Dota2 subreddit has it so you can post a hero icon: https://imgur.com/a/GWqYWXb
Can we do this in the wow subreddit?

I am looking to share WoW videos soon, just a bunch of clips I collected and thought were amusing over the years.

If there's anything against posting such things on r/wow then I must have missed it. Please let me know if there is. I know platforms often differ in this respect.

What has me waiting though is Rule 4 in particular, because in my videos there are countless players and guilds.

4.Call Outs

Don't rile up the community against a person, guild, or organization. Blank out all player and guild names to protect their identities.

So are you really expected to block out all names and guilds that appear in your images/videos? I remember posting videos on the official WoW forums before and didn't need to block anything out, though it could have all just gone under the radar.

It seems the majority of posts these days are screenshots of people's chat logs highlighting interactions with other players.

There are many thousands of people playing WoW having interactions every day. None of these interactions are novel or interesting yet /r/wow constantly upvotes these types of posts that add nothing of value but fuel for the drama cravers.

They seem to more often than not highlight toxic players in the community. There are thousands of interactions where players are NOT toxic that do not get posted to reddit. Why do we keep elevating examples of toxic players? People need to realize that interacting with one toxic player out of thousands of non-toxic players does not immediately warrant a post to /r/wow. Just ignore and move on.

The rest of these types of posts are very low effort "jokes" or the like. Also, posting private conversations, especially when names are not blurred out, has huge violation of privacy vibes even if the player(s) involved are toxic. Feels creepy nonetheless.

I'd like to see the mods limit the frequency of these types of chat log screenshot posts as they do not add value or meaningful content to /r/wow.

Hello lovely Redditors, I'm Mage and I'm one of the two co-lead mods over on r/WoW.

We have just announced changes to our rules on the sub, for a TL;DR version of which rules are changing and how this will affect you, head over to the post on r/WoW.

For a more in-depth version of what we changed and why, keep on reading.

##What's changed?

#####FAQ / New Player Questions We will no longer be removing posts for asking questions that are covered in our FAQ.

#####Ableism We will be banning users for using ableist phrases, even those that are common in discussions surrounding WoW.

Many users will be unaware of the harm these terms cause, and so we hope that with this change to our rules we can tackle this head-on. Examples of disallowed phrases include, but are not limited to: 'huntard', 'mong', 'wheelchair class', or variations of these.

Users will be given a temporary ban upon the first offence, and then a permanent ban if these phrases are used again.

Please note that ableist phrases that are not commonly used in World of Warcraft will result in an immediate permanent ban as per our existing hate-speech policy.

#####Achievement / Loot Posts We are trialling for one month a removal of our 'No achievements/loots posts' rule.

#####Tattoo Sourcing Tattoo posts will now require an artist to be credited in the title, to be in-line with our other art-sourcing rules.

#####Art Credit / Commissions / Product advertising When a user makes an art post, there will now be an automod sticked response that invites the user to provide further details on how the artist (OC or otherwise) can be found across social media platforms. This will include links to their Patreon or Etsy if applicable.

Artists and creators will also be allowed to respond to direct questions on where commenters can purchase goods or commissions. This does not allow posters to give unsolicited advertisements to any commenter.

Please note that mass-produced merchandise (fan-made included) is still disallowed on our subreddit, and so this opportunity to link to points of sale will be solely for small creators and shop owners such as users that crochet the occasional murloc or allow others to commission character portraits.

#####AI After much discussion, we have made the decision to not allow AI images on our subreddit.

#####Transmog This is not a new rule but one that many users are unaware of - transmog posts that contain the list of items in the image are also required to write a top-level comment containing the item list for accessibility reasons.

#####Subreddit Values We have provided a section on our rules page detailing our Subreddit Values, to give a clarity on the decisions we make and why we make them.

##Why?

Over the years, the moderation team at r/WoW has changed as mods come and go. The team we have now is almost entirely different to the group of moderators running this sub 3-4 years ago. With new people bring new ideas, and along with my co-lead moderator, u/Eveanyn, we decided that some of the rules we were enforcing did not fit with our personal values.

