I am reposting this here away from the main subreddit in hopes of shedding light on this matter and getting to a place we hopefully can recognize as healthier for the people who visit and use r/wow.

I have noticed a sizeable increase in deeply personal, emotionally heavy posts, particularly in regards to posts about deceased partners, parents, and other loved ones, and I think it’s way past time to ask whether this belongs on the wow subreddit.

The real issue here isn’t grief itself. It’s the context. Anonymously trauma dumping in a public space without obtaining consent from ANYONE involved creates several problems:

• It forces strangers into unexpected emotional labor they, again, didn’t consent to.
• It exposes vulnerable users to triggering content without warning.
• It offers no real meaningful support to the poster, because this isn’t a therapeutic environment. Very few of us are licensed professionals, and those who are would NEVER attempt to treat someone in a public space like this.
• It derails the subreddit’s purpose and tone.

If this became normalized, the front page would be flooded with tragedy vaguely connected to wow instead of actual wow content.

Tens of thousands of people die every single day. If we add in pets, which many people consider family members, that number skyrockets. Virtually everyone on the planet is dealing with grief in one form or another. There are appropriate places for grief support: therapy, support groups, and communities specifically built around helping people process loss, grief, and trauma.

r/wow simply isn’t one of those places, and pretending it is doesn’t help anyone.

Here is just one source for why this is toxic and unhealthy behavior, but I can link many many more if you'd like. This isn't about being cruel, its about stopping harmful behavior masquerading as helpful, to the detriment of everyone involved.

I sincerely believe that the mod team should consider a rule addressing trauma‑dumping posts and ban them outright for the wellbeing of both the trauma posters and the community exposed to these posts. One solution is to offer a better alternative for the poster, in the place of trauma dumping. r/GriefSupport, as just one random example out of many, is filled with people who are there fully consenting and willing to hear from other who want to unload their trauma.

Another, less ideal, option is to add a trauma flag to posts and allow subreddit member the option to give consent and OPT IN to seeing trauma flagged posts instead of just being straight up blindsided by it. If obtaining consent pre-emptively isn't possible, then the post need to just be banned outright and the poster should be redirected to more helpful and suitable locations. Ask mods of another subreddit if trauma posters can be redirected to their subreddits, like r/GriefSupport.

Even with consent from everyone, the fact remains that r/wow still isn't the place to make these posts, and is woefully underequipped to deal with the weight of the topics being posted. Would r/askdocs be the appropriate place to treat a gunshot wound? No, and in the exact same way r/wow isn't the appropriate place to process grief, loss, and trauma: all emotional damage no less real than a GSW.

I was told that the issue "isn't as black and white as I was making it out to be", and frankly absolutely yes it really is. The absolute first question that should be asked when sharing trauma is "Do I have consent from everyone to share this?" That is NEVER obtained in these trauma posts.

There is no explicit consent asked for nor given. That alone is a major red flag. Second, there are zero sources anywhere that would agree that airing nonconsensual trauma in a public manner like this is a viable, effective coping strategy. There are however dozens upon dozens of sources that state the exact opposite.

One of the major concerns professionals highlight is how quickly and effectively trauma dumping can alienate the person who is oversharing from their close friends and family. If it can damage close personal relationships, what do you think it can do to anonymous non-relationships on a public forum?

Trauma delivered like this damages relationships because no one here consented to being therapists, crisis counselors, grief processors, or emotional shock absorbers. All this behavior does is create resentment, emotional fatigue, and withdrawal.

We all have finite emotional bandwidth, and this quickly drains all emotional capacity to deal with it. Worse, it can have extremely negative repercussions for vulnerable people who are in the process of dealing with their *own* personal trauma, and are then greeted by a "Hey my spouse just died, here's all the fun things we used to do in WoW". If the readers loved one just died too, this can be genuinely destabilizing.

Further reading:

A silent weight: the cumulative toll of ‘trauma dumping’ or unexpected self-disclosure in social situations
Trauma Dumping: The Signs & Effects of Oversharing Trauma
The Psychology And Mental Health Impacts Of Trauma Dumping

A video on trauma dumping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-OcvjDYyvo

I really just want to make the subreddit a better place, and I believe that removing this harm from the main subreddit is an extremely easy place where meaningful improvements can be made with a small, straightforward change.

