Hi /r/FSAE! This is just a short modpost to inform you of some minor changes to the sub.

New Moderator

Firstly, you may have noticed that /r/FSAE has a new moderator! Namely uhh... me. Wetmelon. I was brought on by /u/Dutchie3719 after I expressed interest in helping /r/FSAE setup an IRC channel. More on that in just a minute.

To give you some background on myself and my FSAE experience, I'm a rising Senior in the Mechatronics undergraduate program at UNC Asheville. I initially started my engineering degree at the University of Western Ontario (Go Mustangs!), but didn't do very well (go to class, kids!). In my brief 1-year stint there, I was part of the 2010 FSAE team, which placed 20th at Michigan and 5th in California. When I started at UNCA in Fall of 2014, I was lucky enough to find out that there was an active push to start an FSAE team. I'm now one of the charter members and VP of the UNCA SAE club, and Engineering Lead of UNCA Motorsports the Formula SAE Electric team. We'll have 4 students attending the competition in Lincoln this year as observers, and have plans to enter the 2017 competition, so say hi!

On the Reddit side of things, I've been a moderator of /r/SpaceX for nearly two years now. Although I was initially recruited to do the IRC work (or so I thought), it seems as though the current moderators would like to kick /r/FSAE up a notch and have asked me for some general modding advice, which brings me to the next couple of points:

The Modqueue

When I joined there was more than 200 items in the modqueue, and over 800 unmoderated posts (posts which are visible to the sub, but haven't been manually approved). Since all the work I do on /r/SpaceX is done through the "moderator toolbox" (/r/toolbox) add-in, and it only has one modqueue and one unmoderated queue which were now overflowing, it was in both my best interest and the best interest of /r/FSAE for these to be cleared out. This was completed in short order. Here are the stats:

• Removed Posts: 222 (vast majority were some sort of Asian spam caught in the spam filter over a year ago)
• Approved Posts: 627
• Removed Comments: 6
• Approved Comments: 15

That means that everything ever posted in /r/FSAE has been moderated, retroactively. Yep, even the two year old post by the Brazillian(?) team that got caught in the spam filter and never saw the light of day, despite it being perfectly valid.

I've recommended that the other mods get /r/toolbox, and between that and a clean modqueue it is now possible to quickly and efficiently address reports, catch spam, and approve new posts. So please, if there is an issue, use that report button!

Automoderator

I have enabled a very basic config for Automoderator, which is visible here: http://hastebin.com/raw/apadomonex

Right now, it does two things:

1. Issue a "report" if someone might be requesting mod input. Basically, it just flags common mod-related terms like "mod", "flair", "ban", "sidebar", etc.
2. Issue a "report" if someone might be acting rudely. I've combined the auto-removal rule from /r/SpaceX for "obvious hostility" into the auto-report rule for less-obvious hostility and made it just issue reports. Since we don't actually have a rule against rudeness, I'll only be removing clear cases of

Currently, nothing is being removed without moderator intervention. This may change as we grow and as we decide on clear rules.

Rules

I can't find any posted rules outside of the basic Reddit-wide rules. If we want to be a premier location for FSAE, that needs to change. What should our community rules be? I'd like some sort of "be respectful" rule to start. Anything else?

CSS

/u/Dutchie3719 has brought up changing the /r/FSAE look and feel (CSS) to make it feel sexier. He suggested the /r/Naut theme. Thoughts? Let us know in the comments. The current CSS only handles flair.

IRC

Would you like an IRC Channel? It should be relatively simple to set it up on Snoonet. We have also discussed setting up a Slack server, but this requires every member to share a publicly visible email address. IRC does not, and it even hides your IP address.

Formula SAE vs Formula Student

All of the branding is currently Formula SAE related, which might not show up if someone is searching for Formula Student. I propose that we change our branding (without changing the sub address) to be more inclusive of both terms.

Flair

/u/JBSwiftus has the ability to grant team flair. See his most recent post about it and post in here if you want to add your team logo. I hope he doesn't hate me for giving him more work.

Going Forward

In my view, the Formula SAE / Formula Student internet community is highly fragmented, mostly spread between various independent team Facebook pages, twitter pages, the FSAE forums, and of course the subreddit. I have a vision of Reddit doing what it does best: Aggregating content. If done properly, we could very easily become the central hub to a spoked wheel of distributed content; the first stop for any and all FSAE / FS content. But to do that, we need to set a clear goal, so I'd like to pose the question:

What do you want /r/FSAE to be?