Our Ethos of Transparency & Free Discussion

Outlined below are our efforts to promote transparency on /r/Futurology. We wish to keep an open set of standards for deciding content relevancy and seek to avoid the pitfalls of automated moderation that other communities may encounter. We seek to work with the machines instead of having them work for us. For any open policy questions please feel free to ask a question on /r/FuturologyModerators!

For details on subreddit rules, visit the rules page

Moderation

Mod Procedure & Voting

Our moderator team acts as a hive-mind. We take consensus to ensure fairness. In the past, we voted on every single deletion and ban. However, after hitting a 100k subscribers we have reluctantly had to switch to more austere methods. We only do auto-deletion at the comment level, with the exception of banned domains. For any major decisions or unclear judgements, our moderators take a vote within mod mail to weigh in on the decision making process.

Mod Forums

Our moderator forum, /r/futurologymoderators, is open for anyone to view and post. You are also free to message the mods at any time and we will respond to your request in timely and democratic manner.

Mod Removals

All removed posts are listed on /r/FuturologyRemovals. If you have any questions about why something was removed please pose your question there or via /r/Futurology modmail.

Banned Users

Banned users are always seen by all of the moderators and can be protested if the action seems unfair. We seek to only ban users who espouse violent or abusive language, either as blatant bigotry or ad hominem attacks.

In most cases, a warning is sent to users who are disrespectful to others, including: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.; bigotry with regards to differing political or religious views; personal attacks and trolling; gratuitous profanity; and harassment, especially sexual harassment. We find that a majority of users improve their behavior after being warned.

If a user accrues multiple warnings, they will be temporarily banned from /r/Futurology at the discretion of the moderators.

If a user egregiously violates the rules against gratuitous profanity, harassment, and personal attacks, they will be temporarily banned without warning. If a user egregiously violates the rules against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., or employs death wishes, they will be permanently banned without warning.

User bans can be appealed at /r/futurologyappeals. Anyone can view the discussions and results. A ban is overturned if a majority of mods agrees for its removal.

Bots

To assist in moderation, we utilize three bots.

/u/botwatchman

/u/botwatchman is a bot designed to blacklist unwanted bots from subreddits it is moderated to. For more information, and a list of blacklisted bots, visit /r/botwatchman. That subreddit also logs when and where a bot was banned from. It is possible to appeal the blacklisting of a bot there.

/u/AutoModerator

/u/AutoModerator is an extremely versatile bot created by /u/Deimorz. The bot takes custom instructions from subreddit moderators and applies them to posts and comments as they are made.

Here is a general list of what /u/AutoModerator is used for:

• Remove obvious low-quality comments
• Enforce the domain spamlist
• Enforce the domain blacklist
• Enforce shadowbans of known spammy users
• Automatically report content containing certain keywords
• Enforce the account age and karma requirements (Rules 7 and 8)
• Message users when their content was automatically removed (except for the shadowban and spamlist functions)

/u/Rule_13_Bot

/u/Rule_13_Bot enforces Rule 13 by verifying the age of content posted to /r/Futurology. All submitted links older than 6 months without the month and year in the title are automatically removed by /u/Rule_13_Bot. The bot also sends a removal notification message and suggests a corrected title. Appeal erroneous removals by messaging the moderators.

Reddit Spam Filter

We have the reddit spam filters set to high. If you do not see your submission it could have been caught in the spam filter. Message the moderators for clarification.