Hi everyone! I'm the new mod here on r/r4rseattle. I wanted to introduce myself and run some ideas past the community here before implementing them. As you can probably tell from my username, I'm local to Snohomish county. I've been on the r4r subs for a while and really enjoy seeing the successes that people have and the connections they make. My goal with being a mod here is to provide some additional structure to the sub while also being fairly light touch.

Some of the changes that have been made already:

• The rules in the sidebar have been tweaked a bit. They are essentially the same, but I updated the language to make them more clear and also added a new rule that users must be local to the greater Seattle area (any of those online-only posts from people not claiming to be locals will be removed under this rule).
• I've been more aggressive with removing and banning the scammers. Some of these within minutes of being posted so you may not have noticed. I promise to stay on top of this and am actively considering options to write a bot that would more aggressively target these scammers in an automated fashion. In the meantime, please continue to report anything that you see. I'm not glued to my computer every hour of the day after all so I'm not saying I'll get 100% of them but with your help we can remove the overwhelming majority.
• The setting to auto-collapse comments from users that have negative karma in this subreddit has been enabled. Please continue to downvote all those stupid "sent a PM" comments.

In addition to those changes, I wanted to propose a few new rules/options and would like your input first before implementing them:

• Add required post flair.
  • Each post would be required to select a tag such as M4F, F4M, MF4MF, SUCCESS, META, etc. when posting. This would make it easier to filter for the types of posts you're interested in.
  • The automod would remove any post made without flair.
• Add optional verification.
  • Users would be encouraged, but not required, to verify themselves with the mods as being a real person and someone actually local to the Seattle area.
  • This would be done privately with the mods and would not require anything intrusive, just a SFW or NSFW verification photo with their username and current date on a piece of paper as the user sees fit.
  • I'd also like to honor verifications from users in other subs such as r/seattlegw. Doing so would also allow for someone to verify publicly if they wish.
  • Verified users would be given user flair on this sub to make their posts stand out a bit more and provide them with more credibility.
  • For additional encouragement to get verified, verified users would be allowed to include links to photos in their posts. Within reason, that is; this is not a gonewild-type sub and I have no intention of making it as such.
  • Any unverified users that raise suspicion as determined by the mods about not being who they claim to be would be asked to provide verification to the mods or be disallowed from posting further. I'm not sure if this would be needed since the obviously fake scammers are immediately banned, but having a policy such as this on the books could be useful in limited circumstances.
• Implement a new anti-harassment policy.
  • Safety for all users is a top concern. Thus, any user that harasses another or generally behaves in bad faith will be banned if the mods notice it in comments or are provided screenshots of a private conversation. There is no tolerance for anyone acting like an ass.

Another item I potentially want to address is low effort comments like "DM me" and "sent a PM" left on posts. These are more of an annoyance than anything, but I don't want to resort to a heavy handed policy of disabling comments entirely. I also don't think it would be prudent to make a formal rule against it as enforcing it would be nearly impossible given its prevalence. Maybe an automod rule to remove them automatically? I'm open to suggestions here.

So, I'd like to hear from the community here. What are your thoughts on the policy suggestions above? What other policies should be adopted? Pending feedback I'm looking at next week to implement some of these ideas. Thanks for taking the time to give your feedback!