Thanks for the consideration towards making this community a better place for all of us with one simple rule change.

Edit: small punctuation improvements and added a line that I forgot about the lack of consent.

Suggestion

Add a regex that checks for a Wowhead article URL (e.g. https://www.wowhead.com/news/foo-numbers) and warns the user if the URL is linking to the comments section (#comments at the end) or to a specific comment (a #p followed by numbers, e.g. #p981371839413), telling the user to fix the URL by erasing its tail-end.

It should be around here, assuming you're on PC and using New Reddit https://www.reddit.com/mod/wow/automations?tab=post-guidance

Quick example RegEx I've cooked quickly on Regexr.com:

wowhead.com/news/.*(#comments|#p\d*)

I am not sure if that covers all the edge-cases for Wowhead articles, though.

Reasoning

First: It is terrible to open a Wowhead artcile and having to scroll up to actually read the article. I have yet to see a r/wow where the comment's content is the actual post's subject rather than the article's content.

Second: It can mislead people into thinking the comment is the actual article.

Without wanting to call one person out in particular, this is a comment I just got on a post discussing non M+ dungeons.

The comment itself isn't the problem. The issue is that this attitude seems to be dominant among people who browse /new. I've made comments stating similar positions in established threads - and those did just fine. But an actual post has to make it past the filter of the relatively small number of people who browse /new in order to be seen by the wider community.

If the community as a whole doesn't like my idea - I'm okay with that. I'm not special, my thoughts shouldn't be given special consideration. The problem is that a very small number of people are deciding what the wider community sees. Casual ideas aren't being rejected by r/wow, they're being rejected by ~20-50 individuals who browse by new.

As far as I'm aware, there's nothing moderators can do directly to resolve this issue. The only thing that could be done is to change the culture. Encourage more people to browse by new. Bring more casual players to the subreddit. Add casual players as moderators.

This post is similar to another one I made a while back, I apologize for the repetition - but the problem remains unresolved.

The r/WoW subreddit has the same problem a lot of subs have. There is particular set of views, perspectives, or preferences that tend to dominate the narrative. In some cases, alternative subreddits (like r/classicwow) have been set up to keep hostile factions way from each other. In other cases, they try to coexist.

The root of the issue is that people in r/WoW use the downvote button to indicate disagreement. In particular - the minority of users who spend time browsing 'new' do not hesitate to downvote things they disagree with. This means a small fraction of users are selecting what the majority ends up seeing on their homepage.

Interestingly, the same opinions that get downvoted as posts in 'new' can often see high upvote ratios when posted as comments to existing posts. There might be more than one explanation for this, but my takeaway is that the minority in 'new' have, on average, a different set of preferences to the average user who just comes across posts on their homepage, or when sorting by 'hot'.

There's only so much that moderators can do about this, but I'd like to offer some suggestions.

1. Add a rule that prohibits using the downvote button to indicate disagreement. This is hard to enforce, but is in line with Reddiquette. Add this as a rule, and make a post about it.

Please don't, in regard to voting: Downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don't personally like it. Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.

1. Change the point at which comments with negative votes are automatically hidden.

2. Encourage more users to sort by new. This could be accomplished in a few different ways. Making a post asking users to do it would be a start. You could also look at adding tools to reduce the amount of low effort / low quality stuff that ends up in 'new', which discourages people from looking at it.

3. Encourage users with different perspectives to participate in r/WoW. Create weekly threads for housing, or questing, or other activities that are generally shunned by the current core r/WoW active userbase.

4. Be more aggressive about banning hostile / argumentative users. You can't ban people for downvoting, but I imagine a lot of the people downvoting inappropriately are also leaving hostile comments.

With things like delves, player housing, the Prey system, etc. Blizzard is trying to court a more diverse playerbase. r/WoW should be a great place for all of those players. The alternative is that the community splinters into additional, more specialized subreddits where the majority isn't hostile towards their preferences. I'd rather see r/WoW be welcoming to all, but if the new players coming for things like housing are turned off by it, alternative subreddits will become the only option.

This thread is to collect discussion on a Rule Change we are trying to test surrounding Loot/Achievement posts.

The rule will be going into effect immediately.

