Hello, everyone! The community has now reopened; there are some new changes (important bits in bold for those who don't want to read a boring wall of text) to ensure things run smoothly from now on, and I 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.

A note about comments

One of the key reasons for reviving this community was to ensure comment replies remain allowed, as a number of R4R and personals subs have resorted to turning these off as a spam-control measure. Many people prefer to respond in comments for a wide variety of reasons, and some posters have been appreciative of constructive advice received in comments. We also intend to provide high-accuracy location detection (it'll just work, even if your formatting is a bit off), searching by location, and contact info and scam filtering.

We would, however, like to ask that comment replies not make public accusations against people being scammers/fake/etc. We have seen such unverifiable claims widely weaponized as a means of retaliation, used by sick individuals to punish and destroy the reputations of posters who reject them. So, please report these only to the mods; hit the Report button and message the mods to follow up if the reason for the report isn't very obvious. Tipping off scammers is also counter-productive, as it gives them an opportunity to delete their post or account to avoid any consequences until they quietly return the next day. We will take swift action against scams/fakes, and also against public false accusations, to prevent these from being used for harassment.

It is also important to note that we intend to tackle the scam problem head-on; our plans for this are detailed below, and involve removing such posts and users within seconds, not hours. We do very much appreciate it when users are proactive and report rule-breaking and dangerous conduct to us, but we intend to ensure that the need for users to take on this role will be minimized as much as possible. We welcome any feedback and suggestions on handling this.

Please do keep in mind that bdsmR4R is focused on finding like-minded individuals, not discussions; so, while we won't prohibit general advice and help to those who are seeking someone and open to such suggestions, those primarily in need of advice are encouraged to check out r/BDSMCommunity. Be sure to check out their pinned post for newbies if you are new to the scene!

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 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. Attempts to circumvent this in any way will result in bans.

New Features now available

• Search-by-location and search-by-R4R-tag are now enabled, via the community main menu. These currently only function on New.Reddit.com for desktop; if you are using a mobile device, you can access this version of the site using the "Request Desktop Site" option in your device's browser and logging in to New.Reddit.com; please let us know if there are any issues, we will work to fix them! Note that only recent posts will get location flair, so the results will be pretty sparse for a while! For best results, please use the format #City, State/Province (including the comma, and with only one # before the city name) 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. We will closely monitor use of this feature to ensure it is not abused; a reminder will be posted on locked posts instructing users on how to report rule-breaking or dangerous conduct.
• Much better spam and scam filtering. Our team has developed an AI-based bot to combat the "NYC Catphish Queen", who has plagued this community and many like it 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-positives, as our AI can distinguish them from the scam group with far greater accuracy than Automod.

Planned future changes

• We will likely permit only conversations directed to the OP in R4R posts. Discussions between multiple people would be allowed only on [Meta] posts like this announcement, and [Success] posts; we would consider adding a means for an OP to allow these if there is good reason, though we still recommend that BDSMCommunity be used for those seeking advice. Our reason for locking down discussions is that most of them have tended to be attempts at harassment, blatant spam, or people mistakenly replying to a comment instead of the post.
• We are considering adding a post length requirement, which will likely be 50 words. A comment length requirement of 10 words is being considered as well. 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 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 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

Unfortunately, Reddit's official apps are just too severely broken to have any hope of supporting this feature. Mobile users can still use Location Search by going to New.Reddit.com and logging in. This will take you to the desktop version of the site; it's not 100% perfect on a phone, but it works far better than the official app for the features we need here. You may need to use your browser's "Reguest Desktop Site" feature, or Reddit will try to force you to go back to their broken app. We have reached out to Reddit, who have confirmed this is a problem, but that they will not be able to fix it in the foreseeable future. We are in the process of developing our own search app to provide a better searching experience for our users, and users of any other community that relies on the ability to search for posts.