Hey all you regents of the sub, thanks for cumming. We (the mods) have had some stuff come up in the past few months and genuinely don't know the best way to move forward in the sub so we wanted to come here and ask for some thoughts.

We've had a huge problem with spammers, griefers, sellers, and escorts abusing our flair system to try to circumvent our auto mod filters. Apologies to all our Trans, GNC, NB, and other queer folx that had a post mistakenly removed, the spammers go-to move is to flair their posts as [T4X] to try to get around the filters we have set up.

Our title requirements still seem to be a thing that many users struggle with (even with AutoModerator commenting on EVERY post it removes what the proper format is). There are catfishers that users find themselves catfished by and want us to "do something" (?) and users that flagrantly, frequently try to sell people their premium snapchat and escort services (Looking at you, Biancax60, you hoe).

These problems are not new problems. I've been a mod here for over four years, I think, and it's pretty much been the same old song, just the second verse is twice as long.

Big Reddit (with capital R) will not do anything to help us. Not a huge surprise, I would actually be surprised if they continue to allow NSFW content in the same way for too much longer now that they're a publicly traded company. We're on our own.

We can't do a verification system. Simply too much work and it's not proven to work. r/SoCalR4R had, and later abandoned, a verification system. You had to send in a photo with your username and the sub written on it, with a date, wrinkled up, and sent to the mods who would save the photo, put your info in a spreadsheet, and keep it on file. This never sat well with us (we mean no disrespect to that sub, I know they were doing the best they could and what they thought could help), so we have yet to implement a similar system.

But the way we've been going is not sustainable much longer. We could expand the mod team and open up the subs for new moderators, but the core issues still remain. We have a pretty quick turnaround time among us, most modmails are answered relatively quickly, our mod queue doesn't stay full for long, and we've been on Bianca's posts in usually less than an hour.

We could move to a version of the sub where only approved users can submit posts, which likely would mean we would need to expand the mod team and create an extra step the first time you post in the community, but it could prevent the overt sellers from coming back. It would just mean that users (likely, for the first time anyway) couldn't just get horny and post.

I'm curious to hear what the community thinks about this, or if there are other problems you've observed or come across in your experience on this sub?