As per yesterday's discussion, we've now introduced the ability to set flairs on your own threads, from the list:

• STEM
• Social Sciences
• Mathematics
• Humanities
• Meta

We considered a few other categories (type of question, country), but decided on this cut down set for an initial trial; these appears to be the main external selection criteria for posters in this sub. This is presently a purely opt-in system - you don't have to tag a thread if you don't want to (often threads aren't discipline-specific), but we would ask that posters use these flairs where it is appropriate, and mods will add flairs where they're missing. We'll no doubt iterate over both the process and specific flairs in use substantially in the coming months, based on community feedback.

Probably equally, if not more importantly, we've made a small rule tweak (which really is at the heart of this issue) to require posters to provide enough information for responders to reasonably answer questions in the first place. As follows from the sidebar:

Your post should comprise a question (albeit potentially an open-ended one) and must contain sufficient information to enable posters to provide an effective answer. This might include, for example, your career stage, your subject discipline, the type of institution you're affiliated with, and/or the country you're in. Mods may delete posts which do not provide enough context.

We're not prescribing a requirement to include all, or even any of this information necessarily (as mentioned above, a lot of the time you might just want broad perspectives), but a significant portion of the time posts in this subreddit pertain to a specific situation in which the poster's field, country, career stage etc. will massively vary the responses. While we've often asked posters to provide more information when it's missing, we're now formalising it as a rule - so it's reportable, and mods will actively remove threads created without enough information to allow the community to provide effective answers. When a thread is deleted for this reason, we'll always be clear on what needs to be provided, and will reinstate the thread when this is done.

Please feel free to discuss below, or continue to make constructive suggestions for improvement to the subreddit.