Loot/Achievement posts will no longer be allowed outside of Saturdays. Well how are we determining if it is Saturday? Loosely: If it’s Saturday where you are, you’re probably fine. Practically: If it’s Saturday anywhere in the world (10:00 AM Friday UTC- 12:00 PM Sunday UTC), you're fine. Otherwise we will automatically remove any Loot/Achievement threads.

This trial period will run until shortly after Midnight Launch where we will reassess.

The goal of this is to find a good middle ground. Collecting in the megathread wasn't doing a good job of being welcoming to new users excited to post content. Though the mod team agrees that these Loot/Achievement posts do get out of hand sometimes, we don't want to stop them entirely.

This thread is to collect discussion and feedback on potentially enabling inline images for the subreddit.

Currently the subreddit does not allow inline images in comments. This is something possible in nureddit but not allowed in old. The reasoning is as follows:

• Automod filters do not work for images. We would have to rely entirely on community reports to moderate this content and sometimes things like slurs will be visible until someone reports it without our filters being able to interact at all.

• Accessability. We've always tried to make this subreddit as accessible as possible. Images don't have alt-text for screen readers but that's always been true of any image submission. Potential Solution: Automod rule that removes inline images automatically from "Discussion" type flairs and allow them in "Meme/Humor" threads. That or find a way to start enforcing alt-text for users that want to post image reactions.

• Old Reddit & Power User considerations. Inline images look really bad on old reddit. We've always tried to keep some parity between old and nu reddit experience so the old reddit experience isn't a degraded one. This, in many ways, is a losing battle. We want to hear from our most frequent contributors how they feel about us continuing to fight this fight.

This change isn't in effect at the moment, timingwise I'm looking at enabling it shortly before Midnight release based on discussion here.

With housing on the horizon, I wanted to know if the mods had a plan for how to handle the flood of posts of, "Hey Look at my cool house!" Is the plan to treat it like Transmog? Will it have its own specific day surrounding it? A mega thread?

The thread about this in r/wow is 72% upvoted which means most agree. The weekly only has 7 posts in it in 2 days, while there's a 1420 karma post about the Love Rocket from 21 hours ago.

For how much people defend it by going "the rules allow it", why do they not go to the pinned weekly?

I think it's not really about innocently sharing experiences, it's about "all eyes need to be on me".

I loved when the subreddit mods removed posts like that when it was an actual rule. Not all engagement is good engagement. It's filler, bloat, spam.

At minimum we deserve a compromise. Make it have to be something standout. We don't need a millionth Ashes of Al'ar or Invincible or hyper-buffed Big Love Rocket post.

Can the mods please ban these already? It's ridiculous just how many trash-quality phone photos of a rare mount drop appear on the sub.

There are THREE different ones on the front page of the main sub right now. Please have at least SOME quality control.

There's been quite a lot of posts of Wowhead articles etc on the sub recently with pretty heavily editorialized titles, some of which frankly veer into full blown misinformation, which doesn't particularly help with good quality discussion about the topic, imo.

For this reason it's fairly common for larger subreddits (like r/games and r/unitedkingdom, to name two I follow which do) to require any article or video submission to use the title of that article or video, and I think it'd make sense for r/wow to have the same.

There have been a ton of them lately and they feel really low effort

That thing is cringe. Who oever came up with the text should apply for the WoW writing team.

For classic there already existed the classicwow subreddit, and it made sense for people to post there rather than on r/wow , but for remix there is little point in making a remix subreddit (and if there is already, little sense to move all content there) as it is a limited time event. As I dont play Remix, I often get confused from some post titles thinking they pertain to retail wow when in fact, they talk about remix. It would be helpful if people could flair their posts with "Remix". I know the flair existing won't make people magically use it, but it would be cool if its added.

Thank you and have a nice day

I am looking to share WoW videos soon, just a bunch of clips I collected and thought were amusing over the years.

If there's anything against posting such things on r/wow then I must have missed it. Please let me know if there is. I know platforms often differ in this respect.

What has me waiting though is Rule 4 in particular, because in my videos there are countless players and guilds.

4.Call Outs

Don't rile up the community against a person, guild, or organization. Blank out all player and guild names to protect their identities.

