Hard Mode requires people complete 100% of a street’s nodes to mark it as complete. This is in place of the 90% rule, which allows GPS jitter etc to give us some leeway.
It currently also blocks the ability to mark streets as manually complete.
I see this as problematic, because the data source (OpenStreetMap) isn’t perfect. Just because a street is present in CityStrides does not mean that it is actually safe to run/walk … or legal to run/walk … or that it even exists at all.
Ideally, people in Hard Mode will see these problematic streets and make appropriate edits in OSM (and also ideally, my ruleset will be able to accomplish this given the filters available to us), which will remove them from CityStrides. Sometimes things don’t work out ideally, though.
I think that people using Hard Mode who don’t want to become OSM editors should be able to mark unsafe/illegal/nonexistent streets as ‘manually complete’ and go on about their lives.