Ta’c léehyn, ’óykaloo núunim himyúume (Good day to all my relations). There are some things the mod team would like to bring to your attention for discussion.

Recent Events

It seems much of the storm has finally passed over us. Since the events of January 18th occurred that involved Omaha Elder Nathan Phillips and the MAGA hat wearing kids, our community here has been bombarded by Right-wing brigades coming here to serve no other purpose than to disrupt our support for our Elder and push their anti-social justice agenda by means of political agitation.

In other words: trolling.

In response to this, the mod team took drastic action to protect the sub when we realized this wasn't going to blow over in a few hours. We made the decision to appoint some interim moderators to help accommodate the influx of both new users and mitigate the assault by troublesome users. Two of the moderators, /u/cleopatra_philopater and /u/searocksandtrees, are also moderators of /r/AskHistorians and volunteered their time to help process the reports and spot flare ups occurring in threads. They have now been demodded as it seems we are passed the majority of the intrusions. We also appointed a new regular moderator from our community, /u/shoonka, who are we grateful accepted our invite to help out.

To give an idea of how big the situation was getting from the mod perspective, we have banned 34 users during a 6 day period. Before that, it would have been considered a very high number to have that many bans in several months, let alone less than a week. On Saturday/Sunday night (Jan. 19/20) when I got online, we had 30 reports pending from various threads. We have never seen that many reports before since the sub was created. Dealing with rule breaking content here usually means we have to check each thread and don't rely too heavily on reports, but to have that many is pretty astounding. Many of the people we ended up banning were do to a variety of reasons, including:

• Violating multiple rules
• Harassing our community members
• Doxxing threats
• Threats/verbal abuse toward the mods in modmail
• Encouraging brigading through crossposting to other subs
• Toxic post history

Normally, we don't want to ban people outright, even those that have dissenting opinions. We encourage discussion and value having diverse opinions from all backgrounds. And as of the last few months, we have made it our way to not remove comments outright either so it doesn't appear that we are harshly censoring the community and allow everyone to decide what stays and what goes (we would typically only remove content that is clearly grotesque, violent, or a violation of reddit's site-wide rules).

As the situation prolonged, we found it necessary to start removing content without warnings and banning users proving to be troublesome without little mention since conversing with these users doesn't really do anything. In an attempt to be fair, we left several dissenting comments up about the situation, including some from those who might not have the best of intentions, but we had to draw the line somewhere in order to prevent further proliferation of fabricated and (at times) racist/bigoted commentary. We are still dealing with some stragglers (this was made while I was writing this post).

Blacklists

More than a year ago, it was brought to our attention that certain websites are (obviously) Fake News and others market themselves to a Native audience to potentially scam or mislead us. As such, it was suggested that we implement a blacklist to prevent submissions to our sub from these domains. Well, the time has finally come.

We have created a blacklist for potentially dangerous websites as well as a shortened URL blacklist which helps to prevent those wanting to circumvent the regular domain blacklist. If you know of any sites or see any sites posted here, send us a modmail or make a note of it to one of the mods and we can add it to the blacklist.

Account Restrictions

One of the big tip offs for us when it came to determining troublemakers was the age and karma count of accounts. Therefore, we want to propose a few changes to the sub:

• Adding age restrictions for new accounts
• Adding karma restrictions for new accounts (either a threshold for users to have a certain level of karma or a negative karma limit to prevent those below a certain number from participating
• Shadow ban list that silently removes content from trolls without immediately alerting them

These are pretty substantial changes and could potentially impact even genuine users from participating among our community. However, it can also help mitigate brigading efforts. So we want to get some opinions about if we should implement this.

Application of Rules

Finally, we want to ask for some opinions about how we, the moderators, apply the rules of the sub and generally conduct ourselves. We want to make sure we do things right by the community and are asking for feedback. How can we better enforce the rules? Are there any changes you would like to see? Is there something we can do differently? Are there any complaints to how we have been doing things in general and with regards to the recent brigading efforts?

Edit: Fixed a word.