Hey, there, guys. As someone who watches the modqueue and modmail of /r/favors without touching either, I thought you should all know that a goodly portion of your moderators' day is spent repeating the following conversation over and over:

USER: Am I in the spam filter?

MOD: Yes because you did not read the rules.

USER: Okay thanks.

Less often, the conversation goes like this:

USER: Am I in the spam filter?

MOD: Yes, you should be better now.

USER: Okay, thanks.

It should be obvious to anyone that the former conversation is a drag because the mods have to be the bearer of bad news. The latter conversation is great because the mods are like Santa Claus. As being a moderator on Reddit is pretty much a total drag, I believe it behooves this subreddit to do anything reasonable to tilt the Debbie Downer/Santa Claus ratio towards joviality.

/u/Deimorz has created a script that automates many of the tasks of moderating. This script is used in dozens of major subreddits; you may have encountered it before. Your moderation team discussed implementing this script in order to streamline moderation of /r/favors to the benefit of everyone prior to our recent elections, but chose to put it off until the new moderation team was in place. We decided that this post was necessary in order to preserve the "guided democracy" that is /r/favors. As such, feel free to comment below with the understanding that this subject is not up to a popular vote, that the moderators (everyone but me) will decide for themselves what they're going to implement, but that thoughtful discourse will most assuredly sway their decisions.

The implementation of the script would be at the discretion of the moderators. There would be fine-tuning to get it to perform optimally and its actions would be subject to full oversight by the moderators. Those posts that are mistakenly banned by the automoderator would be reinstated by the moderators on request and all actions of the automoderator would be transparent. These actions would likely include, but would not be limited to, the following:

• Tags. Posts without [Request] [Offer] or [Trade] would be removed and the submitter notified to resubmit with the tag.

• Financial requests. The bot would be programmed to filter for title words related to loans and donations in [requests.] The submitter would be linked to the rules.

• Artwork requests. The bot would be programmed to filter for title words related to logos, photoshop and design in [requests.] The submitter would be linked to the rules and linked to PicRequests and ForHire.

• Ditch digging. The bot would be programmed to filter for title words related to voting, facebook, liking and surveys in [requests.] The submitter would be linked to the rules and linked to ShamelessPlug and SurveyJerk.

Note that this would not release you, the community, from reporting links that you feel violate the terms of this subreddit.

Terms subject to change without notice, prices may vary in Hawaii and Alaska, always consult your doctor before undertaking a new moderation program, yadda yadda ikky pakang

Feel free to weigh in below. If the moderators get the sense that most of the community is on board with this change, the automoderator could be up and running by next week. If enough people protest vociferously and eloquently enough, we'll keep things the way they are.

Ready

Steady

GO