16 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Improvements to subreddit rules
A quick refresher on why we didn't like subreddit rules the first time around:
As far as I can see, this update adds an extra field for the text in the report menu, and addresses none of the concerns we had with it when you first rolled it out, including the ones that were promised to be fixed.
This update is a stark contrast to the communication we had about the modmail beta and is honestly pretty disappointing. I know you guys worked hard on it, and I'm sorry to be negative about it. I really hope you stop future plans to expand the use of this rule system and talk over with the moderators and users about what we actually need. If you continue to push forward in the direction you're going, you're going to make things harder for us, not easier.
Thanks for your attention and your continued work to try to improve reddit, even if we don't always agree which direction that work should go. :)
Comment by powerlanguage at 15/02/2017 at 20:36 UTC
20 upvotes, 5 direct replies
Hey u/jakkarth. Thanks for the feedback, as always.
There's no formatting like you can do on a wiki page.
Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean markdown support? Markdown is supported in the description field but not the `short name` or `violation reason` field. This is deliberately done to keep these fields short and concise.
You can't link to specific ones when discussing things with users like you can with anchors on a wiki page.
This is a good point. Not sure why this got dropped previously. I'll look into it.
The title and description fields are arbitrarily short to the point of absurdity. This was supposed to be fixed (according to admin comments at the time) but never was.
The goal of `/about/rules` is to have a version of the rules that people *will actually* read and that we can use throughout the site. I am aware that a lot of subreddits have very specific requirements, in which case I encourage you to treat these rules as a summary and link them to a wiki that has the detailed rules fleshed out.
The number of rules (10) is also arbitrary and too short. Subs with 11 rules or more are out of luck. Again, promised to be fixed, again never was.
I see this as a trade off between defining rules that users will actually read vs all the rules that mods *wish* users will read. This may mean that some subreddits have to group some of their rules together in these definitions. As I mentioned above, if required I encourage you to link out to a wiki that has the full details.
Because of their use in the report menu, all rules have to be phrased in the negative, rather than explaining the positive desired behavior of participants in the community.
This is specifically **why** we added the violation field that this post highlights.
No way to review and track changes over time like wiki history diffs.
Can you elaborate why this is important/what your use case is here?
I really hope you stop future plans to expand the use of this rule system and talk over with the moderators and users about what we actually need. If you continue to push forward in the direction you're going, you're going to make things harder for us, not easier.
The motivation here is to get subreddit rules to a place where we can display them within context (e.g. as a user is about to make a post or comment) across platforms.