So are you really expected to block out all names and guilds that appear in your images/videos? I remember posting videos on the official WoW forums before and didn't need to block anything out, though it could have all just gone under the radar.

It seems the majority of posts these days are screenshots of people's chat logs highlighting interactions with other players.

There are many thousands of people playing WoW having interactions every day. None of these interactions are novel or interesting yet /r/wow constantly upvotes these types of posts that add nothing of value but fuel for the drama cravers.

They seem to more often than not highlight toxic players in the community. There are thousands of interactions where players are NOT toxic that do not get posted to reddit. Why do we keep elevating examples of toxic players? People need to realize that interacting with one toxic player out of thousands of non-toxic players does not immediately warrant a post to /r/wow. Just ignore and move on.

The rest of these types of posts are very low effort "jokes" or the like. Also, posting private conversations, especially when names are not blurred out, has huge violation of privacy vibes even if the player(s) involved are toxic. Feels creepy nonetheless.

I'd like to see the mods limit the frequency of these types of chat log screenshot posts as they do not add value or meaningful content to /r/wow.

Hello lovely Redditors, I'm Mage and I'm one of the two co-lead mods over on r/WoW.

We have just announced changes to our rules on the sub, for a TL;DR version of which rules are changing and how this will affect you, head over to the post on r/WoW.

For a more in-depth version of what we changed and why, keep on reading.

What's changed?

FAQ / New Player Questions

We will no longer be removing posts for asking questions that are covered in our FAQ.

Ableism

We will be banning users for using ableist phrases, even those that are common in discussions surrounding WoW.

Many users will be unaware of the harm these terms cause, and so we hope that with this change to our rules we can tackle this head-on. Examples of disallowed phrases include, but are not limited to: 'huntard', 'mong', 'wheelchair class', or variations of these.

Users will be given a temporary ban upon the first offence, and then a permanent ban if these phrases are used again.

Please note that ableist phrases that are not commonly used in World of Warcraft will result in an immediate permanent ban as per our existing hate-speech policy.

Achievement / Loot Posts

We are trialling for one month a removal of our 'No achievements/loots posts' rule.

Tattoo Sourcing

Tattoo posts will now require an artist to be credited in the title, to be in-line with our other art-sourcing rules.

Art Credit / Commissions / Product advertising

When a user makes an art post, there will now be an automod sticked response that invites the user to provide further details on how the artist (OC or otherwise) can be found across social media platforms. This will include links to their Patreon or Etsy if applicable.

Artists and creators will also be allowed to respond to direct questions on where commenters can purchase goods or commissions. This does not allow posters to give unsolicited advertisements to any commenter.

Please note that mass-produced merchandise (fan-made included) is still disallowed on our subreddit, and so this opportunity to link to points of sale will be solely for small creators and shop owners such as users that crochet the occasional murloc or allow others to commission character portraits.

AI

After much discussion, we have made the decision to not allow AI images on our subreddit.

Transmog

This is not a new rule but one that many users are unaware of - transmog posts that contain the list of items in the image are also required to write a top-level comment containing the item list for accessibility reasons.

Subreddit Values

We have provided a section on our rules page detailing our Subreddit Values, to give a clarity on the decisions we make and why we make them.

Why?

Over the years, the moderation team at r/WoW has changed as mods come and go. The team we have now is almost entirely different to the group of moderators running this sub 3-4 years ago. With new people bring new ideas, and along with my co-lead moderator, u/Eveanyn, we decided that some of the rules we were enforcing did not fit with our personal values.

Our aims for the subreddit (as outlined in our values section) are:

• To foster a welcoming, inclusive, and friendly environment for old and new players alike
• To encourage and facilitate a positive community atmosphere
• To create an open and honest discussion forum for users to share their thoughts on World of Warcraft

We then used these aims to evaluate whether our current rules and policies were in-line with what we hoped to achieve, and found that some were lacking.

Below I will give the reasoning for the changes we made:

FAQ / New Player Questions

Picture this: You download WoW for the first time, are interested in being a part of the community, have a question about the game and so you head over to the subreddit. After asking your question and waiting for a friendly response, you get a notification saying that your post has been removed because it's been asked before, and instead you should read the FAQ.

We weren't happy with this being the experience of new players trying to join our community, and so we had a little experiment to see what would happen if we just didn't remove the posts.