Our aims for the subreddit (as outlined in our values section) are:

• To foster a welcoming, inclusive, and friendly environment for old and new players alike
• To encourage and facilitate a positive community atmosphere
• To create an open and honest discussion forum for users to share their thoughts on World of Warcraft

We then used these aims to evaluate whether our current rules and policies were in-line with what we hoped to achieve, and found that some were lacking.

Below I will give the reasoning for the changes we made:

#####FAQ / New Player Questions

Picture this: You download WoW for the first time, are interested in being a part of the community, have a question about the game and so you head over to the subreddit. After asking your question and waiting for a friendly response, you get a notification saying that your post has been removed because it's been asked before, and instead you should read the FAQ.

We weren't happy with this being the experience of new players trying to join our community, and so we had a little experiment to see what would happen if we just didn't remove the posts.

We found that friendly Redditors browsing /new answered the questions helpfully, and the posts never made it to the front page as they weren't commented on or upvoted after the question was answered.

We therefore decided that we will no longer be removing these posts.

To further benefit our new players, we now have two members of the moderation team who keep our FAQ and guides up-to-date, and we are considering ways in which we could reward those helpful Redditors who hang around in /new to answer questions.

#####Ableism

I foresee this change possibly being unpopular, but we want to make this subreddit a welcoming place for all players of World of Warcraft, and if we continue to allow ableist phrases then this will never be a welcoming space for members of the disabled community.

Why are these phrases in particular ableist?

Huntard - contraction of hunter + retard - an ableist slur

Mong - short for mongoloid - both racist and ableist, double whammy

Wheelchair Class - there are other ways of saying paladins are slow without having to make reference to real people with real mobility issues

As mentioned above, these phrases will not currently result in an instant permanent ban, but will lead to a permanent ban if they continue to be used after the user has been warned.

#####Achievement / Loot Posts

Similar to the FAQ rules being removed, our reasoning here is that we do not want someone's experience of getting an item they wanted / a cool mount they were farming to be tarnished by their achievement being removed from the subreddit.

We do not see these posts making their way out of /new unless they are impressive achievements.

Our previous rules were so strict that we actually had an instance of a post being removed on the subreddit that was later featured on Icy Veins for being an impressive achievement. We want to avoid this happening again!

#####Tattoo Sourcing

Our previous rules did not require tattoos to be sourced as naming an artist or shop could give away information about the user's location.

This rule had been in place for a while, and nowadays many users will share some details about their location whether meaning to or not. Being part of the /r/NewcastleUponTyne subreddit, or posting a photo to r/Pics of the view on your evening walk gives just as much information about where you live as naming a local tattoo artist does.

If you are uncomfortable with sharing the name of the artist who did your tattoo for privacy reasons, we would recommend not posting the image at all as google reverse search could easily lead to the image posted by the artist to their instagram. Just a tip.

#####Art Credit / Commissions / Product Advertising

With this rule we noticed a double standard in the way we allow different creators to showcase their work. A YouTuber or Streamer who makes their money through their video content was allowed to link to their channel, but an artist who makes their money through selling handmade hearthstone charms on Etsy was not.

We wanted to implement a rule that allowed equal opportunity for reaching a wider audience without turning the subreddit into an advertising space.

#####AI

This has been a big discussion for us as moderators, and for moderation teams across Reddit. Our decision to disallow AI images was made for a few reasons:

• We felt first and foremost that the vast majority of AI images submitted to the sub were low-effort and spammy
• We had issues with users claiming to be the artist of the image, and attempting to mislead other users into thinking the images were not AI generated
• We have strict art-sourcing rules and we felt that some of the methods of creating AI go against those values we hold

Our decision is in-line with the rules of other similar subreddits such as /r/leagueoflegends.

#####Transmog

Some users use translation software or text-to-speech software to access our subreddit. If the list is only in image format, these users are not able to access your post.

##So, what now?

This rule change is quite big, and so we will be constantly monitoring what is working (and what isn't) though we do not for-see any changes needing to be made at this stage.

As noted above, our achievement/loot rule removal is a one month trial. If we notice that these posts are becoming too prevalent then we will adjust this ruling in a month's time.

Shadowlands is all but over as of this coming Tuesday. Is there a new subreddit theme coming soon?

