Hello, everyone! We're now back under new management, and are in the process of clearing a large backlog of spam. Thanks go out to those who have been reporting rule-breaking content; please continue to do so, and reach out to us by messaging the moderators if you see anything amiss.

My plans for the community are to bring it back into smooth operation, and ensure it remains free of scams and rule-breaking content. I'll try my best to explain the new changes (important bits in bold for those who don't want to read a boring wall of text), and am soliciting feedback from the existing community to ensure they are in everyone's best interest. None of this is set in stone, so any feedback, questions, concerns are welcome, please leave it either in the comments, or by messaging the moderators.

Rule changes effective immediately

• The no-selling rule will be strictly enforced: Any mention of exchanges for money or goods, or of commercial activities, will result in a ban. These violate the Reddit Content Policy on Prohibited Transactions, which moderators are obligated to enforce; violators will be reported to Reddit to have their accounts permanently suspended site-wide. Do not mention commercial or prohibited services for any reason, even to ask people not to respond with them; this can trigger our bot to ban you! Scammers will not read your post, so asking them not to spam you will not be productive. If you are banned by mistake, you may appeal the ban by replying to the ban message.
• Posts and comments containing or requesting contact info are now strictly forbidden. These are overwhelmingly being used by scammers to side-step account suspensions, and there are privacy and safety concerns to allowing people to include contact info in posts that we cannot verify is their own. Like most similar communities, we will not be allowing contact info to be posted publicly. Feel free to specify a preferred platform, but the username must be exchanged in private, and your post cannot ask users to send their usernames. Attempts to circumvent this in any way will result in bans.
• Only conversations directed to the OP will be allowed in R4R posts; discussions between multiple people are no longer allowed except on [Meta] posts like this announcement, and [Success] posts. Most such discussions have tended to be attempts at harassment, blatant spam, or people mistakenly replying to a comment instead of the post, so this change should not impact normal use of the community. If you see a rule-breaking post, please use the report button to report it; please remember to message the mods if the rule violation is not very obvious, so it does not get missed!

New Features now available

• Search-by-location and search-by-R4R-tag are now enabled, via the community main menu. This feature is currently available only on Reddit.com when viewed in a browser; while you can still use the mobile app to browse and post here, please use the desktop site for search, as you'll have a much better experience. We are exploring options to develop our own search webapp. Check it out at the top of the page! Note that only recent posts will get location flair, so the results will be pretty sparse for a while. To make sure your own post gets indexed properly, please use the format #City, State/Province (including the comma, and with only one # before the city name) in your post title, if possible; specifying a state/province and country (#Uttar Pradesh, India), or just country for smaller nations (#United Kingdom), is also permitted, if you don't want to include your specific town or city. Up to two location tags (including the #Online tag) may be specified, e.g., #DC and #NOVA or #NSW or #Online. Please ensure your #tagged location suits how far you are willing to travel to meet someone; don't specify an entire country or huge region if you're not able to venture far outside your city.
• 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.
• The title formatting is now more flexible. We still require an [R4R] tag, #tagged location, and activity in the title, but posts will no longer be removed for including those things in a different order, or for missing a dash, etc. A lot of people were struggling with this; if you couldn't get your post correct before, please try again now.
• Much better spam and scam filtering. Our team has developed an AI-based bot to combat the "NYC Catfish Queen", who has plagued this community for years. Our bot has been successful in removing the vast majority of this group's posts, as well as most other types of scams. Users from NYC should now have far less issues with false-positive post removals, as our AI can distinguish them from the scam group with far greater accuracy than Automod.
• Account age and karma requirements are now eliminated. The bots/scammers have long been able to evade these, and they're only hurting newcomers to the community. Our AI handles this task far better than these simplistic filters.
• Note that new posts no longer receive a comment from the Automod telling you you've posted. This gets rather spammy for people who post every week, and is generally distracting. If your post is removed, the bot will tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it. Note that due to spam-filtering, some posts may be delayed a few hours; this is normal, and you typically don't have to do anything, as we review the spam queue regularly. If your post does remain caught in the spam filter for an excessively long time, feel free to message the mods to ask what's up.

Planned future changes

• We are considering increasing the required post length from 30 words to 50. We want to ensure that low-effort posts don't wind up burying the posts of people who have put time and effort into composing good, descriptive posts; overly short posts also make for a poor searching experience. The removal message now gives an estimate of how many words short a post is, to assist users in fixing their posts. Note that padding out a post with filler or nonsense will not make it meet the requirements; the bot is smart enough to not count filler text. Please let us know what you think of these changes; do you agree, disagree, or have other suggestions we should implement?
• In the future, we are going to introduce an official, optional, method of including a verification clip in posts. 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 has publicly posted photos (whether here or elsewhere on their profile), or requests 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 is still in development, 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. We will continue to update this post based on feedback and progress on introducing these features; updates will be added below.

Some Notes On Location Search

The menu options are divided up based on activity on Reddit communities similar to this one; areas that get a lot of posts have lots of divisions to make them practical to search, while regions where Reddit is not popularly used may be divided only into continents. Once this has been operating for a while, we will review the search divisions to see if any improvements can be made.

For example, if you're a woman seeking a guy in Calgary, you'd start by picking Canadian Prairies from the Americas region menu. When you find an appropriate M4F Alberta post, tapping on its flair will show others like it, with the exact R4R tag and province. Alternatively, you can edit the search query after selecting a menu item, to keep only the desired flair:"Alberta" search query.

The actual flairs themselves are divided mostly at the country level; some non-country territories also have an entry, mainly when they are widely separated from their parent nation. The United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Brazil are further divided into states/provinces.

We will review these divisions and their menu structure periodically, to ensure they continue to suit our user base. The hope is that this will be intuitive, and give a coarse place to start your search. A more detailed location directory is being worked on, and will be posted at a later date along with an official How-To Guide.

Due to severe space limitations in the menu, some of the names are difficult to read, so here's what they mean:

If there are any others that are unclear to you, or if you want to suggest better names for these, please let us know.

Location search 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 several weeks. I'd also like to thank everyone who has worked on building or testing this feature over the past year. If you see anything acting strangely, please let us know so that we can fix it.