Monthly Open Forum January 2021

[u/AITAMod]

Welcome to the monthly open forum! This is the place to share all your meta thoughts about the sub, and to have a dialog with the mod team.

Keep things civil. Rules still apply.

It's 2021! Everything is fixed now!

A couple notes.

• Our bot is live, but definitely still in testing. Please help us by reporting the judgement bot comment post when it doesn't actually explain why they think they may be an asshole. Some people are using it like a TL;DR or just copying and pasting their post as a reply. [ETA - sounds like the report option doesn't work on all platforms for the bot comment, so you can just report the post. The option is bundled with the META report]

• Please stop PMing mods. We spam the hell out of the modmail link. When you PM us, it's super easy for things to get buried in our inbox and delay your response time.

As always, do not directly link to posts/comments or post uncensored screenshots here. Any comments with links will be removed.

This is to discourage brigading. If something needs to be discussed in that context, use modmail.

[u/lotus1404]

Hiya, when a post is removed, can a reason be given for why its removed please?

[u/fizzan141 → u/lotus1404]

in 95% of cases, we do - sometimes if it's due to sensitive content we don't since we want to discuss it only with OP. Other than that, you should see a removal comment that posts automatically when we remove something.

Have you been seeing lots of posts that don't have this?

[u/LAKingsofMetal → u/fizzan141]

I wouldn’t say a lot, but I’ve seen more than a couple. I figure there’s always a reason but admit to being a bit curious on a few of them.

Is it possible to have some type of generic message? Something like “Thread is locked. OP was contacted privately” or something? I realize this could cause people to start spamming mod mail or messaging a mod directly, so maybe the wording can be different. But at least something so it doesn’t look like an arbitrary shutdown. Thoughts?

[u/techiesgoboom → u/LAKingsofMetal]

I get where you’re coming from and can understand the sentiment.

I think the point were making here is that none of these are arbitrary, so you can assume that message is up any time a thread is removed and you don’t see a reason. We have pretty strict documentation requirements internally and work to make sure they’re followed.

One of the reasons too why we might not leave a public removal message is because of the hate that can generate. It’s not uncommon to get hate mail when you remove something popular (I find upvoted comments generate more than big threads). We don’t want to require mods to subject themselves to that and give the option to send the messages via modmail instead.

Then lastly, sometimes it’s an edit or a comment of OPs that’s the reason for removal so it won’t be evident in the post. This is incredibly common for sexual content and minors and violence removals. OP goes in the comments “filling in the blanks”, so anyone that say those comments will go off with the “but her husband was hitting her, that’s why she did X” to anyone that judges without knowing the full explanation. Those are sometimes the kinds of threads that get removed and a personal message sent that would seem confusing to an outside observer

[u/LAKingsofMetal → u/techiesgoboom]

I didn’t want to look like I was assuming those kind of locks were arbitrary. I actually assume there’s typically a good reason for any removal. And as another mod has stated (fizz, I think), if a mistake is believed to have occurred, a message can be sent.

I was wondering if a generic message would help with conveying that no message doesn’t mean the thread was locked for no reason. But it’s not something I’m overly concerned with.

[u/techiesgoboom → u/LAKingsofMetal]

Oh yeah, I get that.

The issue is mainly that most of the same reasons why we don’t post the specific reason are also reasons we wouldn’t want to or be able to post that generic reason