Last Updated: September 16; see recent changes at end of post.

We've been rolling out some new features based on feedback, suggestions, and complaints. We'd like to take some time to check in and see how things are going, and what can be done to improve all of your experiences with the community. We've been leveled off at around 20k subscribers and the same number of unique monthly visitors for a while now, and would like to hear your ideas on what can be done to improve the user experience and help the community grow.

Most notably, that's a lot of eyes reading posts which, in a great many cases, have been leaving a lot to be desired. Our plans so far on how to address this will be detailed below; further suggestions are welcome, please leave them in the comments or by messaging the moderators, and please do let us know what you think of these changes. These changes are being rolled out in r/Philadelphiar4r as well; a few have already given some initial feedback over there.

Post length/quality is one of the main things that has gotten complaint. Currently, we only require 25 words in posts; for comparison, the main r/R4R requires 100. And many of these posts are just re-stating the minimal required information from the title, and giving no details whatsoever about themselves. These low-effort posts have been burying the posts of people who have put time and effort into composing good, descriptive posts, and also make for a poor searching experience. As an initial step, we've switched over to a different method of counting words that is more resistant to attempts to skirt the existing post-length rule (padding out a post with filler or nonsense should no longer allow it through), and added feedback to the removal message to give an estimate of how many words short a post is.

We'd like some feedback on how we should further address post quality, while ensuring we don't alienate too many community members with posting requirements that are too high or that unintentionally restrict what people can seek here. Should we up the requirement to 100 words? Or a different length? Should we leave the length as is and instead mandate posts require specific personal details (and which details should those be; height, weight/build, etc.)? Should we require both of those things? Is there any info we should require to be brought into the post title? Or, should we simply allow different post lengths and distinguish them with flairs? If you have a preference, or even a suggestion not listed here, please let us know in the comments, so that it can be discussed.

Addressing harassment; we've also received feedback from users who haven't been reporting harassment because they were unclear on what constituted harassment, or were unsure of where to report it. We're working on increasing the visibility of support options, and are trying to clarify our policies on this. Explicit images/messages/comments that are sent to SFW posters or are otherwise unsolicited, intentional unwanted contact such as someone directly ignoring a poster's request not to be contacted about certain activities, and any retaliation or threats made against people who reject someone or don't send pics, are all things that should be reported as harassment by messaging the moderators, as well as with the report button.

Tag and location flairs are now automatically assigned. This went live a couple weeks ago, and makes it possible to search either for a particular R4R tag, a specific region or county, or both. Tags and location are both normalized, to ensure consistent searching; for example, you can search for [M4F] in Dauphin County and get results from anywhere within (Harrisburg, Hershey, etc.), even if the posts don't specifically include the words "Dauphin County"; or you can combine queries to list anyone seeking a guy, or any other combination you want. Check out the Region/County Search in the menu at the top of the community. We're also getting together a search guide that will provide additional listings of useful search criteria; please chime in if you have suggestions or want to help out with that. This took a lot of work to get up and running smoothly, and we're still making tweaks; it will even be fully brought over to the Old Reddit layout as well sometime in the next week. I'd also like to thank everyone who has worked on building or testing this feature so far. If you see anything acting strangely, please let us know so that we can fix it. There is one known issue; tags should be color-coded, though due to a bug in the Reddit App, they currently appear all gray on mobile; we hope Reddit will fix this soon, but we'll work around it on our end if it isn't.

We now allow users to choose to lock their posts. To do so, include the command !lock anywhere within the body of the post. Locked posts will get a comment by the automod reminding users how to contact the author; by default, posts will not be locked or commented, and this will remain an optional feature for those who do wish to allow comments. Locking doesn't affect a post's visibility or ranking in any way. Some people, particularly new accounts that may not be able to send chat messages, may prefer to respond in comments, but we leave it up to the author to decide if they want to allow these types of responses or not. In the near future, we will also be looking into additional comment length requirements, to cut down the number of no-effort or spam responses to posts which do allow comments.

We are also going to introduce an official, optional, method of including a verification clip in posts. At the same time, we will be requiring that verification be expressly tagged as either [Verified SFW] or [Verified explicit]. We do not intend for this ever to be mandatory simply to post here, though the plan is for us to make this a requirement for anyone who does choose to publicly include photos in their post, direct users to photos elsewhere, or request photos be included in an initial message. This will allow everyone to confirm publicly-posted photos are recent and of the author, while not forbidding or penalizing those who elect to not publicly share photos. This feature will likely be added along with our posting guide, though you may reach out to us now if you want to try it out or give feedback.

These are the ideas we are currently working on, but we are open to other suggestions as well if there are additional concerns we should address. Please leave your feedback in the comments.

Recent Updates & Known Issues:

• Known Issue, reported May 29: Flair colors are not working in the official Reddit app, due to a bug or missing feature. We're waiting for a response from Reddit as to whether this is an app bug or intended behavior; if the app can't/won't be fixed, we can work around it by using an alternate method of setting flair. This doesn't appear to break searching with flairs, they just all appear grey.
• June 12: At present, progress on implementing a verification procedure has stalled; we are seeking individuals willing to verify ahead of time so that we can refine the verification instructions and produce some correct examples for people to refer to when creating theirs. If you can help with this, please reach out by messaging the moderators.
• August 10: Post flair is now required for selecting whether a post is to be tagged as SFW or NSFW (a TW option is also provided). We've enabled this option because too many people were forgetting to tag their posts; doing it via flair allows us to make the selection mandatory. Note that we will still use flair for location; the flair selection made while composing posts will simply set the NSFW tag appropriately (and spoiler tag for TW posts).
• August 18: We've restricted comments of unlocked posts to allow only conversations directed to the OP; discussions between multiple people are no longer allowed in R4R posts (but will be permitted in [Meta] posts like this announcement, and [Success] posts). We made this change after observing that virtually all such discussions were attempts at harassment, blatant spam, or people mistakenly replying to a comment instead of the post.
• September 16: We are trialing a new top-level comment length requirement of 10 words, to cut down on spam and no-effort responses. We'll keep an eye on this and adjust it if necessary. We've also retired some of our old spam-filtering rules after some discussion and testing shows these are no longer needed and are causing unnecessary delays to posts. Please let us know if these cause any trouble, or if you observe more spam slipping through.
• Known Issue: The location search function is broken in the official Reddit app, and always returns no results. If you want to search by location, please use the desktop website. You may be able to do so on a mobile device by using your browser's "request desktop site" feature, though Reddit tries to block this to push their broken app. User experience will be best on a computer or tablet at this time. We are trying hard to convince Reddit to fix this, and are working to develop a work-around if they will not.