In general, one of the biggest problems with rules is that new users don't read them and fail to follow the expected behavior for a subreddit. To address this problem, I contacted the mods of a relatively new subreddit, /r/neutralnews, to ask them for permission to copy the format of their guidelines in order to greatly simplify our own rules. Those of you who have been around long enough will remember that over 2 years ago, I sought & received the same permission from the mods of /r/AskHistorians, which this sub is roughly modeled after.

After getting permission last week, I started a draft revision of the rules and had a round of feedback comments from the other mods. The rules you see now are the result of that. I succeeded in reducing the body of text from over 20,000 characters to just under 8,700 by removing redundant information and condensing over a dozen different sections into four very straightforward sections:

• Section 0: Mission Statement
• Section 1: Submission rules
• Section 2: Comment rules
• Section 3: How we moderate & misc.

Sections 1 and 2 are the only ones with sub-sections, which make it very clear the types of posts or comments will get removed, and how you are expected to create posts and write comments. They are also designed to be able to be read on a single page in under 3 minutes on modern desktop resolutions.

Comment quality

The biggest change you may notice is that we will now require answers to contain a short explanation using engineering and scientific logic. One-sentence answers are unlikely to be sufficient anymore. For assertions of fact that do not have an obvious and easy answer, we will now require a credible and relevant source.

This rule has always existed, but it was always sort of an unspoken "legacy" rule to allow everyone to say what they want, since the discussion would be self-regulated by real engineers. However, I realized that this is neither consistent nor a reliable form of moderation since someone knowledgeable on a particular topic may not be present in every thread.

Moving forward, we're slightly raising the bar for the quality of top-level comments that attempt to answer OP's questions... but in the spirit of free and open discussion, we're not going full AskHistorians draconian and requiring essay-length answers with multiple sources. I still expect everyone who is an engineer to do their part in regulating the comments by calling out wrong info and dubious opinions made by users who may not be expert enough to answer the question at hand.

tl;dr The rules were revised and simplified. They're pretty much the same, but answer comments in every thread will be more strictly enforced to a higher standard.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/wiki/rules