Morning everyone! /u/Dennis_Langley and I wanted to make the community aware of some changes that are coming to r/Ask_Politics. I'll spare any other flowery introduction and just get to business.

As you might guess, we have a bunch of submissions here, especially given our size. Unfortuantely, I'd say a good percentage of them break our rules. We've used the automoderator to be able to automatically remove many, there are still some that either automoderator can't do (ecause its not something we can codify into a rule for the bot either because we don't know the knowledge to do so or its one of those fuzzy logic things that is hard to explain).

Given the election coming up, submissions here have increased and, with it, the number of submissions that break the rules have grown as a proportion of the total. Given Dennis and I have jobs and sleep on occasion, we often get over here and find fires starting to burn and 128 comments on a thread that should have been reported dozens of times.

So, starting today (9/23) and going through the end of this month (9/30) we are turning on the requirement that all submissions must be approved before they are posted for the general public to begin commenting on.

Yes, this is going to cause a slowdown on questions here but we feel that it is going to be a better value to the community than our current process. And yes, we understand that makes our jobs a bit more difficult.

So to that end, we're moving ahead and conducting final interviews with three members of the community that threw their hat in the ring to become objects of hate moderators. My goal is to have someone selected soon and hopefully up and running before the end of the month.

More changes might still be coming as we try to cope with the crunch of activity here (oh, for the slow days before election years...) but these two are clearing going to be large changes.

We thank you for joining us here and I hope that these changes make the community a little bit better.

Edit: And if you want a good idea of the type of crap we end up wading through, I give you this. Obviously didn't read the announcement and rather than actually waiting for a mod to reply to modmail.

Edit 2: We've now added a new, automated welcome message for new subscribers! Maybe I ought to go spend more time at the new site since it does impact users of the old...

Edit 3: Let's be clear. If you don't like the rule or the moderation here, you have one of three choices:

• Unsubscribe and leave our community
• Ask the moderation team to ban you
• Suck it up and be part of the community.

We moderate heavily here. Many generations of moderators have lead to the rules we have now. Many attempts at "loosening" the rules have lead to the rules we have now. The rules aren't changing. We're all adults here.