OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/9p6kd5/whats_with_all_the_students_offering_speculative/

tl;dr

1. Students and generally those with less experience are posting comments with bad advice. This is a disservice to those seeking help and is against the rules. If you are one of these people, think before you post or you will be banned for posting bad advice. Read comment rule 2 in the sidebar for more info.

2. We need more moderators to help sustain a baseline level of discussion quality. AskEngineers has grown to 100,000 subscribers and there are currently only ~3 active mods (including myself) maintaining the sub. If you'd like to volunteer, see the most recent call for mods to understand the requirements and message us if interested.

3. I can't do this alone. Even if you aren't a moderator, we need your help to keep this sub a place worth coming back to for engineering discussion. You can help us by reporting any post or comment that's against the rules.

   • See here for a list of posts that should be reported.
   • See here for criteria for reporting comments.

Changes to moderation policy

In the recent past I've simply locked (rather than removed) posts that break the rules. This was mainly for visibility, and I don't have a good way to see whether this has had an effect, if any, on the number of rule-breaking posts. Logically speaking it probably has little effect, since new users probably aren't going to look before going straight to the submit page. At the same time, I think it has some net positive effect for letting return users know what types of posts will get locked.

Given that most of you who are regulars don't want to see a cluttered mess of locked posts, I'm going to start removing rule-breaking posts outright. I'll also implement a stricter filter on posts by new users so we get less "what major should I pick?" types of posts, something we already do in r/engineering.

Feedback

Please leave a comment here if you have any questions or concerns. I already replied to many of you in the original thread, but I want this issue to have as much visibility as possible.