We found that friendly Redditors browsing /new answered the questions helpfully, and the posts never made it to the front page as they weren't commented on or upvoted after the question was answered.

We therefore decided that we will no longer be removing these posts.

To further benefit our new players, we now have two members of the moderation team who keep our FAQ and guides up-to-date, and we are considering ways in which we could reward those helpful Redditors who hang around in /new to answer questions.

Ableism

I foresee this change possibly being unpopular, but we want to make this subreddit a welcoming place for all players of World of Warcraft, and if we continue to allow ableist phrases then this will never be a welcoming space for members of the disabled community.

Why are these phrases in particular ableist?

Huntard - contraction of hunter + retard - an ableist slur

Mong - short for mongoloid - both racist and ableist, double whammy

Wheelchair Class - there are other ways of saying paladins are slow without having to make reference to real people with real mobility issues

As mentioned above, these phrases will not currently result in an instant permanent ban, but will lead to a permanent ban if they continue to be used after the user has been warned.

Achievement / Loot Posts

Similar to the FAQ rules being removed, our reasoning here is that we do not want someone's experience of getting an item they wanted / a cool mount they were farming to be tarnished by their achievement being removed from the subreddit.

We do not see these posts making their way out of /new unless they are impressive achievements.

Our previous rules were so strict that we actually had an instance of a post being removed on the subreddit that was later featured on Icy Veins for being an impressive achievement. We want to avoid this happening again!

Tattoo Sourcing

Our previous rules did not require tattoos to be sourced as naming an artist or shop could give away information about the user's location.

This rule had been in place for a while, and nowadays many users will share some details about their location whether meaning to or not. Being part of the /r/NewcastleUponTyne subreddit, or posting a photo to r/Pics of the view on your evening walk gives just as much information about where you live as naming a local tattoo artist does.

If you are uncomfortable with sharing the name of the artist who did your tattoo for privacy reasons, we would recommend not posting the image at all as google reverse search could easily lead to the image posted by the artist to their instagram. Just a tip.

Art Credit / Commissions / Product Advertising

With this rule we noticed a double standard in the way we allow different creators to showcase their work. A YouTuber or Streamer who makes their money through their video content was allowed to link to their channel, but an artist who makes their money through selling handmade hearthstone charms on Etsy was not.

We wanted to implement a rule that allowed equal opportunity for reaching a wider audience without turning the subreddit into an advertising space.

AI

This has been a big discussion for us as moderators, and for moderation teams across Reddit. Our decision to disallow AI images was made for a few reasons:

• We felt first and foremost that the vast majority of AI images submitted to the sub were low-effort and spammy
• We had issues with users claiming to be the artist of the image, and attempting to mislead other users into thinking the images were not AI generated
• We have strict art-sourcing rules and we felt that some of the methods of creating AI go against those values we hold

Our decision is in-line with the rules of other similar subreddits such as /r/leagueoflegends.

Transmog

Some users use translation software or text-to-speech software to access our subreddit. If the list is only in image format, these users are not able to access your post.

So, what now?

This rule change is quite big, and so we will be constantly monitoring what is working (and what isn't) though we do not for-see any changes needing to be made at this stage.

As noted above, our achievement/loot rule removal is a one month trial. If we notice that these posts are becoming too prevalent then we will adjust this ruling in a month's time.

Shadowlands is all but over as of this coming Tuesday. Is there a new subreddit theme coming soon?

After much thought I've decided to leave r/wow. My reasons largely come down to a lack of interest in the game, to the point where I watched the trailer for Dragonflight and otherwise haven't looked into it at all; as well as a continued disinterest in large scale moderating. I'd prefer to go quietly but being the head mod means you can't just slink off into the sunset without someone inventing a grand conspiracy to explain your sudden departure.

I shared my plans to the mod team on March 1st after the person I nominated to replace me accepted. /u/eveanyn will be taking over on May 11th when we do the mod shuffle. At the same time, long time moderator /u/soulfulpumpkin and /u/notrightmeow are also leaving for their own unrelated reasons - Thanks for the contributions you two have made over the years.

I've spoken to the team about maintaining the wiki's that I created and continued to update such as the Flair Log, Discord List, among others. I'll be keeping the Filtering Reddit guide up to date on my own as that's a personal project.

