- Things that belong in specific mega-threads posted each week
- Things that belong somewhere else
- Rules
- Moderation
Things that belong in specific mega-threads posted each week
- All events and posts about events are to be posted to the weekly "Stuff to do in Austin" thread.
- Posts about pets that need adoption or otherwise need help or pets in general belong in the weekly "Pet Adoption / Pet Help Post" thread.
- Posts about Real Estate / Renting / Where to Live belong in the weekly thread by that name
- Stupid questions go in the "Weekly Stupid Question Sunday" thread. (You can pretty much ask whatever you want here.)
Things that belong somewhere else
- /r/Austin is also not Craigslist - please post any sales or services posts in /r/AustinClassifieds
- This includes:
- promo/referral codes
- tickets/items for sale or services for hire
- Questions about food, drinks, bars or restaurants that have ___, good date night spots et cetera all belong in /r/Austinfood
- Personals or missed connections - those belong in r/atx4atx or the CL missed connections section.
- Reviews or ads for businesses
- Surveys, market research, polls, petitions etc.
- Anything that is not specific to Austin (or at least central Texas) -- if it's not specific to Austin, it belongs somewhere else. r/Texas is often a good choice for state-wide issues.
Rules
/r/Austin follows a loose set of guidelines located at http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette.
Single character, single word or other noise comments may be removed automatically.
Posting and requesting personal information is against the rules. Soliciting or asking for personal information will likely result in an immediate temporary ban. Editing or reposting after the fact will usually not change this.
- For this rule, we follow - http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/d7m1c/dear_internet_vigilantes_and_lynch_mobs/ - This includes (but is not limited to) Personal phone numbers, Addresses, Instagram and/or personal Facebook/Twitter/Tik tok/Social Media pages. We may or may not decide what other information is personally identifiable.
- Posting cross posts to videos from subreddits, such as /r/PublicFreakout will all but ensure that personal information or details are released. For that reason, we rarely allow those videos.
Posts linking to articles behind a paywall will be removed - please post with non paywalled sources.
While the reddiquette doesn't directly address it, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and the like are not tolerated in /r/Austin.
Do not be intentionally rude or insulting to your fellow redditors.
(Insulting public figures is permitted, as long as it doesn't break any other rules.)Do not wish harm upon anybody. ("He should be arrested for his crimes" = ok. "Somebody should put him out of his misery" = not ok.)
Do not troll, intentionally post misinformation or otherwise argue in bad faith.
Disparagement of any individual's disabilities is not permitted.
Gofundme, Indiegogo or other funding links are not allowed except under very limited circumstances - message the mods if you wish to post one.
Pictures of people, accusing them of actions, will be removed without prior mod approval.
Each topic should have at most one active post about it at a time. Before you make a new post, make sure there's not a recent (within two weeks or so) post about the same topic before posting, and if there is one and you have more to add, add it to the existing post rather than making a new one.
- This also applies to new developments or articles in a news or political story -- add them as comments to the original post rather than adding them as new posts of their own.
If you have information to share or request about a crime, please:
PM /r/austin the police case number or Detective to verify the post
Make a selfpost about the issue - do not include the case number as this can be linked to personal information.
In all of these cases, any personal information, clues, hints, etc, posted in the thread will be removed.
Please familiarize yourself with the rules before participating in /r/Austin. That's it!
If you break the guidelines, a moderator may remove your submission and generally reply with a comment telling you which guideline you broke. You might be banned for repeat or egregious violations. Moderators may use their best judgement to allow or not allow exceptions.
Moderation
There's a huge description of moderator duties at http://www.reddit.com/wiki/moderation. In /r/Austin, most of the moderator work is
- Flair Message the mods for any sort of flair ideas/requests you may have! If your account is an official social/publicists for your organization, please let us know so we can add it to your account. If you have flair and want to remove it, write "clear my flair" in any thread and the robot will remove your flair. If you want to temporarily disable your flair, uncheck the option in the sidebar.
- Scheduling automatic posts: Every Monday morning, a scheduled "Stuff to do in Austin" is posted. The moderators make changes to that post at users' requests. Same goes for Travel/Advice Thursday and Stupid Question Sunday.
- Remove posts that violate the guidelines: If a submission breaks the guidelines, moderators remove it. We may remove posts that are more suited for a weekly scheduled post. That said, we will not do this for posts that contribute to a greater discussion.