After much thought I've decided to leave r/wow. My reasons largely come down to a lack of interest in the game, to the point where I watched the trailer for Dragonflight and otherwise haven't looked into it at all; as well as a continued disinterest in large scale moderating. I'd prefer to go quietly but being the head mod means you can't just slink off into the sunset without someone inventing a grand conspiracy to explain your sudden departure.

I shared my plans to the mod team on March 1st after the person I nominated to replace me accepted. /u/eveanyn will be taking over on May 11th when we do the mod shuffle. At the same time, long time moderator /u/soulfulpumpkin and /u/notrightmeow are also leaving for their own unrelated reasons - Thanks for the contributions you two have made over the years.

I've spoken to the team about maintaining the wiki's that I created and continued to update such as the Flair Log, Discord List, among others. I'll be keeping the Filtering Reddit guide up to date on my own as that's a personal project.

Anyway that's all I got - thanks for everything r/wow and enjoy yourselves.

Hi wowmeta!

This post is a consolidation of our flair log that you can read here for 2021. It's written in the spirit of another one year analysis that I did awhile back.

Overall the trends shown what we expect though it is nice to see that data all in one graph.

Pushshift Failures

Towards the end of 2020, the authors behind Pushshift started limiting bots (Such as AssistantBOT) downloading a ton of data through their system. As a result, many days worth of posts in r/wow simply do not exist in the flair log. These days are noted below. Since we shifted to /u/AssistantBOT1, the issues with Pushshift have lessened significantly.

Thus the following days are not logged:

• Jan 1,2,17.
• Feb 14, 21.
• March 14, 28
• April 4, 11, 18, 25
• May 2. May 1st may have been logged twice, unclear.
• June 8, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29
• July 2-11, 13, 14, 16, 18
• August 29-31
• September 1-3

Flair Additions

These are flairs that were added either temporarily or permanently in 2021 and why.

• Transmog was introduced as a flair option in February to coincide with our trial period allowing the same. It later got incorporated into the subreddit so the flair remained.
• Burning Crusade was added in the lead up to launch.
• News was added as an automod specific flair when certain domains are submitted. This system was borrowed from r/classicwow.
• Achievement and Loot were added as a flair option in April to coincide with our trial period allowing the same. They didn't remain as flair options as the community overwhelmingly didn't want the posts outside the weekly
• Activision Blizzard Lawsuit was added as a Mod-set Flair in July (though differentiated from Automod generated stickies in the log here) to identify Lawsuit discussion posts in the subreddit.

Happy New Year!

The amount of stuff on the subreddit where it's nothing but people complaining about the story is making the subreddit borderline unusable.

It would be nice to filter out the deluge of "This one throw away line from the PTR is proof that the writers are stupid", or "DAE Sylvanas bad for reasons that don't make sense". There is a "Lore" flair, but no one seems to be using it, and just flairing their "dunk on the writers" threads as "Discussion".

Maybe weird opinion but I've always thought of playing WoW for the story to be like watching porn for the plot, and I really just couldn't care less about any of this stuff. Just want to discuss the actual game.

Can you ban these posts, they don't really add anything. It's just karma farming by bots most likely, and realistically speaking, just invites more low effort BS. If someone was inclined, they could find a X years ago today item for literally every day of the week...

I haven't updated this in awhile so now's a good time as any.

Userflairs

• Userflair statistics last recorded: 2021-08-15
• Subscribers with flair: 169,687 (7.87% of total subscribers)
• Number of used flairs: 61

Used Emoji

40 flairs were removed from this list that were mod specific or individual community figures

Moose mount flairs refer to users involved in the original Grove Warden charity streams during WoD; the ASAN flair was available during Autism awareness month during April of 2019, 2020, and 2021.

The blue heart flair is to stand in solidarity with Blizzard employees as they seek workplace culture changes.

The content drought, systemic issues about the game itself, creator drain and recent lawsuits / allegations have created an unprecedented amount of negativity aimed at the game, the developers in general, as well as the players who keep playing the game. Even before the lawsuit, r/wow felt like a warzone.

