u/khazdan37

Hello everyone, I wanted to address the recent post revolving around one of our Moderators, Foxboltco. I've included the OP redacted in the comments. There's a few different aspects to this situation so I'll break it down in chunks.

First, the issue brought up was that u/Foxboltco also has a church consulting business and has been creating some posts that link to youtube videos that he created that tied into his posts. I saw no issue with these posts as they were applicable to the subreddit, and they weren't focused on promoting his business. I don't remember having anyone else posting something comparable to these, so honestly I don't have any examples to show that this treatment would be equal to what we would apply to another user. If you feel this is a conflict of interest, feel free to express that in the comments. Also if I'm remembering wrong and we have prevented someone from posting a similar post, express that in the comments.

Second bit, and the part that made me take the post down quickly while I was away, was the doxing. This bit has a lot of aspects, and is partly my fault. Foxbolt started out moderating our community with a different username that contained his real name, several months ago he switched to a new account and requested his moderation permissions switched over. I had issues removing his old account on my phone, and then kept forgetting to do so after. The post very clearly drew the connection between his name and his new account, and that is absolutely unacceptable and will result in a ban, I don't care how easy it is to find the information. I've already apologized to Foxbolt for my part in this and he has been incredibly gracious both to me and the offending user regarding this. It was entirely my call to remove the original post and ban the user.

Thirdly, my reasoning for banning the user. Given that the original post was about transparency, it felt wrong for me not to address this. The user was banned in part for including personally identifiable information in the post, but also for the structure of that post and almost all of their other contributions to this subreddit. The user in question was created a short while ago along with their own subreddit that seemed to arise out of us cracking down on promotion, AI usage, etc. We denied their request to promote that subreddit as it seemed to largely go against the protections we were trying to put in place, it read as highly AI generated, and was a brand new account. Since then almost every contribution they've made to this sub has been targeted at promoting their own sub. You can see below that even in this recent post they were trying to direct people to a more complete post on their own subreddit. It's hard for me to read this as anything other than trying to create drama in order to promote their own content. This would be a completely different situation if they hadn't included any personal information, or tried to use the situation to promote their own subreddit.

Finally, I am genuinely interested in peoples opinions regarding the actual content of the complaint. Do people see an issue with the content u/foxboltco has been posting, both in general or because he is a moderator? If there seems to be a consensus one way or the other he has no problem with not posting that content going forward, he's always been very up front with us regarding those posts and would not have posted them had we not been okay with it.

As stated, the OP in question was redacted and commented below, and Foxboltco originally responded to the situation HERE

Hey everyone, we are aware of some allegations/suspicions against one of our moderators. We will address this in the next day or so. Right now I’m on an anniversary trip with my wife, hence the short response.

Hello everyone, we have some rules updates happening today.

We're going to be restricting promotional posts to a recurring Show & Tell post. We'll start that out as monthly and go from there. Outside of that we will no longer allow posts containing any promotion. Comments are still allowed as long as the product you're promoting is applicable to the OP, and you are transparent and disclose your association with the product.

We are also adding a rule against AI generated posts and comments. If you are using AI for translation or grammar help, that's absolutely fine but you must disclose that at the end of the post or comment.

We're hoping this will help keep the community from being cluttered with promotion or AI spam, while still giving a space for people to share something they've made. We realize that AI is a contentious topic, but I do want to be clear that targeting someone based on their disclosure of AI use will not be tolerated.

As per usual, your help keeping our community clean is appreciated, continue to report when you see someone breaking the rules.

Hey everyone, just wanted to give some transparency on something we found.

We get a decent number of posts where the OP shares information about a product they have affiliation with in a deceptive way, in the hopes that no one will notice they're trying to push you to their product.

These are often presented as comparisons between products that the OP themselves are looking for guidance on, but they're leaning towards offering B, which is the one that they won't tell you they work for.

After dealing with another one of these today, I realized that as a church worker I would want to know if a product I'm looking at engages is deceptive marketing practices. If you haven't guessed by the title of this post, today we're talking about Donorbox.

I can't remember if this is the 2nd or 3rd account that I've dealt with from them doing this exact same practice. So if you ever have someone recommending their product to you, keep in mind that they might work for them.

Anyone else have issues with their YouTube stream this Sunday, particularly random skipping?
I’m being told by my stream provider there were mass issues with YouTube this weekend but I’m curious if anyone else experienced it.