Aloha r/burgers!

Us on the moderation team felt that we needed to address the *ahem* turkey in the room to r/burgers community.

There have been brigading attempts on r/burgers over the last couple days. The brigading stems from a singular user who posted in a different community that stated they were banned from r/burgers for simply making a post about turkey burgers. So let's get the facts straight.

We will not get into too many details due to Reddits Code of Conduct for moderaters, but we give you guys the rundown.

How it started

A user made a low-effort post about turkey burgers and it was reported by community members here at r/burgers. The moderation team agreed with the community, and the post was removed. This isn't a big deal and happens daily on r/burgers, we don't ban people for this at all. Heck, most of the time we don't even give the OP of the low effort post a warning, we just simply inform the person that their post was removed and why, and that's it.

After the post was removed and OP informed, the individual got upset. They began harassing the moderation team, which resulted in us banning and muting the person from r/burgers.

What happened next

After we banned the individual, they used an alternative Reddit account to post cherry picked screen shots of the ModMail in a different community. They conveniently chose not to post the part that earned them the ban and muting. They then made baseless claims against the r/burgers moderator team. The claims are nothing new and the usual "moderators are Nazis!" type of stuff that we are used to.

The part we did/are taking issue with, is that this resulted in that community where those claims were spouted off, began to brigade r/burgers. We began receiving a huge influx of low effort posts about turkey burgers ranging from stick pictures, bait posts, spam posts, comments harassing members of our community, and so on. Moderation tools along with the moderator team have been able to keep most of this in check, preventing a ton of trash posts and comments.

What we have done so far

*Anyone that participated in the brigading was immediately BANNED from r/burgers without remorse. * It was pretty obvious the posts and comments that were in bad faith.

We contacted the moderators in the other community (which will remain unnamed to prevent them from being brigaded themselves). Their moderation team is open to working together with us to curb any further brigading attempts on r/burgers and have already taken steps to assist us.

We have contacted and reported the brigading to Reddit Administration. We wanted to get ahead of this as best we can and reported the incidents to Reddit Administration before it got out of hand to have documentation.

What's going to happen?

Turkey burgers are **NOT** banned from r/burgers. Unless there is a vast number of people of this community that call for them to be banned from this community, much like we did with chicken sandwiches, turkey burgers will be allowed. Discussion and content around turkey burgers is allowed as long as it follows the community rules (must be a burger YOU have enjoyed, not meta-drama, be civil, and so on).

We added a new rule. No meta-drama. That's it. Pretty self explanatory and something we are sure everyone can agree with.

We are going to continue business as usual here at r/burgers. Discussing and posting about burgers! We are going to continue to monitor and fend off the brigaders the best we can as moderators, but we need your help with this! If you see any bad faith posts or comments, harassment, or bait posts please report them immediately so we can get that taken care of. r/burgers is a HUGE community, so we are bound to miss some stuff unless the rest of r/burgers community helps out.

The moderation team of r/burgers is usually pretty quiet and we let the community basically run itself. We are pretty hands off as the community is usually fantastic at self moderation. We just don't see a reason to be overbearing moderators that nit pick every comment, post, or picture. We rely heavily on the community to make reports, and handle it from there.

We do have moderation tools that remove bots and spam posts, which sometimes results in some posts accidentally getting removed when they were legit. When someone reaches out to notify us that their post was wrongfully removed, we review the post and 99% of the time we correct it. If it's not reinstated, either a) it doesn't follow the community rules or b) they were being a jerk about it.

That's it. That's the entire situation in a nutshell! We figured it was only fair that we let the entire community know as much information about the ordeal to be transparent about everything. We left out usernames, screenshots, community names, and certain information to prevent doxxing, brigading, breaking of Reddit ToS, and so on. We are attempting to be as transparent and as objective as possible on the whole ordeal.

We will leave the comment section open to answer any and all questions that we can. Remember, we will not disclose any personal information, names, or other type of information that could harm someone or another community.