Now that some time has passed, and (hopefully) some of the dust has settled, let's discuss how we want this subreddit to be ran in the future. Our moderators all have varying opinions on what would by the best direction for the subreddit to go moderation-wise, but before we attempt to settle on any one plan-of-action, we want to include the subscribers themselves int he discussion. Currently, we're in three camps. I'm going to rattle them off and see what you all think of them.

First, we'll start with what eternalkerri thinks future moderation should look like. She, sadly, was the butt of the whole Bill Sloan fiasco, something all the mods were to blame for. Anyway, she would like to see a tightening of this subreddits standard. Memes, trolling, bad history (objectively wrong, not subjectively), and jokes should all be removed, and the subreddit should only focus on academic and scholarly discussion of historic issues.

Second, we'll look at what agentdcf wants. He thinks that top-tiered comments should have to abide by the rules that eternalkerri proposed (no memes, jokes, etc), but that comments futher down the chain should be allowed to make some jokes. This would, in theory, allows the subreddit to maintain strict scholarliness while still having comic relief and an aura of looseness.

Finally, my opinion. Personally, I think the comments should be ran the way they always have, upvotes/downvotes style. I think people are making mountains out of molehills here. The Bill Sloan crisis was an isolated incident, one that could have been stopped by the mods (sans the proposed rules). On the majority of posts I see, the most-upvoted comments are the informative ones, and the memes/jokes are downvoted to hell. This makes things easier on the moderators and decreases the chances of corruption.

Those are the options for the future of how questions and their respective comments will be policed.

As an update, here's what AMA's will look like in the future:

Before conducting an AMA, the person will have to contact the moderators with actual proof of identity. This means either a picture with a sign that says "Hi, reddit!" and some sort of I.D, or a post from a verified social-media outlet, such as an official twitter or facebook page. We don't want another Bill Sloan crisis.

The next issue we want to look at is flair. So far we've used the honor system and it's worked pretty well. Now that we're as big as we are though, I think some additional levels of verification are due. We DO NOT want to restrict application to those with degrees, or anything like that. Instead, we think we want to base our flair decisions off of past actions. This means, in order to recieve flair, you just have to link to three comments you've previously made in r/askhistorians that were well sourced and answered the question properly. We feel that someones historical knowledge should be evident from these posts, and it will probably help to weed out the assholes. Thoughts?

Now, for a less serious matter: The little alien at the top of the page is pretty boring. Would anyone with some artistic savvy be willing to draw up a new one? Get creative--make one dressed in a toga or something.