Moderator Guidelines

Last revised November 11, 2022.

Create, Facilitate, and Maintain a Stable Community

Moderators are expected to uphold our Content Guidelines by setting community rules, norms, and expectations that encourage positive engagement. Your role as a moderator means that you not only abide by our terms and the Content Guidelines, but that you actively strive to promote a community that abides by them, as well. This means that you should never create, approve, enable or encourage rule-breaking Content or behavior.

Set Appropriate and Reasonable Expectations

Users who enter your community should know exactly what they’re getting into, and should not be surprised by what they encounter. It is critical to be transparent about what your community is and what your rules are in order to create stable and dynamic engagement. Moderators can ensure people have predictable experiences in their communities by doing the following:

• Providing a clear and concise description of the topic(s) discussed by your community.
• Properly labeling content and communities, particularly content that is graphic, sexual, or offensive.
• Creating rules that explicitly outline your expectations for members of your community. These rules will help your community understand what is or isn’t permissible within it.
• Explicitly marking your community as "unofficial" in the community description if the topic concerns a brand or company, but the community isn’t officially affiliated.

Respect Your Neighbors

While we allow meta discussions about us and communities, your community should not be used to direct, coordinate, or encourage interference in other communities and/or to target users for harassment. As a moderator, you cannot interfere with or disrupt communities, nor can you facilitate, encourage, coordinate, or enable members of your community to do this.
Interference includes:

• Mentioning other communities, and/or content or users in those communities, with the effect of inciting targeted harassment or abuse.
• Enabling or encouraging users to violate our Content Guidelines anywhere.
• Enabling or encouraging users in your community to post or repost content in other communities that is expressly against their rules.
• Showboating about being banned or actioned in other communities, with the intent to incite a negative reaction.

Be Active and Engaged

Whether your community is big or small, it is important for communities to be actively and consistently moderated. This will ensure that issues are being addressed. Being active and engaged means that:

• You have enough moderators to effectively and consistently manage your community. This involves regularly monitoring and addressing content and, if possible, actively engaging with your community via posts, comments, and voting.
• Camping or sitting on a community is not encouraged. If a community has been empty or unmoderated for a significant amount of time, we will consider banning or restricting the community. If a user requests a takeover of a community that falls under either category, we will consider granting that request.

Enforcement

We may consider the following enforcement actions:

• Issuing warnings
• Temporary or permanent suspension of accounts
• Removing moderators from a community
• Prohibiting a moderator from joining additional moderator teams or creating new communities
• Removal of privileges from, or adding restrictions to, accounts
• Adding restrictions to communities, such as adding NSFW tags or Quarantining
• Removal of content
• Banning of communities