Last Updated: September 16; see recent changes at end of post.
We've received some feedback, suggestions, and complaints lately, and would 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're over a year past when the original Philly R4R was closed, and we're just about back to the same daily post volume as before the closure, though only 70% of the previous one's 11.6k subscribers. We're getting around 15,000 unique visitors a month though; if every one of those people joined the community by clicking the join button, we could quickly surpass it. Joining will also of course bring our posts straight to your front page feed.
In any case, 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.
As an initial step, we've added the requirement for a location to be specified in post titles. Not everyone has a car or 2 hours to sit on septa, so please ensure your post title includes at least a region or neighborhood. This has actually been a rule since the very beginning, but we now have the ability to enforce it automatically.
Post length/quality is another key thing 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. We'd like some feedback on how we should best address this, 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've increased 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.
We'd also like to limit use of imprecise location tags like #Philly, as a large number of posters using those tags are not, in fact, willing to travel to the entire city or region, and are just putting it there to skirt the location requirement; however we want to do this in a way that will still permit people, for whom traveling to new places is part of the fun, to utilize the community. The most likely way we'll do this will be to require such posts to explicitly say either "Greater Philadelphia" (the whole Delaware Valley region) or "City of Philadelphia" (the Philadelphia City-County itself). We also would like users to be more active about reporting posters who make misleading claims in their posts about where they're willing to meet, whether they can host, etc., so that this information remains useful, and location search provides useful results. If you are one of the people seeking in a large region, or otherwise have got any suggestions on what direction we should go to clarify such locations, please let us know. This change has now been implemented.
Tag and location flairs are now automatically assigned. This makes it possible to search either for a particular R4R tag, a specific area of the city or surrounding region, or both. Tags and location are both normalized, to ensure consistent searching; for example, you can search for [M4F] in #Center City and get results from Rittenhouse, Penn's Landing, etc., even if the posts don't specifically include the words "Center City"; or you can combine queries to list anyone seeking a guy, or any other combination you want. We're getting together a search guide that will provide a listing 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.
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.Reportedly fixed!- May 31: We've switched over to counting information content of posts, rather than a simple word-count (something we've already been doing with post titles). We are tuning this to aim for a minimum post length of approximately 50 words, which we hope will be a reasonable compromise between giving posters freedom to compose their posts as they like, and ensuring posts contain enough details to be useful to those reading them; we may further adjust this if needed based on user feedback. We've also added feedback to the removal message to give an estimate of how many words short a post is. This method should be far more resistant to attempts to skirt the post length rule, something we've noted an uptick in as the limit went up.
- June 2: We've been reviewing posts tagged #Philly/#Philadelphia, and there is clearly no consistency in what this tag is being used to mean; some posts specify only a single neighborhood, some mean the city itself, while others refer to the entire Greater Philadelphia region. As such, we are now directing users to use a more specific tag. Along with several bugfixes, this should now ensure that most posts are correctly flaired as being in one of our defined regions. If there are still issues with the location flair or search, please let us know.
- 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.
- June 26: 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 plan to add a top-level comment length requirement of 10 words, to cut down on spam and no-effort responses. This is being tested in Pennsylvaniar4r first, and will be enabled here next week if we don't see any major problems. We'll keep an eye on this and adjust it if necessary.
- 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.
- We aren't presently planning on prohibiting new users from posting; everyone does have to start somewhere, and we have more effective measures to combat scammers that don't unduly impact newcomers. We are also in the process of rolling out a verification requirement for anyone publicly sharing or asking for photos, which will make stolen-photo scammers and "pic-collector" accounts far more tedious to operate (and if users elect to follow our verification process, they won't be able to operate privately either). We are looking for some people to test out the new verification method, so we can make sure it functions properly before we make it fully public; if you/anyone are willing to do this, please let us know.
- We are well aware of the groups that are making those posts; we've even developed an AI-based moderation bot specifically to eliminate them from our communities. Our stats suggest it is functioning extremely well, banning virtually all of them within seconds of them posting; the last user-submitted report of that scammer was back in early April. Of course, anyone seeing any break thru should report them via the report button and by messaging the moderators; such reports help us remove that scam post, and also identify future ones like it.
We are still planning to require verification as per the original announcement. A further announcement detailing our plans for the verification requirement will be made in the next couple weeks. Currently, we are still seeking individuals willing to verify to test the verification process ahead of time. If you're willing to do this, please message the moderators.
We plan to have our guide cover the topic of verifying for multiple communities, so it'll be possible to do verification that should be acceptable both here and elsewhere. We're going to have identical requirements across our others (Pennsylvania and Maryland), and there's a few additional R4R and NSFW communities that we've talked to about standardizing with. At the moment, though, we aren't aware of other communities that have verification requirements that already meet our own goals, though we hope more will adopt them in the future.
I should note also, we don't expect to be able to also verify a poster's age, as there's no viable way of us doing so. (We do have measures in place to identify, block, and investigate reports of underage posters.)
