HiScores

The Hiscores is a website feature in which members are ranked by their experience in skills. For players to appear in the hiscores:
 * They must be a member* (on 20 August 2012, a news article hinted at allowing free-to-play characters back into the hiscores in the future).
 * They must have a minimum skill level of 15 in the skill (2411 experience points).
 * The account must not be banned or locked. Banned/locked accounts are removed from the hiscores. If an account is unbanned/unlocked, it appears on the hiscores again.
 * Jagex Moderator accounts (on which they can change stats and spawn items) do not appear on the hiscores. All these accounts begin with the word "Mod" except for Andrew, Paul, and Ian. Jagex Moderators' real private accounts, however, do appear on the hiscores. These are just regular accounts with no special powers that Jagex Mods play on for fun, and there is no way to know that they work for Jagex unless they reveal this information (and they probably can't).

The hiscores has added a very competitive atmosphere to the game, causing players to continue training their skills after 99 in order to gain ranks, and inspiring websites and programs dedicated to tracking and comparing experience progress. Some players look up their own ranks and note how much experience they need to gain to reach a certain rank. Also, many players look up their friends in the hiscores often. Many of the top ranked players are often closely followed as well.

The hiscores are updated with a player's stats each time they log out or leave to the lobby. An exception is that a player's hiscores do not update if they are automatically logged out of the game due to a system update but if a player reaches the 6-hour auto-log, the hiscores update.

* Note: A player may remain on the hiscores after membership expires, but after a certain point (about 14 days after) the experience will cease to be tracked. Eventually, it is believed that such player characters are removed entirely after another period of time.

Minimum levels
The minimum level to be ranked in the hiscores is level 15, unless more than 2 million players are already ranked, in which case a skill level of 15 will not rank a player. The following table shows the current minimum levels for each skill to be ranked on the hiscores.

For a more detailed chart, see the extended table.

Activities set the minimum "level" differently, according to the activity scoring system. See the table below.

History
The original hiscores table was updated weekly with players' ranks overall, levels, experience, and change in rank. It recorded the top 2,000 players.

The hiscores were redone on 21 November 2003. The update changed the maximum number of players on the hiscores to 250,000.

This was changed to a maximum of 500,000 on 24 May 2004.

On 1 June 2004 another update to the hiscores allowed players to see the hiscores of all the people on that player's Friends list on one page.

On 25 August 2005, the number of people that were on the hiscores was increased to 1,000,000. The change was due to a larger number of accounts, meaning many players were being left off the hiscores.

It was once again changed on 30 January 2006. The 'compare' function was added and the look of the hiscores page was updated.

On 4 May 2008 at 17:39, 4 years, five months and three days after the release of this free skill, Runecrafting reached one million people on the hiscores.

On 9 July 2008, the limit increased to 2,000,000 people. Although the Crafting skill had not yet topped out at 2,000,000 people above the skill level 30, later that day, the 2,000,000th person achieved 30 Crafting. Runecrafting remained the only free skill that had not filled the hiscores.

On 12 April 2010 the Dungeoneering skill was released on free worlds meaning that currently Runecrafting and Dungeoneering are the only free skills that have not reached 2,000,000 players over level 30.

On 12 April 2011 a new clan feature was edit in game. Clans now show up in the highscores. Clans can get higher ranks the same as normal players do. So higher xp in a skill or overall means a higher clan rank.

It was announced on 15 November 2011 that from week commencing 21 November 2011, the hiscores would be members only, in order to remove dormant accounts from the hiscores and give new paying members a chance to get high on the scores. However, this has met a lot of controversy on the forums.

On 22 November 2011, the hiscores was re-structured, making it a member's only feature. When a term of membership elapses, there was a 14 day grace period in which the account will remain on the hiscores. After this period, the account will not be shown on the hiscores until it is re-subscribed. Before the change the minimum requirement to be ranked in a f2p skill was 30+, now it is only 15.

Trivia

 * In 2006, before their release, an early picture of the Dragon pickaxe could be found at the top of the highscores.
 * In early July 2008, there was a rumour that an icon for a Sailing skill appeared on the Hiscores. However, this rumour has been confirmed as false by Jagex mods. Various mods have said that a sailing skill is unlikely. However, it does bear some similarities with the concept of Player-owned Ports.
 * Hunter, Summoning and Mobilising Armies were temporarily leaked to the hiscores before they were officially released.
 * Summoning was leaked on 11 January 2008 when an "undefined" skill appeared in the hiscores.
 * As of 1 July 2008, when RuneScape HD was launched, the hiscores said "You have to be in the top two million in a category..." when you type a person's username who doesn't appear in the hiscores.
 * As of 6 September, 12 free players have all 15 non-member skills at level 99, and 3 of them have reached 120 Dungeoneering.
 * On 2 September 2009, some maxed players (2,376 total level) were shown on the hiscores as having 2,377 total level instead of 2,376.
 * Mod Fetzki has stated that new features are planned for the hiscores, as mentioned here.
 * As of 12 April 2010 the front page of the Hiscores displays the top 22 ranked players, instead of the top 21.
 * Jagex moderators do not show up on the Hiscores. However, on 6 October 2010 a player found a glitch where Mod Matt P was displayed on the Hiscores. Most of his levels had the exact amount of experience required for level 99 (13,034,431).
 * On May 2012 S_U_O_M_I wrapped around the overall XP counter. Because of this happening, it can be assumed that Jagex used 4 bytes to store the value of overall XP on the Runescape Highscores.
 * Roughly around the release of the Evolution of Combat, hiscores for former members were updated once. The scores were removed completely several days later.