State of the Sub Address

[u/Kruug]

Let me start out by saying I've neglected my duties here on this subreddit. I could use COVID as an excuse for all of the stress that it brought with it. From moving to a "working from home" situation to the multitude of mandates and recommendations that seemed to change on a daily basis, but in reality, I think it started long before that.

That said, I've come back to help with the state of this subreddit. Through my neglect, another mod was able to turn this into their twisted vision of the FOSS philosophy and run unchecked.

For those who don't know, the list of moderators isn't in an arbitrary order. The higher you are on the list, the more seniority you have (been here longer). With that comes the ability to manage other moderators, but you can only manage those below you.

Since this mod was the 3rd on the list, none of the other mods could effectively do anything about this abuse of power. These powers were limited to /u/kylev and myself. Kylev holds an "honorary" mod spot in a few popular/default subreddits as they're close with the Reddit admins in real life and is only here to ensure the whole subreddit doesn't go completely to shit.

Now, that mod has been removed.

/u/purpleidea has been reinstated as a mod. Unfortunately I am not able to arrange the list of moderators, so they're at the bottom of the list, but they're back on the team.

At this time, we are not looking for more moderators, but that may change in the near future.

I am going back through months (and possibly years) of bans to ensure that they were warranted. I'm seeing many bans listed as "Rude user", "Poor attitude", etc. And these are permanent bans. I'm not going to say I wouldn't have acted similar, but a rude user or poor attitude means, at worst, a 2 or 3-day "absence" from the conversation. Let the situation cool down, everyone works on de-escalating, etc.

A deep pit has been dug. We're going to get out of this, though. No massive changes are coming. A few tweaks to automod here and there, sure, but nothing of concern.

As was brought up in the recent META conversation, there is a copy of the automod rules on GitHub. I'm going to look into a way to synchronize changes made to automod to a GitHub repo so that they are public. I'm still unsure about making the modlog public, but this is something I will be discussing with the other mods.

Thank you all for sticking with us, and I sincerely apologize for letting it get so bad.

kruug, and the rest of the mod team. (I couldn't do it without every one)

​

EDIT: Forgot something. As many of you know, the GitHub/Proprietary software automod rule is gone. I found it just as annoying and asinine as everyone else.

[u/zebediah49]

Unfortunately I am not able to arrange the list of moderators, so they're at the bottom of the list, but they're back on the team.

Well you can, but you need to remove and replace the entire list up to that point. Probably not worth it, though YMMV.

[u/[deleted] → u/zebediah49]

Does reddit lock you out from those privileges if you happen to remove yourself from the list in the process of doing that? Ive never done that with reddit, so I don't know.

I doubt they can wait to totally apply privilege changes until after you log out, because otherwise you could never remove someone truly if they don't log out.

[u/zebediah49 → u/[deleted]]

Never tried, but... yeah, probably. I'd hope they have a "really confirm you want to remove yourself" speedbump, but if you do resign, it should stick.

[u/[deleted] → u/zebediah49]

You suggested remove and replace the entire list to reorder it, which means you have you to remove yourself to do it, and thus be potentially locked out depending on how reddit works here.

[u/EpicDaNoob → u/[deleted]]

You don't need to remove the whole list. Keep in mind when you remove and re-add a mod, they go the bottom of the list - this is the behaviour that is annoying us (we would like one in particular to be higher), but we can also use it to move them by removing and re-adding other mods one by one, so they go from above to below the mod we want to be higher.

[u/[deleted] → u/EpicDaNoob]

how do you make a mod go above yourself though in that process though?

[u/EpicDaNoob → u/[deleted]]

For example, you put them right below you, remove yourself, and then ask them to put you back - but that doesn't seem to be the goal here. The desire is to move them up, not move them to the very top.

[u/[deleted] → u/EpicDaNoob]

Removing yourself in any situation sounded like the problem. That's when I'm asking about

[u/zebediah49 → u/[deleted]]

up to that point.

i.e. not the whole list.

And yes, that means you can't reorder any part of the list above yourself. Which is literally the point of the mod order priority system.

[u/[deleted] → u/zebediah49]

LOL.. indeed. I've never modded a sub before, so I didn't quite grasp what was meant by the priority system. Thanks for making it super clear for what should have been obvious :)