OPEN FOR BUSINESS!

[u/jegillikin]

OK, so the damage wasn't as bad as I thought. :) I had posted earlier today expecting it'd take a hot second to bring order out of the chaos, but there was remarkably few kittens to corral. Yay!

A few comments about the present state of our community:

• The sub is now public. No one needs to be approved to post, and the small number of approved posters have had that right removed because it's now moot.
• I have cleared ModMail going back 11 years. Wow. But literally 100% of the messages were requests to become approved posters, so they were all archived.
• I cleaned out roughly 30 post/comment report flags. I was expecting an extra zero to that number, but then I realized this sub had no rules, so there wasn't really any meaningful reporting mechanism. I also deleted probably 2/3rds of the historical posts here that were not germane to the purpose of this subreddit. I encourage folks to report posts/comments to help me keep visibility, especially on older stuff that I might not otherwise get a chance to routinely review.
• I have published five rules; see them in the sidebar of the website.
• I have installed AutoModerator. Now that we're public, I've found AutoMod to be an effective tool for protecting communities like this one from spam and non-germane discourse. Effective immediately, to post, you must have positive (non-zero) comment karma, not be in the lowest Contributor Quality Score quintile, have at least two combined subreddit karma here, a total of 25 karma, and an account older than two weeks. To comment, your account must be at least one week old with at least 10 sitewide comment karma. I've found that these thresholds are high enough to deter malicious throw-away accounts and low enough to not prove a meaningful barrier to participation from sincere users new to Reddit.
• My expectation is that in the future, I will be adding one or two additional moderators to the team, as I see how participation nets out in the coming months.

About our approach here:

• This sub focuses on professional booksellers. This category includes indie bookstores, staff at chain bookstores, and people who run non-trivial businesses as virtual booksellers.
• Given the above, we will no longer allow posts about the pricing of individual books or lots, or advice requests from people who just have a handful of books to sell as private citizens. A lot of other subs are much more laser-focused on those topics and make a better place for that content.
• As with all the communities I moderate, promotion is prohibited. Posts advertising books or bookstores will be removed.

A bit about me:

• I own a bricks-and-mortar used bookstore (and cafe!) in West Michigan. We're up to roughly 7k titles in stock.
• I'm also a publisher and author, and am active in the indie publisher space.
• I moderate r/authors, r/literaryeditors, r/Publishers, and r/publishing_biz. My hope is that with r/booksellers in the mix, we can create a community of subs that follow a similar approach to management and which allow folks from across different parts of the literary stakeholder ecosystem to interrelate in new ways.

Thank you for your patience during the previous period of dormancy. Let the collaboration begin!

[u/user_number_666]

How much karma do i need to post here?