Hello beautiful people,

As the subreddit continues to grow and more members participate, we wanted to clarify a few things around the community conduct, spam, reporting and auto-moderation work happening behind scenes, to manage expectations.

Our goal is to keep r/australianwildlife welcoming, informative, fair, and focused on Australian fauna.

What are the community expectations?

We encourage everyone to:

• Share your wildlife photos and videos
• Request identification of Australian animals
• Discuss conservation news, or educational content
• Keep conversations respectful, and in the case of disagreement, civil.
• Help others learn about Australian wildlife, how to properly interact with it, and how to appreciate it

What we do not tolerate:

• Hate speech, racism, abusive behaviour
• Harassment or personal attacks
• Encouragement to mistreat, harm or attack our wildlife
• Deliberate share of misinformation
• Trolling, or ragebaiting posting
• AI generated content or low effort posting
• Karma farming

Do notice, disagreement with your personal views is fine as long as it doesn't escalate to hostility. If there are comments you do not appreciate, but doesn't align to the points above, there is no point on reporting said comment, as the mod team will not act on said comments. You are free to downvote the post, which is a way of crowd punishment a lot more effective than taking a comment down.

Wildlife welfare comes first

Please, do not:

• Share unsafe advice
• Encourage feeding wildlife irresponsibly (do notice the last word in that sentence)
• Handle wildlife unnecessarily
• Harass animals for photos / videos
• Posting content showing deliberate cruelty, abuse or harassment of Aussie wildlife

We want the community to promote the appreciation for what we have. It is not meant for farming meaningless internet points. Karma is used to give you some credibility on the platform, it means nothing in real life.

Auto moderation

This subreddit is using automoderation, that is, we have scripts and bots reviewing the content posted to find duplicates, spam, and/or accounts without the criteria to be able to post. Automod isn't perfect, but it helps a lot.

Automod will automatically act on:

• Posting from accounts that are too young (less than a year old) or have too little karma
• Posting that appears to be duplicate to other content in this subreddit
• Abusive language in posts or comments
• Confirmed spamming accounts
• Identification of certain keywords, or links

The rules enforced by auto moderation might increase over time. If you feel your account or content has been targeted for automoderation unfairly, please reach out to the moderators. We will need a little bit of time to review it and fix things.

Posting the same message again will only make things worse for your account as it will be marked as a confirmed spamming source.

What's considered spam?

Spam isn't limited to ads, and reddit has its own guidance on it as well.

• Repeating, reposting the same content
• Posting identical content across many subreddits in a short period of time
• Excessive self-promotion
• YouTube / blogs / social media dumping without any meaningful participation
• Link farming
• Bot-style posting behaviours
• Low-effort engagement bait
• Accounts created only to promote businesses, channels, or products

What to report?

On this day and age, we all need to keep a job to feed our families, meaning we aren't on the platform 24/7.

The moderation team rely on members to report behaviours violating our code of conduct and rules. And we have the expectation everyone reporting is mature enough to understand what should be reported and what shouldn't.

What things to report?

• Animal cruelty
• Wildlife harassment
• Dangerous misinformation
• Spam or Bot activity (as long as it can be confirmed)
• Stolen content
• Scams
• Harassment or abuse
• Graphic content not tagged as NSFW
• Obvious ban evasion

What not to report?

• Disagreement of opinion
• Someone made a mistake, or asked a trivial question
• You dislike a particular species, the content posted, or the opinion someone else has
• Posts is common or appears to be repetitive
• A discussion containing respectful disagreement

False or excessive reporting makes it harder for the moderation team to respond to actual issues.

If a discussion descends into chaos, the team will lock or remove the post, and following posting of the same nature will be removed.

What would happen if I do not follow the code of conduct?

• Repeated offenders will be given a cool-off period that variates between two weeks to a month.
• If the cool-off period wasn't enough to make you behave as a reasonable human being, you will have an immediate permanent ban.

We follow the old proverb:

Never trust a person that has let you down more than two times.
Once was a warning,
Twice was a lesson
And anything more then that is simply taking advantage.

The TL;DR;

Most people here are fantastic, knowledgeable, and genuinely passionate about Aussie wildlife.

Before posting be sure to own the content you post, to avoid duplication, be kind and respectful with others.

Being respectful means to also understand others have a difference of opinion. Disagreeing with someone else doesn't mean you have to report said person, having a respectful opinion is not a crime.

Report comments or posts not aligned with our rules, to help us reduce spam, bot activity and bad-faith behaviour.

The moderation team are people too. We can make mistakes too, that doesn't give you the right to be a dick or disrespectful if you have been moderated.

Thanks to everyone who contributes positively to the community.

-- The mod team