- Manage the layout of /r/Austin: The look of /r/Austin is customizable. They can also change the content of the sidebar.
When a trolling or offensive account is brought to our attention, we review several factors, including their submission/comment karma, contributions to /r/austin and the content they are posting. We rarely believe a ban or comment removal is the best approach and tend to reserve them for:
- Spammers
- Overtly racist, sexist or other extreme prejudices
- Posting or requesting personal information - even if you yourself are posting it.
- Users who have garnered large amounts of negative karma from their posts on /r/austin
- Incivliity on political threads where discussion can quickly become pointless
Please remember that /r/austin is not a place where we, the mods, try to decide who gets what voice but rather keep it "all things Austin" - the key to deciding what is good and bad lies in that little up/down arrow to your left.
Browser users can also setup Reddit Enhancement Suite - https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ - to allow labeling, blocking and many more features. We do ask that you save the ignore feature for only the most caustic of users - multiple viewpoints are a good thing.
Political posts and /r/Austin
While we encourage discussion on all issues, we have a special set of policies related to politics. As a result, most posts that would be a fit for /r/Texas (which you should subscribe to if you subscribe to /r/austin) or r/TexasPolitics will be removed, with the exceptions being posts that cover Austin specifically as well.
- You should have some verifiable history on /r/Austin.
- Political posts have to be directly relevant and specific to Austin in the sense that these posts must relate to having a direct impact on Austin and not on the state or country as a whole.
- Articles posted must not editorialize the headlines. This means that if your headline does not match word-for-word, we will likely remove your post.
- Articles about political or news issues should be timely -- do not post old articles.
- Pictures or any form of propaganda-like material just to cause a troll reaction or get upvotes based on bashing the other person will be removed. Repeated reposting will result in temp then permanent bans. This includes political memes.
- Submissions with "I think that we should do so and so" about people's personal political beliefs, or politically based websites that ask people to do specific things will be removed..
- Submissions that are complaining about specific breeds of dogs will be removed.
Homelessness posts and /r/Austin
Homelessness posts are a sensitive topic and can become a very negative. We've added some special rules to managing those posts.
- Any calls for violence, harm or otherwise target those who are homeless will result in removal and a likely a permanent ban.
- Posts advocating for a specific platform/position without discussion will have their post removed - this is not an advertising platform for your beliefs.
- Posts with open-ended questions may be removed if the moderators do not feel like it contributes to a discussion - An example would be a post with only "What can we do about homeless people?" and nothing else
Posts about Immigration Enforcement Actions and r/Austin
Our policy regarding these can be found here, but the highlights are:
- Things need to be related and specific to Austin. What's happening at a national level applies to Austin but is not specific and so doesn't belong in /r/Austin
- Live "reporting" of enforcement actions need to have reasonable evidence -- pictures or video, or links to news articles on reputable sources.
- A report on a "crowd sourced" website that shows immigration actions is usually not sufficient evidence, not by itself.
Missing persons
- All posts regarding a missing person must be verifiable, and we follow the same requirements that r/MissingPersons follows.
Petitions
- All petitions will be removed. This includes anything where you are asking people to sign/go to something for a cause. This is not the place to advertise your cause.
Please message the mod team if you feel we need to revise these rules.
AI generated content
Low effort ChatGPT or other AI generated content will likely be removed. It does nothing to actually invest effort in engaging with a community. If you use AI to generate most of your post, you should disclose that and ask mods for review.
If it's worth writing, it's worth putting in your own words.
AutoModerator
AutoModerator is a bot that helps with moderator duties. In /r/Austin, we use it to
- report racial slurs and personal attacks to the moderators.
- add 'flair' to submissions Flair can help people see at a glance the topic of a submission. Also, RES users can filter out posts based on that flair if they don't want to see any "Lost pet" or "FAQ" posts. We think this is a good compromise between relegating frequent (but disliked) posts to a subbreddit (in this case, /r/AustinPetLostAndFound and /r/AskAustin), and not having a quick way for people to avoid popular posts they don't want to see.
- schedule automatic posts Every Monday night we have a "Stuff to do in Austin" post. Every Thursday, we have an Advice/Travel Thursday post. Every Sunday, we have a Stupid Question Sunday.
- apply additional scrutiny to known trolls Everyone is welcome to post in /r/Austin. If someone trolls a lot, then their posts and comments will be set aside until a moderator can approve that post/comment. This is a compromise between allowing everyone to have a voice, and keeping trolling to a minimum.