Hello /v/programming community!

I think that it's now time to have a look back. Lot has happened in the last 9 days. What has happened? Things have happened!

1. You actually now have moderators! Wooo!

I don't think I have to really recount what happened first, as the first sticky turned out to be quite popular. Earlier this week, /u/discopig also turned up. After some chatting we came to the conclusion that we have similar goals for /v/programming in mind, so that's awesome.

2. Time for a Flairy-tale!

After another popular thread I decided to investigate again in what actually works on voat, and what's actually a dummy (cough Mod Mail). After some quick tinkering we had working flairs, which have now replaced the deletion policy. The thread. Right now, voat only allows us to have ten different flairs at all times. Which these are is outlined in the linked thread.

Please note that right now you can't only show or hide certain threads by their flairs. We would like this feature as much as you do. Hacks around these would be appreciated (Could we abuse the search?). Only idea we had as of yet were abusing the night mode to hide OT flaired submissions. I don't like that idea, as I imagine users of that feature would be out to kill me.

3. Deletion log

I promised that I'd give out a deletion log in a feedback thread. So here it is. For a reasoning, please check the threads and look for a comment by me.

• https://voat.co/v/programming/comments/300565
• https://voat.co/v/programming/comments/317417
• https://voat.co/v/programming/comments/315329
• https://voat.co/v/programming/comments/312176

That's it.

4. Current situation

I'm still thinking of ways to be made the level 1 Moderator of this sub. This means that I would have the permission to remove inactive mods and invite new ones. Oh, and I could wreak other kinds of havoc too. I'll save that for April Fools or something though ;)

That's pretty much the most pressing problem at hand.

I also want to use the moment to emphasize again that the rules only apply to submissions. We decided to rename the section to Submission rules. Please have a look at them in the sidebar. We tried to make them as lax as possible, with the exclusion of local-only content (That's rule 4!) to make sure we cater to a global audience.

Please understand that this rule affects the submission itself only. You're free to link to e.g. a local gathering of sorts (e.g. DEFCON or similar), as long the submission link itself is accessible globally. Everything else must be accessible for free for everyone. No paywalls, no surveywalls, just plain content.

We think that this is a useful restriction. I think we all heard about something cool, just to be blocked by some stupid popup. We don't need to encourage publishers to have these, instead we're thus discouraging the use by banning these submissions. The content behind these walls are of course not banned (As long it follows the rules). So be creative and work-a-round these ;)

5. Future direction

We envision /v/programming to be a open-minded and welcoming community sharing and discussing developments of programming related things of whatever kind. Unlike our Reddit neighbor sub, we will not disable text submissions. Being welcoming and open-minded includes having common sense. We thus don't have a CoC or other political affiliations. If someone steps on your toes, discuss it with that person.

With voat currently being under attack (CloudFlare says so at least), we're currently pretty much bound to do everything manually. I discussed some ideas with /u/discopig on having different kinds of tools at our disposal through the use of bots.

First idea was having a bot which flairs submissions with [Community Deleted], which are then hidden through CSS by default, if a submission goes under a certain threshold. Maybe -5 could work (I just made that number up). This may work as not everyone is capable of downvoting. Or it may not work and the code of the bot would be quickly moved into /dev/null.

Second idea was to have pretty much IRC-style commands for the bot. This could be a "!report" to report a submission (Which doesn't work as of yet on voat). Or commands to flair a submission. Or maybe that's the worst idea ever.

The End

Be free to comment on anything. No, actually, we encourage you to do so. In general, but in this case, especially in this thread ;)

Note: Tomorrow, I'll be mostly away. If anything turns up it'll have to wait a few hours more than usual. This thread will be a sticky until Monday, whenever I feel like clicking "toggle sticky" on that day.