The verification is intended to give us a way to allow users to include photos/gifs of themselves alongside their posts, while ensuring outdated (older than 6 months), non-consenting, or stolen depictions cannot be used. As noted above, this will remain optional; people who don't have public images of themselves will not be required to verify (except in the uncommon case where we'd have reasonable cause to suspect they are being dishonest, similar to what r/r4r does). This also gives us another tool to combat scammers, who typically direct users to stolen photos posted on their profiles; though our automation does catch the bulk of these already, a blanket requirement for anyone with public photos to verify will make it considerably more difficult for them to target our community.
If you've got any other suggestions, feel free to include them here or in modmail. We're also seeking people to test out the verification method to iron out any remaining issues/hangups before we officially roll it out; so if you know anyone who'd be willing to do so, let us know as well.
All good points, thanks for the feedback!
NSFW posts: We do require posts to be distinguished either as SFW or NSFW, tho Reddit's posting interface doesn't call as much attention to this as we'd like it to; the automod and bot try to do this automatically, but posters can set or unset the flag as required by the content in the post/activities mainly being seeked out. The auto-tagging does skew towards classifying stuff as NSFW, to ensure NSFW posts aren't mistakenly classified as SFW; however, we are seeing that this might be having the unintended consequence of causing SFW posters to be harassed with NSFW responses, when they often don't see that their post has been mistakenly tagged as NSFW. One idea that was floated, to try to ensure people don't forget to set this correctly, is to require flair to be set (we'd force users to pick either a "Explicit Content/NSFW" flair or a "Strictly Clean/SFW" flair), and the bot would then tag the post according to this. If we're still seeing mis-tagged posts after the post length/quality improvements, we will likely move to this option to ensure users can no longer overlook the SFW/NSFW tagging option.
Verification: Our plan for verification is to allow it to be done either in public (in the comments of the post), or directly with the person one is intending to meet. Our guide will explain how to perform the verification, and how to confirm the verification fits the requirements we have set. For public verification, this will be assisted with the bot, and in private people can simply follow the instructions on their own. This removes moderators from the trust loop, addressing concerns with people who may not trust community moderators; you won't have to, you can check the verification yourself. We will be spot-checking public verification, and the bot message will instruct people on how to report invalid verification to us, to ensure people are being honest and not trying to fake it or re-use outdated/someone else's verification. Several other communities I'm involved with also have had verification requirements for a long time, and so we already have well-tested tools and a "back-room" team available to do this if more than the expected amount of moderation overhead is required, or if we otherwise run into problems that require us to manually approve public verification.
Karma/age limits: We do track these statistics among posters, and our stats still show that implementing such restrictions would disproportionately affect new users more than it would reduce post spam, as compared to our current anti-spam/anti-scam systems. If you see spam that slips thru, please report it by messaging the mods; doing so helps us ban that account, as well as identify future ones like it. One of our intended features is that our community allows newcomers to Reddit to participate fully, without having to go thru a waiting period or jump thru hoops to use social-media type features to gain karma when they might just be here only to meet people; we are one of the few R4Rs that allow that. At the same time, these restrictions are very easy to bypass at scale; scammers can simply purchase or create tens of thousands of accounts in bulk and farm the required karma using bots, so it adds very little effort for them, but a lot of effort for legit posters.
We are aware that spammers/scammers seem to be readily evading spam detection in comments; this appears to be a bug, and we are working on fixing it. We will also be raising the minimum effort required to post a comment in the first place; those "DM me" comments in particular aren't useful, spambots are even starting to mimic them, and we want to require people who do choose to comment to actually put effort into it.
Please do report unwanted contact or harassment, both using the report button, and by messaging the moderators. That type of behavior violates community and Reddit rules, but users need to be reporting it to us so that we can take action; doing so helps out everyone, as if someone is harassing you, they're no doubt doing it to many others. We previously made some changes to increase the visibility of the reporting options as well; they're now more clearly listed in the rules and sidebar, as well as an option in the community menu.
I'm not sure where it is, but the app does have an option to hide NSFW posts in search results; look for a settings icon on the search page, or possibly in user settings if you just want to turn it on for everywhere. Posts that are tagged as SFW are not allowed to contain explicit language, or describe explicit activities, even using coded terms; we've been trying to crack down on the people deliberately mis-tagging their posts by using vague language. Please report any NSFW posts you see that aren't properly tagged.
Harassment for any reason is strictly forbidden here, so please report anyone harassing SFW posters, both by using the report button beside the message, and also by messaging the mods. Because of the way Reddit's reporting system works, you have to do both of those things, which is admittedly somewhat annoying, but will help everyone by helping us identify and remove those individuals from Reddit. Also do check that your own post is still tagged as SFW about a minute after posting; sometimes the automatic tagging will get it wrong.
We are going to re-evaluate use of the SFW/NSFW tagging in about a week today; if we're still seeing more than a trivial number of mis-tagged posts (people reporting them will make sure these aren't missed), we will move to a mandatory flair system to ensure users cannot forget to tag their posts. This is something we might do regardless, as we also see SFW posts getting mistakenly tagged as NSFW as a problem.
Edited to add: Looking at the recent posts, I am going to turn on the SFW/NSFW flair feature today, as it is clear the current system is not even close to to the level of accuracy we need to have.
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Post Details
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- 2 years ago
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- View post on reddit.com
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- reddit.com/r/philadelphi...