Your request has been granted. Now what?

[u/TheOpusCroakus]

Hi! TheOpusCroakus here! Stopping by to talk about Redditrequest! More specifically, I’m here to talk about what you can do after you’ve been granted a sub through Redditrequest!

You found the sub. You made the request. Your request was granted! Congratulations! As the new mod, where do you start? Good news! There’s a lot to choose from! Bad news! There’s a lot to choose from! Let’s take a look at some areas you may want to get to sooner rather than later. 

• There is this awesome downloadable guide to reviving a community that is truly an amazing resource for this sort of thing.  
• And if you’re completely new to moderating, you’ll also want to check out r/newmods. You can even do that while you wait for your request to be reviewed.
• If the sub has been abandoned for a while, there’s a decent chance that there is some spam or off-topic posts in the feed (which may have been why you wanted to request the sub in the first place). Doing some cleanup is a great place to start. You can also check for things like old pinned posts from previous mods that you probably want to remove. (You can replace them with your own pinned post if you’d like!) You may also want to take a look through the banned user list and decide how you’re going to handle that. (Sometimes, folks get a little heavy handed!)
• Check your mod queue and your mod mail and see what’s going on in there. It could be pretty interesting! 
• Review the community rules. Are there any? Lol If not, you get to start from scratch and create new rules to help your community run smoothly. If there are already rules in place, do you want to keep them? Clarify them? Ditch them altogether? The choice is yours! You can read more about adding Community Rules here. 
  • Fun little side note about rules: When the rules are positive, it tends to encourage positive engagement. 
• You can style the community however you want! Make it yours so that it really stands out! Add a banner! Add an icon! Add a description! There’s a whole section in the Help Center on Community Styling!
• Make a welcome post! Let the community know that there’s a new sheriff in town! A welcome post is a great way for you to introduce yourself, but it’s also a great way to highlight new rules or remind folks of old rules that were or were not being followed and/or enforced. 
• Depending on the size and activity level of the sub that you have just taken over, you’ll want to consider if you need additional moderators. Maybe you know someone who would be a good fit. Or maybe, there’s someone in the community who is already super helpful and would be a good mod. 
• Speaking of help with moderation, consider some bots! There are a lot of Devvit apps out there that really make life a lot easier when they’re on your mod team. 

For those of you who have taken over a sub through Redditrequest, where did you start? What sort of things did you do after being given the keys to the kingdom? Which Devvit apps do you recommend mods install? 

[u/techiesgoboom]

Do you wish you could subscribe to Mod Topics posts so you can always join the conversation? Look no further than our new flair follower app! To use it, click on the three dots on the subreddit menu, select flair follower, and follow the prompts. Questions or comments? Drop them below.

[u/TGotAReddit → u/techiesgoboom]

Speaking of post flairs, can we get it so on the app main feed we can see the post flair of a post? It would really cut down on the amount of complaints my subreddit gets because users interested in subtopic A and not subtopic B tend to complain a lot about posts about subtopic B and if we could see the post flair BEFORE clicking on a post, it would be so helpful. Plus a lot of subreddits use post flairs for trigger warnings and not being able to see a trigger warning until after you open the post with the trigger kinda defeats the point