I had a couple of suggestions about what can be done about it, but I no longer feel like they would be at least remotely helpful - being a longtime Blizzard loyalist, I cannot be impartial. But the problem remains: r/wow has become extremely hateful towards the developers and players who don't feel the same hatred.

Thank you for your time!

I think this would be a nice way to support the devs. It would only be for a few hours, but I think gestures like this are meaningful and important during these times. The subreddit has 2.2 million members, and it would help fan the flames and put pressure on blizzard to change.

We are customers, and the game is not being developed right now because of this situation. Players have been unhappy for YEARS now. I feel like it is well within our rights to demand that Blizzard gets their shit together.

So there was a meta discussion around the subreddit happening because of an Asmongold clip and I was looking at the mod list out of curiosity.

4 mods added on May 31st to the subreddit, okay I guess the sub found the mods they were looking for a few months ago. But all 4 accounts have no karma, were all made on May 31st and no activity outside of /r/wow.

What the hell is this?

What are the mod team’s thoughts on the current trend of FF/yoshi p worship in a bunch of threads lately? Any plans to curb it or just waiting a couple of weeks to die off?

I'm seeing a lot of repeat posts about things that don't work or undocumented changes in game.

This post: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/oaywxo/undocumented_patch_changes_91/ is currently being used, but I'm afraid that it will drop off of hot as more posts are made.

With the launch of BCC there are an increasing number of posts asking questions, and often it’s not until you get deep into the comments that you find out which game is being asked about.

I remember when Classic was launched there was a discussion here about whether posts on that game should be allowed in r/WoW or pointed to the Classic sub. Perhaps it’s time to have that debate again?

If the r/WoW sub is going to accommodate all the Classic games going forward then the flairs need an overhaul so that it’s clear which game is being discussed.

I think there’s a strong case for a Retail flair now.

I'm on old reddit, but it doesn't seem to be working on the Boost app on Android, either. I'm seeing fanart and things, which I usually have filtered out so I don't see it and have my page cluttered.

Screenshot here: https://i.imgur.com/kqa2CG1.png

I'm all for the new flairs so people can post what they want to post, but the memes that have risen up due to how terrible the quality of them are is very telling. Some of them, just like the memes that rip on them, are barely even legible.

Can we please have some sort rule in place such as 'no phone photos' or at the very least 'phone photos must be in focus, not taken at weird angles or show anything other than screen unless it is relevant to the post'.

I appreciate the new laxed moderation and allowing memes so much as the next person, but this is stupid. There's one on the front page that's just a blurry image...

I know I know, just downvote and move on. I do that. But can we draw the line somewhere? thanks.

#oldmanrant #getoffmylawn /20chars

Are user flairs currently broken? Because for the last week or so they haven't been showing.

I'm using Edge with RES if that helps.

Topic. Or at least a way to filter them out.

Is there a list of all the new flairs I need to block in order to not see these low effort memes ever again? Like the TF dagger meme on my frontpage right now?

The sub's header was updated in what I'm guessing is a memorial for someone notable in the community? I feel like I missed some major news of someone passing. Who is/was Andrew?

Lots of posts like this or this end up with basically random flairs because none of the current options fit them. Is news not relevant to the community?

Hey guys!

I get it, it feels unfair not getting invited to a M+ run, but I think there should be a control of the amount of post about it, I've seen at least 1 daily complaint post, and also the "This is why you're not getting invited" posts.

There is currently a comment in the Best Of nomination thread:

Anything but the real dwarf people

This seems so incongruous with the spirit of the nominations, and a really distasteful place for negativity toward community members to manifest. (What would the mod compiling the Best Of list even do if the comment gains lots of upvotes?)

I don't know if being off topic is enough grounds to remove the comment according to /r/wow's rules. If not, I'd personally like to see an explicit rule that any top level comments in future nomination threads be actual nominations.

Feels like every single day theres at least one of them on the frontpage. Yea we get it, people are botting and advertising, do we really need a post about it every single day?

For the love of God please start removing all the frog lines in Oribos posts. I counted over half a dozen just scrolling down the subreddit.

Hello r/wowmeta and /r/wow

I originally intended to submit this post later this week, though this thread has prompted me to speed it along so that more people can give their voice.

