Hey everyone! We've seen a lot of changes and new arrivals in the past week, and I'd like to share some announcements from the mod team:

New Theme

The new theme has been live for a few days now, and /u/TheFlyingBastard has been working hard to address bugs as they're reported. If you find any bugs or have any comments/suggestions, feel free to share them in our announcement thread or in modmail.

Banner Contest

We would like to reach out to our community to design a new banner for the subreddit! Starting today (March 6), designers will have ~two weeks (until Saturday, March 21 at 00:00 UTC) to send submissions to our Modmail, with the subject (BANNER CONTEST). Here's a link with that subject already generated.

The banner will be displayed on our top bar and should meet the following criteria:

• Horizontally Tile-able
• Maximum height of 100px (any larger will be cropped)
• Feature some concept or motif that is related to Virtual Reality. Here's a collection of VR images from popular culture to get some ideas flowing: http://imgur.com/a/atV8c#37

Once submission has ended, we will present the submissions anonymously for voting. The moderators will screen the submissions before compiling them for voting, so be aware that we do have the right to exclude any inciteful/trollish submissions.

Voting will remain open for one week, after which time the winning banner will be displayed and the winning designer will receive 1 month of Reddit Gold.

Revisions to Submission Guidelines

The Submission Guidelines haven't been updated in over two years, and reflect a time when this subreddit was much smaller and individual users were much more accountable to providing high-quality news and discussion content. As the subreddit has grown dramatically (we only had 2K users before the Facebook Oculus acquisition!), we're interested in codifying some existing behaviors into our submission guidelines to ensure that our focus remains on providing news and discussion content.

The first revision, I think, will be very non-controversial for our existing community:

• No image macros (memes) or reaction gifs as the primary subject of submissions.

This will not be extended to comments, and will not be extended to links or self-posts where the image is being used as a visual aid in the context of a larger discussion. This will also not be extended to poignant or useful images, like political cartoons or diagrams. This is not a ban on all image submissions.

This sort of content isn't a big deal right now, in fact we get very few meme submissions. Maybe one or two a month? But as we continue to grow, we'll naturally see more of these submissions and that sort of low-effort content tends to be highly upvoted in large populations. This would push the content we're really focused on -- news, discussion, and personal projects -- lower in our sorting, and would change the culture of the subreddit over time. In light of this, we're going to begin actively removing submissions that primarily feature image macros or reaction gifs.

Feedback on this and other, future revisions is welcome. We may bring another one or two guidelines soon, the sudden population boost has lit a fire under out butts. They should be similar in nature... things that the current community is already doing tacitly, that we would like to preserve as the population grows.

Please feel free to leave comments/questions below regarding any of these announcements, and we'll do our best to answer any concerns.

Thanks,

The /r/virtualreality mods