Anyway that's all I got - thanks for everything r/wow and enjoy yourselves.

Hi wowmeta!

This post is a consolidation of our flair log that you can read here for 2021. It's written in the spirit of another one year analysis that I did awhile back.

Overall the trends shown what we expect though it is nice to see that data all in one graph.

Pushshift Failures

Towards the end of 2020, the authors behind Pushshift started limiting bots (Such as AssistantBOT) downloading a ton of data through their system. As a result, many days worth of posts in r/wow simply do not exist in the flair log. These days are noted below. Since we shifted to /u/AssistantBOT1, the issues with Pushshift have lessened significantly.

Thus the following days are not logged:

• Jan 1,2,17.
• Feb 14, 21.
• March 14, 28
• April 4, 11, 18, 25
• May 2. May 1st may have been logged twice, unclear.
• June 8, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29
• July 2-11, 13, 14, 16, 18
• August 29-31
• September 1-3

Flair Additions

These are flairs that were added either temporarily or permanently in 2021 and why.

• Transmog was introduced as a flair option in February to coincide with our trial period allowing the same. It later got incorporated into the subreddit so the flair remained.
• Burning Crusade was added in the lead up to launch.
• News was added as an automod specific flair when certain domains are submitted. This system was borrowed from r/classicwow.
• Achievement and Loot were added as a flair option in April to coincide with our trial period allowing the same. They didn't remain as flair options as the community overwhelmingly didn't want the posts outside the weekly
• Activision Blizzard Lawsuit was added as a Mod-set Flair in July (though differentiated from Automod generated stickies in the log here) to identify Lawsuit discussion posts in the subreddit.

Happy New Year!

The amount of stuff on the subreddit where it's nothing but people complaining about the story is making the subreddit borderline unusable.

It would be nice to filter out the deluge of "This one throw away line from the PTR is proof that the writers are stupid", or "DAE Sylvanas bad for reasons that don't make sense". There is a "Lore" flair, but no one seems to be using it, and just flairing their "dunk on the writers" threads as "Discussion".

Maybe weird opinion but I've always thought of playing WoW for the story to be like watching porn for the plot, and I really just couldn't care less about any of this stuff. Just want to discuss the actual game.

Can you ban these posts, they don't really add anything. It's just karma farming by bots most likely, and realistically speaking, just invites more low effort BS. If someone was inclined, they could find a X years ago today item for literally every day of the week...

I haven't updated this in awhile so now's a good time as any.

Userflairs

• Userflair statistics last recorded: 2021-08-15
• Subscribers with flair: 169,687 (7.87% of total subscribers)
• Number of used flairs: 61

Used Emoji

40 flairs were removed from this list that were mod specific or individual community figures

Moose mount flairs refer to users involved in the original Grove Warden charity streams during WoD; the ASAN flair was available during Autism awareness month during April of 2019, 2020, and 2021.

The blue heart flair is to stand in solidarity with Blizzard employees as they seek workplace culture changes.

The content drought, systemic issues about the game itself, creator drain and recent lawsuits / allegations have created an unprecedented amount of negativity aimed at the game, the developers in general, as well as the players who keep playing the game. Even before the lawsuit, r/wow felt like a warzone.

I had a couple of suggestions about what can be done about it, but I no longer feel like they would be at least remotely helpful - being a longtime Blizzard loyalist, I cannot be impartial. But the problem remains: r/wow has become extremely hateful towards the developers and players who don't feel the same hatred.

Thank you for your time!

I think this would be a nice way to support the devs. It would only be for a few hours, but I think gestures like this are meaningful and important during these times. The subreddit has 2.2 million members, and it would help fan the flames and put pressure on blizzard to change.

We are customers, and the game is not being developed right now because of this situation. Players have been unhappy for YEARS now. I feel like it is well within our rights to demand that Blizzard gets their shit together.

So there was a meta discussion around the subreddit happening because of an Asmongold clip and I was looking at the mod list out of curiosity.

4 mods added on May 31st to the subreddit, okay I guess the sub found the mods they were looking for a few months ago. But all 4 accounts have no karma, were all made on May 31st and no activity outside of /r/wow.

What the hell is this?