Rule management on new Reddit
Hey everyone,
We’re excited to bring you rule management on new Reddit today! This encompasses the creation, editing, and deletion of rules, where changes will be reflected on both new and old sites.
The Rules page can be accessed through your subreddit’s mod hub, under the “Rules and Regulations” section. One new feature on the Rules page will be rule reordering via drag-and-drop, so you no longer have to delete everything and re-add rules. If you reorder a rule on the new site, the change will be reflected on the old site, without you having to delete and re-add them. We hope this makes your life a little bit easier when making edits to rules in your community!
Some things to note:
We’ve increased the maximum number of rules per community from 10 to 15.
We’ve increased the character limit of rule short names from 50 to 100.
We’ve increased the character limit of rule report reasons from 50 to 100.
Rule numbering has been added to the old site to reflect the new site. We did this to reduce the confusion of double-numbering, and the work of having to add numbers to rules. This will also maintain consistency for rules throughout Reddit’s communities, making it easier for users to understand.
The new Rules page.
Adding a new rule.
Editing an existing rule.
Reordering rules.
Rules page on the old site, with numbering.
Try it out and let us know if you find any wonkiness! As always, thank you for your feedback and help.
Looks great! Glad to have reordering functionality too!
I'd recommend showing more of the details by default, though, as there is plenty of room anyway. Maybe make the thing into a table?
I was super excited about the reordering function as well! Seemed like a real pain in the ass to have to delete and re-add rules previously.
Good feedback — the idea is to prevent clutter in the sidebar and surface the top-level rule, but we'll take this into consideration!
Thanks! Oh, also kind of goes hand-in-hand with that general feature request about editing sidebar widgets, but it'd be nice to be able to edit right from the sidebar!
Ah, yes. It's on our radar! We want to finish getting all the tools over to new Reddit before we revisit some of the existing redesign tools like the widgets, but will definitely keep this in mind when the time comes.
Hey! Not sure where to post this, but I have a suggestion.
When banning a user, you are prompted to select a rule they violated. You are also prompted for a message to include in the ban PM. It would be nice if we could set up default messages for ban PMs, similar to how we can set up default messages/comments for post removal reasons.
does it really matter when mods can really ban at digression?
Glad to have reordering functionality too!
As a new Mod, that function is a life savior. Whenever I decide that a certain new rule should be on top, all I had to do is just keep copy pasting other rules in slots one below them to make room for the new rule.
I'm a big fan of your username!
1 more reply
This looks like it does improve some aspects of the rules page. I'm still disappointed to see that the rules and the report reasons are tied together. Having a larger number of rules lessens the issue there, but it still is less than ideal, as some rules which might be better displayed separately on the sidebar only need a single report reason; some report reasons can cover multiple rules... and some report reasons might not precisely correspond to a rule at all! I do hope that you will continue to work on improvement here and consider creating two independent workflows for these down the line.
I'd like to get a better understanding. Can you give me a few specific use cases that this would be helpful for?
I'd point to the AskHistorians sidebar. On "Old" AskHistorians, we have our rules distilled into 8 Rules:
Be Nice: No Racism, Bigotry, or Offensive Behavior.
Nothing Less Than 20 Years Old, and Don't Soapbox.
Ask Clear and Specific Questions, with Time and Place in Mind.
Write Original, In-Depth and Comprehensive Answers, Using Good Historical Practices.
Provide Primary and Secondary Sources If Asked. No Tertiary Sources Like Wikipedia.
Serious On-Topic Comments Only: No Jokes, Anecdotes, Clutter, or other Digressions.
Report Comments That Break Reddiquette or the Subreddit Rules.
Please Read and Understand the Rules Before Contributing.
We also have that as a Widget in "New" reddit and have dumped the actual "Rules Widget" down to the bottom, because we REALLY prefer that formulation to what we use for the "Rules Widget", which is the below 10 Rules:
Questions should be clear and specific as possible
Users shall behave with courtesy and politeness
Users should be able to provide sources on request
Answers must be in-depth and comprehensive
Answers should not be speculative or anecdotal
No soapboxing, or events and politics <20 years
Answers should not be only links or quotations
Answers must be original work, and cite all quotes
Comments should not consist solely of jokes
Racist or bigoted comments are not tolerated here
As far as we're concerned, the first one is objectively superior. It is formulated to reflect how we want the rules presented. The second one is just what we're stuck with because of how we want people to approach reporting comments. And really, now we're kind of faced with the additional dilemma that we can make the removal reasons even more specific, but that would then require us to list more rules on the sidebar.
In short, we would use all 15 removal reasons in a heartbeat, but we only want 8 rules displayed on the sidebar, and of those, only 6 of them are actual specific rule even, the final two just being broad reminders.
Pretty much from the day you debuted the rules widget we have been asking for a way to disable it because it doesn't do us an ounce of good and doesn't correspond to either how we want our rules presented and understood, or how we want the report workflow to display to people.
Edit: And to be clear. Having more characters does give us some leeway for improvement, but again, we'd rather have as concise a list of rules as possible, but a varied and specific selection of report reasons.
Additionally widget or nor, these are NOT our subreddit rules. As we title the widget, these are the Rules in Brief. Forcing us to have a page that is /r/AskHistorians/about/rules is kind of annoying in of itself since our complete rules would never fit in there. It takes up a whole wiki page /r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules, but that is only a semi-related issue. Even just being able to title the Rules Widget to be "Rules Summary" or something would be nice.
1 more reply
Side note, as I just went over to "New" when writing this post and I noticed that the "Real" Rules Widget doesn't even do line breaks correctly... Some rules are displaying like this:
Users shall behave with courtesy and p
oliteness
Answers should not be speculative or a
necdotal
Answers must be original work, and cit
e all quotes
And even when the break is in a more acceptable middle of the word, it doesn't hyphenate still of course so still looks awful:
Answers must be in-depth and compre
hensive
Is this similar functionality going to be deployed to the removal reasons page / module?
We are planning a greater overhaul of the removal reasons feature — I'm actually going to start writing up a spec for it very soon. I'm curious, what specific functionalities are you looking for?
Re-ordering for sure.
My rules page is:
Rule 0
Rule 1
Rule 2
Rule 3
My removal reasons page is:
Rule 3a
Rule 3b
Rule 0a
Rule 0b
Rule 1
Rule 2
We dont have a rule, but should
Rule 3c
This is the order they display in the drop down list when selecting a removal reason too.
Got it. Reordering for removal reasons seems pretty reasonable to me!
Now that I've got you reeled in with a reasonable demand...
A free pony for every mod
Here's a couple to get started: 🐎🐎🐎🐎🐎
If this keeps them quiet, we can invest more.
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