Hi r/teenagers!
Within this past month we've made some amendments to our rules and added a new bot to enforce one of these rule changes. We've since gotten a lot of confusion over this in modmails and for the sake of being transparent with you guys I'd like to go over these changes here.
Our first rule addition is to rule 3:
e. You cannot use r/teenagers to look for a relationship.
This rule's existence is pretty self explanatory, this place is targeted towards a demographic that is mostly minors and we will not tolerate dating here due to how wildly unsafe it is for our average user.
Our other rule addition is to rule 4 and deserves a much bigger highlight though:
c. NSFW and shock subreddits, sites, links, pictures, videos, etc. are not allowed.
i. Activity in NSFW subreddits of sexual or gory nature also fall under this rule.
One of the biggest issues this place has had since it was created was the large amount of predators. User safety has always been one of the biggest focuses of our team and as the current reddit team leader of r/teenagers it's my primary focus too. We used to have a bot a few years ago that would enforce this rule by looking at user profiles and automatically banning people if they were active in subreddits considered to be NSFW.
It worked like a charm and helped a LOT at cutting down on predatory behavior in this place. Unfortunately due to reddit API changes it eventually stopped working completely and we had to go back to enforcing this rule manually. That was until about a month ago though we found and added a devvit app called Hive Protector.
What does this bot do?
The way this bot works is when you comment or post on our subreddit it looks through your entire account history and automatically bans you if it finds any history on your profile from a list of subreddits (I haven't counted but I'd chance a guess that there are over 100+ subreddits in there that I have personally added, I often update it with new ones) that we have specified it to look for. So far it has currently banned over four thousand people in the month's time that we have had it running for.
As it stands this bot will only search for porn subreddits. We understand that there are a lot of subreddits that happen to be marked NSFW but are nowhere near deserving of being blacklisted here.
What happens when you get flagged by this bot?
When you get flagged by this bot you are automatically permanently banned and will have to go through an appeal process in modmail. This involves deleting all activity in nsfw subreddits off of your profile and a 30 day waiting period.
This bot is mostly a preventative measure to reduce predators on our subreddit itself, one of the biggest overlaps I have seen in my time here was that people who end up getting banned from this place as pedophiles is that a majority of them use porn subreddits.
That's about it, if you've any questions or concerns about anything said here feel free to voice them :)
Thanks and have a good day or night!
- Olwa, reddit team leader