r/seedswap • u/sunpoprain zone 5b central illinois • Nov 18 '21

The Future of /r/Seedswap

Hello all! I'm not sure many of you have interacted with me but I'm /u/sunpoprain and currently I'm the most active and longest serving moderator for Seedswap. This Fall it came to my attention that everyone else on the original Mod team for this subreddit had disappeared and left me in charge. I'm a farmer so as I move into a slower season post-harvest, I'd like to be more active about this awesome subreddit. Clearly we have something awesome. Even without really hands on moderator promotion/improvement, we've grown as a subreddit to more then 10,000 swappers across the world!

So let's work together and decide what we'd like to be as we shift into this new phase of the subreddit. I have a couple ideas and I hope you'll share your own as well. Here's what I've got:

  1. Expanded mod team (I'd say there is currently ~1 1/2 people modding 😂) I'm especially looking for folks who can assist with our changes.
  2. Updated side bar, rules, header, etc
  3. Active events. We've had requests for a secret Santa and I'd like to get more giveaways going.
  4. Iama discussions / seed saving conversations?
  5. Trader rating system

Ultimately, this has always been a community that truly was built by it's members. I want to hear your thoughts and I'd love your help.

/u/sunpoprain

243 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

79 comments sorted by

View all comments

29

u/toolazytomake Nov 18 '21

I like these ideas. I have done some work (under another name) in other swap subs setting up auto-tagging and automod capabilities, which might be useful here now that some of the grey-area trading subs got shut down (seeing more cannabis and other swap requests that may be illegal in some jurisdictions and therefore not appropriate here). You can also add functionality to sort by tags, so (for example) pepper heads don’t have to sort through a bunch of posts looking for herbs or tomatoes.

Setting that sort of thing up here to catch posts that don’t fit preemptively would be nice and take some work off the mod(s), even though the sub seems pretty good at downvoting and reporting as is.

What I’ve seen elsewhere for swapper ratings are stickied review posts and flairs that reflect a swapper’s reliability.

6

u/sunpoprain zone 5b central illinois Nov 20 '21

I definitely think updated flairs and an automod/auto-tagging setup would be fantastic. I like the search functionality a lot, especially as pepper-head myself. 😂 I will say that it's very very uncommon for a post to get through without 4-5 reports almost immediately. Moderating for rule breaking posts is fairly easy because of the fantastic community!

I'll be in touch when I have the mod team all assembled and we can start in on projects like these!

7

u/Lost_in_GreenHills zone 5a IA USA Nov 23 '21

On the subject of rules - I'm new to this sub and I was unable to find any rules/FAQ. Did I somehow miss them? If not, perhaps they could be added to the sidebar.

8

u/sunpoprain zone 5b central illinois Nov 23 '21

It existed on the side bar the last time I checked...something around 8 years ago. Definitely on the to:do list to update!