EDIT: This post has been flaired as "Brigaded" due to links to the post being put up on other sites (including 8chan.co), with some advocating pushing an agenda. The flair is intended for information purposes only - we do not plan on locking comments or stopping discussion.

It has been an eventful couple of months here at /r/Games . We know there was a lot of controversy over the 15% karma tax levied against all submissions, but we're here to tell you that us mods have been working tirelessly to put that extra karmic income to use.

Poorly thought-out jokes aside, we've got a couple updates to roll out to you that I think were a long time coming.

Sidebar Rules Update

So, it's that time of year once again when the mods sit down and yell at each other until murder is too soft an option have a civil discussion about updating the sidebar.

I'll be honest - we've procrastinated on doing this for far too long, and as a result the rules listed in our sidebar were not as current or clear as they could have been. Unfortunately this resulted in more confusion as of late about what is and isn't allowed in /r/Games , which leads to user frustration and a sense that we're not being transparent.

So, we've done our best to iron out some sidebar changes to make things a bit more clear. To go along with that we've also revamped the rule explanations in our rules wiki page , so everything should be up to date and much clearer.

Bear in mind that we aren't changing the rules of the subreddit - we're only updating our sidebar to better match the rules and enforcement policies that are already in place.

The changes should already be live, so please take a look through our sidebar rules section and the accompanying rules wiki. If you see anything that isn't clear, you don't understand, or that you think is out of place let us know. We did our best and went through several revisions in order to make everything understandable, but if we overlooked anything in the sidebar rules, rules wiki , or the FAQ we want to hear about it.

Ultimately these rules are intended to be for the users of /r/Games . We already know what the rules are - the fact that they're listed and fully explained is to help everyone know what's allowable. If you can't read over the rules and have a reasonable idea whether a post in question is allowable that's our fault. There will of course always be grey areas and we encourage anyone with a question to message us and ask, but if we routinely get the same question over and over again that's a signal to us that we need to edit the rules to be more clear.

#Gamergate Rule

While that decision has been in place since the very start of #Gamergate, we haven't actually put that rule into our sidebar. That is on us - we really don't have an excuse for that, it's something that should have been taken care of ages ago. We apologize for that.

While we feel that this position is already encompassed by the new wording of rule #11 (which specifies that content focusing on non-gaming related details of industry figures is not allowed) we wanted to make sure that everyone was very clear on this matter. As a result we have added it as it's own rule temporarily.

We plan to remove it as it's own separate rule after awhile since we really don't want a lot of redundant rules that serve no purpose other than explicit clarification, however for the moment we feel that it will be useful.

Flair for Removed Posts

We've had requests that we give a full explanation any time we remove anything, and historically our answer has been that it's simply not practical to do due to how much extra time it would require, and we stand by that.

However, there have also been a lot of concerns lately with regards to transparency. People are understandably frustrated when their post gets removed and they don't know about it - doubly so when they don't understand why it was removed.

So we put our heads together to try and find a middle ground, and here's what we came up with.

In the new edition of the sidebar rules, you'll notice that we attached numbers to each of them. When we remove a post for violating a rule, we will put flair on the submission that notes first that it has been removed and second which rule it violates.

If there are additional questions or concerns about a removed post then you are absolutely still free to message us to get a full explanation or a second set of eyes on it, but we're hoping that this will provide a better degree of transparency.

There are a couple caveats to this rule though: we are not going to be attaching flair for removals that are obvious spam, and we will not be doing it for comments.

Additionally, AutoModerator will not flair submissions that it removes. Instead we will be going through the AutoModerator rules to try and include an automatic comment clarification when something is automatically removed for things like a banned domain. These are very infrequent so the average user shouldn't even notice this, but we're trying to do our best to set up systems that provide as much clarity as possible. It's worth noting that we already have AutoModerator to make a comment when a post is automatically removed for violating formatting guidelines, such as a direct image link or a self-post with only a title.

These are some big changes for us, so please bear with us while we get accustomed to the new system. We will do our best to ensure that every submission that gets removed by a human for a rule violation gets flaired, but if we miss something we ask that you just let us know quickly and calmly so we can get it addressed.

Routine Meta Posts...?

One idea that has been thrown around as a way to improve transparency is to have a regular mod meta post where rather than us dictating changes and updates to you we give everyone the opportunity to ask any questions or propose changes to us in a way where they can be publicly discussed between mods and users.

This would likely take the format of us making a stickied post in essentially AMA format where we don't bring up any topics and you all are the ones steering the conversation, with us doing our best to provide answers/clarifications, spitball ideas, and get general feedback from the community.

Do people feel like this is something that would be useful or productive? If so, how frequently would you want to see such a post? We were thinking somewhere in the range of once every 2-4 weeks, but we'd love to hear some input on it.

That's it from us for now, if you have any questions or input feel free to leave a comment and we'll do what we can to answer!