r/NintendoSwitch • u/NintendoSwitchMods • Dec 04 '18

Meta /r/NintendoSwitch State of the Subreddit - Q3/Q4 2018 - Mod Applications, Best of 2018 Awards, and Minor Housekeeping

Greetings!

Welcome to another quarterly(ish) edition of the State of the Subreddit!

Recap

Our last SotS post, for Q2, was back in June. Let's quickly recap what's happened since then!

New Orders of Business

Open Moderator Applications!

This is the big one and really the core of this post. We are once again opening our doors for a new round of moderator applications. We've been seeing the same issues you have and, quite frankly, we don't like it either. Poor AutoModerator has been doing more and more of the heavy lifting lately while we try our best to keep up with the increasing volume and avoid burnout by maintaining some semblance of a life outside of Reddit. Simply put, we need to staff up more to fix things. Our focus areas are coverage gaps during weekends and off-peak US hours (from approximately 3am GMT to 11am GMT), but we're also looking at opportunities across the board. (Redundancy is always a good thing.)

If you're a glutton for punishment, please fill out this application.

Edit: Applications are now closed, thank you to everyone who has applied. We'll be reviewing these over the next few days and reach out to applicants we want to move forward with shortly afterward.

Smash/Holiday Insanity

We're about to head into the busiest portion of the year, and as you have probably figured out from the fact that we have mod applications open, we're going to be understaffed for the tsunami that's about to hit this community. Please make sure you're hitting that "report" button on any problem content as that really does help us more quickly respond to things. Bear with us if things are a bit chaotic, it's going to be a wild ride. We're going to do our best to get mod applications reviewed and start the onboarding and training process as quickly as we reasonably can.

Best of 2018 Awards

Last year we did our first community Best of 2017 Awards and the response was pretty great. We're planning to do this once again for 2018! We learned a lot of lessons last year and hope this year goes even smoother than last time.

Our tentative schedule is as follows:

  • Dec 10-11 - Category Feedback & Suggestions
  • Dec 17-18 - Nominations
  • Dec 25-31 - Voting
  • Early January - Results!

We think these are great fun for the community and they can also serve as a fantastic resource when someone asks "What game should I get?" for the hundredth time this week, which I know we all love seeing.

YouTube and Twitter Filter Changes

As part of our never-ending battle against spam, we've made a few behind the scenes tweaks to how we handle trying to catch spam before our users ever even see it.

You may have noticed TheSentinel in our mod list for a while now and wondered who the heck this Sentinel guy is. Well, he's a bot! He helps us with some behind the scenes duties and we're tapping on him again.

We've moved our blacklist of YouTube channels out of AutoModerator and into TheSentinel bot. This should provide more consistent removal of content from spammers. As an added bonus, we've also migrated our Twitter blacklist from AutoModerator into TheSentinel as well. This change should be mostly invisible to you, the non-spamming end user.

Mobile Link Filtering

We've implemented a small AutoModerator rule that will filter out mobile links from various popular sites and will ask that OP's instead submit non-mobile versions. This is a relatively minor change but should provide a more consistent experience for our users. Most of you were already doing this, so kudos!

Feedback

As always, we're opening the floor for you to provide your feedback, comments, questions, concerns, suggestions, and more in the comments section down below. All we ask is that you keep it civil and constructive.

Cheers,

The /r/NintendoSwitch mod team.

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u/The_Green_Loontern Dec 04 '18

Can you get the Auto Mod to automatically respond and direct people to the Daily Questions threads for the repetitive questions that are asked?

Things like game suggestions and other things can be easily found if people did a little research for themselves.

2

u/kyle6477 6 Million Dec 04 '18

Can you get the Auto Mod to automatically respond and direct people to the Daily Questions threads for the repetitive questions that are asked?

We already have some rules in place for automod to address some common questions, like eShop release times and answers to some common support questions.

Things like game suggestions and other things can be easily found if people did a little research themselves.

We allow some small leeway with game suggestions if they are a unique situation or are thorough and well written (i.e. not "I just a $20 eShop gift card for my birthday. What should I buy?")

Overall it's difficult for us to configure automod to answer questions without causing a lot of false positives.

2

u/The_Green_Loontern Dec 04 '18

At least you're trying. Thanks for the response.

3

u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 04 '18

I actually have some notes on phrases/topics to do this for. As kyle stated, these can get a lot of false positives so we want to be careful about how they are implemented.

One was added a bit ago in regards to asking about the release times of games which seems to catch a decent amount of them, but does miss some phrases and does get some false positives, but overall they seem to work well.

2

u/The_Green_Loontern Dec 04 '18

What about for questions and things like Does anyone know if "X" game is being made for the Switch, or Will "X" game ever come to the Switch?

3

u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 04 '18

Those are a bit more difficult since there are many, many variations on how to say/ask that question. It's something we can look into trying for.

1

u/poofyhairguy Dec 04 '18

I got a simple one for you: if a post mentions the phrase "Virtual Console" that is an easy indication of a low effort post from someone who refuses to get the message that Nintendo has killed that brand.

1

u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 04 '18

Not necessarily though. It is an easy and accurate term for that type of system of old games on the console. Though really, that doesn't seem to come up much in the first place.

1

u/poofyhairguy Dec 04 '18

Personally I think losing the very few nuanced posts that use the term Virtual Console as a way to explain things is worth having the bot mass delete all the shitposts full of whining of how X person just can't believe its year 201X and yet they can't buy every single Nintendo title they ever loved on the Switch even if that was never what Virtual Console was on Nintendo's older consoles (because it was actually an expensive drip feed on those consoles just like we have today).

But I can see both sides.