Previously, on /r/ask_politics announcements...

We've had a few days of the new submissions process and beyond the initial confusion in the submissions process, it seems to be working really well. Better than I expected, to be honest. Its allowed us to work with those making submissions to get a better understanding of how to comply with the rules. Submissions from overnight are probably still the largest concern (we moderators do sleep) but that might end up being a feature rather than a bug.

Just to recap how reddit makes the approval process work:

• You type up a phenomenal question as a title and a body filled with citations to sources you've already researched, your attempts to reason through leading to another statement of the question and hit 'submit'.
• Reddit posts the submission
• Reddit removes the submission
• Reddit puts that submission into the mod queue

Yes, that bit is very confusing. But that's how it does it...

• Moderator reviews the question and, since its awesome and follows all the rules, approves it and now the community can comment.
• Or, Moderator rejects the question either will a rule-break reason or open text on what needs to be changed if its a pretty good question but needs to be tweaked

The second one will never happen because we all read and follow the rules, right?

The other big news is that we have officially added two new moderators to the team - /u/SGP_Mike and /u/brohica - to help out. Their focus for now will be helping with the moderation of comments as they get to learn this side of things, but we're extremely happen to have them on our team.

We don't expect any other changes between now and the end of the year, but this is 2020... so who really knows!

Edit: The breaking news of Trump's taxes being leaked along with the normal weekly stickies meant that we had to un-announcement this over the weekend. We'll leave this as an announcement for another day or two again.