February 2017 Meta Thread - Politics

February 2017 Meta Thread
Trump immediately tweeted about an 'Islamic terrorist' that killed 0 - but nothing about a white man who killed 6
Wanted: One Republican With Integrity, to Defeat Betsy DeVos
Why Didn't the White House Release a Readout of the Call Between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin?
Former Norway PM held at Washington airport over 2014 visit to Iran
Nancy Pelosi Repeatedly Calls Steve Bannon a "White Supremacist"
Sharia law may be coming to America. But it’s Christians who are bringing it.
This Senator Is Hell-Bent on Getting Out the Truth About Trump and Russia
Senate votes to repeal transparency rule for oil companies.
Vancouver artist's anti-Trump cartoon takes off on social media
Here's How Much Betsy DeVos And Her Family Paid To Back GOP Senators Who Will Support Her
An anti-Trump movement is calling for the boycott of these 33 retailers
New CBS poll has Trump at 40% approval, 48% disapproval
Trump still spent campaign money on personal properties post-election
Trump Announces Plan to Let Wall Street Scam America Again
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago getaway could cost taxpayers more than $3 million
Kellyanne Conway made up a fake terrorist attack to justify Trump’s “Muslim ban”
Trump to Dismantle Dodd-Frank Financial Regulations on Friday: WSJ
Nordstrom Drops Ivanka Trump Brand From Its Stores
Twitter ruthlessly mocks Kellyanne Conway's 'Bowling Green Massacre' that never was
Kellyanne Conway Appears to Invent Fake Bowling Green Massacre
Trump just tweeted about 'Islamic terror' attack that killed 0. Still nothing about white man who shot 6 in a mosque
Trump: We’re Gutting Dodd-Frank Because My Friends Can’t Get Loans
The Trump administration is showing white nationalists it won’t fight them at all
German Trust in the US falls to the level of Russia
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker advising White House on how to drastically weaken collective bargaining for federal union members

February 2017 Meta Thread

Posted: 03 Feb 2017 06:55 AM PST

Hello, /r/politics community! Welcome to our monthly meta thread. The purpose of this thread is to discuss the overall state of the subreddit, including recent rule revisions, recent and upcoming changes, and suggestions you have for improving the sub. The December 2016 metathread can be found here.

Updates

YouTube Whitelist: We implemented a YouTube Whitelist about 3 weeks ago and are currently in the beginning stages of a general submission whitelist (more below). This has been very well received and we are constantly adding new channels requested that are worthy of inclusion.
Self Post Saturday: Last month we heard a lot about bringing back Self Post Saturday and we as the mods are in agreement that we do not have enough mods to handle it currently. That, along with many, many other reasons, is one of the big reasons for our recent moderator recruitment effort.
State User Flairs: Based on popular feedback from our last meta thread we brought back state flairs over a month ago. This is a great example of these meta threads leading to a quick change from something we as the moderators may have overlooked. Please feel free to leave suggestions like that below.
Opinion articles: After discussion we decided that removing opinion articles opens up a lot of bad doors. It puts us as moderators in too strong a position of being "content editors". It also adds significantly more work, which as discussed above, we are currently ill-equipped to handle. It also leaves too much grey area for factual articles that contain opinion. Politics is very much an opinion based topic and as such we do not feel it is right to remove them on that merit.
Ban Policy: We revised our permanent ban policy as it had the unintended consequence of catching good contributors in the cracks. We have since changed it so that we now have a 2 "warning-ban" policy of 7 and 21 days before a permanent ban. This should give people plenty of time to fix their civility issues before waving goodbye. We have also enacted a new permanent ban policy for new accounts. New account (which are often complained about) will now be treated differently after hearing your guy's requests.

New Stuff in the Works

Domain Whitelist: This will be a very extensive submission whitelist that will include articles from all partisan affiliations. The goal of this is to speed up our enforcement of title/date with bots as well as prevent Personal Blogs in a more consistent manner. This is still in very early stages and won't be rolled out for at least a 3-4 more weeks. The submission process to add a site to this will be very similar to how the YouTube whitelist works now.
Opinion Link Flair: This whitelist will also allow us to begin the process on considering link flairs to tag "opinion" articles. This seemed like a good middle step towards identifying these type of articles without bluntly removing them, but a backroom discussion is still required to determine if there may be any unintended consequences or issues. The reason we would have to wait until the domain whitelist is that we would want to do the majority of this work with a bot to prevent a new added workload. The bot can be familiar with the domains on the whitelist and what information to parse on the site to determine (url slug, header tag, etc) if that submission is an opinion article or letter to the editor.
Moderator Recruitment: As stated prior and seen across Reddit we are recruiting a large group of new moderators. We are not happy in our current place with handling reports and mod mail. We want to fix this. If you are interested please do not hesitate to apply.
Rules Page Rewrite: We have begun the process of rewriting our rules to be more concise. Right now if you check out our rules page you will see that it is, extensive. We want to fix that so that you as subscribers and more quickly read it. This will also allow rapid access for us as moderators to use a specific numbered rule when providing the example of "why was I banned?". This is probably about 2 weeks away from roll-out so stay tuned for this as well.

Feel free to have an open and frank discussion with us below. We want your feedback on not only these issues, but other suggestions or concerns that you may have. Many past suggestions have been adopted and are in place to this day. Thanks for being here with us today, and we're looking forward to your feedback and suggestions. Happy Friday!

submitted by /u/english06
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Trump immediately tweeted about an 'Islamic terrorist' that killed 0 - but nothing about a white man who killed 6

Posted: 03 Feb 2017 05:27 AM PST