Please welcome our two newest moderators, /u/ansible and /u/fusdohrah. We're going to work hard on getting some more AMAs and stuff rolling through here for your reading pleasure, so please look forward to it. Once we've figured out the logistics, we can finally move forward with having AMAs on a regular basis (probably monthly).

An experiment with AutoModerator settings

Some of you may have noticed that AutoModerator has been making automated responses in some threads. I'm experimenting with something that /r/engineering has implemented, where AutoModerator will send users that submit new threads a PM reminding them to assign a link flair to their post, or it will get removed after X minutes.

What's being done here is a bit different. Nothing will be automatically removed, but any post with 250 characters or less will trigger the auto-response. I figured that if OP can't bother to include at least 2 tweets worth of writing in his/her post, then it might be good to have the auto-response trigger for a couple of reasons:

1. The user is probably new and unaware of the rules, and

2. even if a user is aware of the rules, they probably did not include enough information.

As with anything automatic, it won't work 100% of the time. For example, the coffee thread is perfectly fine, but it triggered the auto-response because the original post was only 173 characters (and subsequently got downvoted to hell because... well it's pretty annoying!)

I'll be tweaking it a bit more as time goes on, but from this point forward, any post with less than 150 characters will trigger the auto-response. If it ends up completely flopping, either by not addressing the two concerns above, or by being too annoying, then the setting will be removed.

Your feedback is really important here, so if you have any concerns about this, please speak up.

What do you think? Is it a good or bad idea? Is it even necessary to have it?

Some other minor updates

From the feedback I gathered from the last mod post, I will be making the following changes:

• "Case of the Mondays" will be scrubbed, but "Career Wednesday" and the fun friday thread will stay. Right now we only have two alternating threads (Sci-Fi Friday and Failure Friday), so if you have ideas for new ones, we'd love to hear them!

• Due to popular demand, "Sci-Fi Friday" will be renamed to "Sci-Friday".

• A new "Panel of Engineers" thread will be coming in the next couple of weeks. Don't worry if you applied in the one in the sidebar; I'll get around to your application this weekend before I post the new one.

• A new "Call for engineers willing to be interviewed" thread will also be coming soon to replace the current one which is now nearly two years old. I want to thank everyone who's on that list for taking the time to reply to the occasional PM from students asking for interviews. :-)