Late last year with the assistance of /u/Vusys I ran an experiment in r/wow that looked at the flair representation on the front page to track diversity, longevity and popularity as Reddit does not have the tools to provide this information to us. The results of that analysis proved to be very fruitful. This data was our first real hard evidence of what's on the front page that goes beyond anecdotal evidence. Though for most observers, the results were not entirely unexpected.

For low mod week 2020 I decided to re-run that experiment to see how low mod week changed the sub. The data will be used for internal policy making and soliciting informed community feedback.

Due to PushShift removing aggregation functions, the control data via. AssistantBOT missed whole days and is thus not usable. Despite this setback I've been able to compare the results found to the December 2019 experiment to track changes.

Considerations

It's important to take into consideration that the December 2019 experiment took place ~2 months before 8.3 launched, whereas now we're right after an expansion launch. December is also a relatively slow month on Reddit. Secondly, just as in the December experiment the other mods (aside from Aphoenix and Vusys) were unaware it was taking place. This was done to remove the possibility of people changing their behaviour knowing it was happening.

Data

I've noted posts as 'rule breaking' because that's what the posts are if low mod week wasn't happening but that doesn't mean the posts were actually removed. The only posts that were actually removed were Witch Hunts and spam.

Rule Breaking by Day

Relevancy refers to IRL posts that rely entirely on the title to explain why they're relevant to WoW.

Individual Day & Flair Graphs

Quantifying Rule Breaking Content

Some of these overlap in that a Witch Hunt might also be a Chat Box post. Misc. covers all sorts of things like Politics, Witch Hunts, people posting bugged characters, fire giants on flight paths, etc.

Rule Breaking Content by Flair

This is a direct comparison to the 2019 results showing how the representation of various flairs changed compared to low mod week.

I calculated the hours on the front page for the 29th as they went into the 30th until the last post was off the front page. Thus the total hours is near 6480, which would be 10days x24hrs x27 slots instead of abruptly cutting off at Midnight GMT regardless of how long posts made on the 29th stayed on the front page through the 30th. Cutting it off then would've been required per the control, but as that was lost I disregarded it.

Analysis

It's immediately notable that the only topics that saw gains are outside of direct user control. The Achievement / Loot & Transmog flairs did not exist before and the weekly threads are something we manage. Beyond that, every other flair suffered at the expense of Humor / Meme. Text posts like Discussion and Question fared the worst. Classic used to be several flairs, though I combined the 2019 data into a single number for this comparison.

The increase in Humor / Meme is not unexpected as that is where our rules are strictest. It ramped up as users began to understand what they could get away with and by the 24th it was common to see every post but two on the front page be Humor / Meme. I pointed this out in r/wowcirclejerk after a user commented on it. It's harder to see this in the actual data graphs because I've sorted them by time posted rather than when they hit the front page. This is needed because of the hard cut-off times with the control and while that data was lost, I kept the formatting to be consistent.

I referenced in the opening paragraphs that the 2019 data occurred during a period of lower interest in the sub. Contrasting that with low mod week, something that stood out is posts rarely stayed on the front page longer than 24 hours. In 2019 most days had 6-10 posts on the front page longer than 24 hours, but by the 23rd that went down to 1-2. The turnover was much higher during low mod week.

I intended to utilize low mod week for another purpose. We've promised in the new year that we'll be running a trial period where Transmog posts are allowed in the subreddit. Thus when low mod week went live, I immediately added a "Transmog" flair to the subreddit. With the loss of the control, this data is now useless. Though it will explain why the flair was present. I added the "Achievement / Loot" flair the next day on the 21st to track that as well, though the rules around Achievements / Loot are not changing.

In contrast to 2019, nearly no posts were removed. While I was unable to quantify it for this analysis, most of the posts I remember removing during low mod week were people begging for game time or for people to buy them Shadowlands.

In reading feedback during low mod week and after it ended, a persistent theme has been that people only liked the change if the topics they were interested in were upvoted. For those who love memes, low mod week was the best this sub has ever been - and why not? The flair saw a 366% increase, blanketing the front page in content they're extremely likely to enjoy. For those who didn't, coming to the subreddit each day became increasingly pointless and users sought out off-shoots to find the content they were interested in.

Thank you for reading!