Hey folks, just wanted to give some updates/comments.

First of all, hello! I'm a statistician and former academic. I somewhat recently came across this sub, and noticed there was only one mod (MercifulTehlu). Thought I would offer to assist on moderating this sub to help clean up spam, low-effort posts, and such.

There was a very small discussion on some of this, but I thought a more "organized" place would be good for this - both ideas and feedback. My initial thoughts to help declutter and organize things were post flairs and possibly a weekly (or some interval) thread as a sink for homework questions.

Post flairs

If you haven't noticed, I added some flair options into the sidebar (users can select from a list when submitting a post). I also added a bot which will detect if a post is not flaired, and will temporarily remove the post and message the submitter to add the flair. It looks like it's working thus far. My thoughts on these are:

• [Homework]: Self-explanatory
• [Discussion]: More general discussion of probability theory.
• [Education]: Resources for learning, implementing, applying, etc.
• [Research]: Talking about novel research
• [Applied]: Questions about calculating probabilities for a given scenario. Kind of like the sub description says "question about the probability of a fair coin coming up heads" or some of the other "I encountered what I think is a rare event, what's the probability of that?" thread that you've probably seen.
• [Meta]: Things relating to state of the sub.

Feel free to critique this selection. It's pretty simple to make changes. Also, if you hit "report" it sends a message to go inspect, so if there's, e.g., a homework post with no effort, it's about 3 button clicks to remove it with a message to the person to show their work.

Weekly threads?

I know it's possible to have the automod make weekly threads. For example, r/statistics has a weekly "What are you working on?" thread, and r/AskAcademia has a weekly "Office hours" thread. Would having a weekly thread as a sink for homework questions be worthwhile? I think I have some automod code set up to detect some homework keywords, but haven't tested it. Would having a similar "Small probability questions" thread to act as a sink for the "Applied" tag be worthwhile as well?

Or if the post flairs themselves are enough to help sort things, let me know. I don't think this sub is so busy as to need a lot of work to reduce the load, but it seems a bit presumptuous of me to say "I think X, so I'll just go do it." I'd like to hear from the people who frequent this place before I go pushing too many buttons.