I moderate a couple of r4r type subreddits for people with particular interests to meet each other. On a regular basis users (who are probably not very technologically inclined) send us modmail messages along the lines of "Hey I'm such and such type of person looking for people near me to meet up and do things". I and my fellow moderator have to manually explain that modmail is for messaging moderators about issues and that they should be using the post feature.

Has anyone else had a similar issue, and if so, how do YOU deal with it? If you have not experienced this, but have suggestions, I'm all ears as well. As my subreddits grow, I want to stay ahead of the increasing numbers of users like this.

I wonder if there is any way to make it more clear to users how Reddit is intended to be used through design features or sidebar info before they use it wrong. That would probably be more efficient and cause less end user frustration that automated responses. I imagine that, with automated responses, I would still have to have some manual interaction to verify that the automation doesn't keep real issues from reaching me.

r/modhelp want me to include what platform I'm using before it lets me post. I don't think it's relevant, but I use both desktop and Android.