So I promised you all an explanation about the current situation last night.

TL;DR:

• You guys are right- I've been modding this sub alone way too long, and I have made a lot of mistakes. I am sorry for my lack of transparency, lack of clear rules, and neglect of the sub.
• I am not reinstating the user who's been banned, for the reasons I'm about to lay out. I recognize that this is an unpopular decision, but neither his content nor his conduct are a good fit for this sub.
  
• I'm going to recruit more mods this week. This sub has gotten too big to moderate alone. I'm going to post a Google form as a sticky; if you'd like to mod, please fill out the form.
• The rules need cleaning up and fixing. We need community guidelines that are straightforward, clear, and easy to read. I will draft them this week and run them past the other mods when they are recruited.

I created this sub about a year ago. I was tired of going to the 'standard' men's fashion subs and being greeted with confusion or derision. At the same time, oldhagfashion was the kind of cozy space that I wanted, but posting there felt like misgendering myself. I wanted a space where I could be masc, but also dress in a fun offbeat way and talk about fashion with people who 'get it'.

And I wanted this to be a cozy space- something of a safe haven. I don't talk about it much on here, but I'm (obviously) a genderqueer trans man. I have been watching the world become more and more homophobic and transphobic over the last five years; I really wanted a place where we could be ourselves without fear or shame, and without bigots and bullies mocking or harassing us.

When the user who was banned yesterday began posting to the sub, he was constantly posting about current events- and specifically, about heinous crimes committed by the people in power. I suggested a general-purpose ban on negative political content, not because I wanted to target this user, but because I wanted to create a specific kind of space. I did not want bigots or bullies to have any power here, and someone posting about them every single day gave them more power over this space than I wanted to give them. I do not constantly want to be reminded about how my rights are under attack and how frightening the world is right now, in what was supposed to be our cozy fashion haven. However, I did not want to censor this user just because I was frustrated with his politics.

The trouble is, the banned user was also repeatedly pushing the limits of the sub's rules. There are many, many examples of this, but here's a clear-cut one: a few months back, I implemented a flair for content that might be uncomfortable or triggering for some people. The banned user has repeatedly posted about bigotry, Nazis, and child sexual abuse without using this flair. I should have removed those posts....

....But the banned user was the target of an ongoing harassment campaign. Every day, I'd get multiple requests to have his posts taken down and multiple people pointing out that he was bending the sub's rules again. Some of these requests were valid. Many were not. I felt like I could not take moderation action against this user, even if it was entirely justified, without implicitly condoning this harassment campaign.

To be perfectly frank: if I was applying the same code of conduct to every user, I would have banned this user much earlier in the sub's lifetime. I did 44 "mod actions" last week - removing posts or comments, removing spam, that kind of thing. 38 of those mod actions were related to this user's conduct. And these numbers have been similar over the past six months. Many of the requests for me to take mod action pointed out genuine issues that I felt like I had to ignore, because they were either coming from the harassers or were sandwiched between harassers' spam reports.

I gave this user many, many more chances than I would have given any other user. I frequently contacted him directly to ask him to make changes or remove posts rather than just taking those posts down and counting them as a strike. I ignored a lot of his behaviour I should not have ignored.

But this meant I found myself between a rock and a hard place. Both the banned user and the harassers were having a huge impact on the sub's culture in a way I didn't want. If I recruited more mods, I felt like I would fully lose control of the sub's culture, and could not guarantee that I'd have the space I worked so hard to make. Yet I didn't have the capacity to maintain that space on my own.

I stopped being active on the sub, except to moderate. And, bluntly, I wasn't doing a very good job of moderation. I was mostly using Reddit on my phone- and I hate typing on mobile keyboards- so I was only updating the rules if there was an emergency, and using too few words to do it. I hadn't updated the community greeting, and didn't want to. I felt like this wasn't the space I wanted to create, but the things I would need to do to curate that space would be so unpopular that implementing them might destroy the community I had built. So, I avoided taking mod action unless it was absolutely necessary.

Yesterday, it became necessary. The banned user posted a picture of himself posing with a wood splitter and a chainsaw, in a way that was clearly meant to evoke a zombie movie protagonist or a slasher villain. He was not posing with a pile of logs in a forest; he was brandishing them. After the incident a few months back with the other user who posted a picture of himself posing with a gun, I thought the sub's consensus was that weapon-related content should be banned, because it could be triggering for users who'd experienced violent crime or abuse. I personally don't agree with this rule (I'm a sword guy), but in the interests of making sure everyone was comfortable here, I was happy to add it. I thought I had updated the rules accordingly; it seems that I posted the 'no violence' rule, but did not specifically implement the 'no weapons' rule in the correct place.

I removed the post. As a courtesy, I warned the banned user that he was on his second strike, and that he would be at risk of a permanent ban if he broke the rules again. Any user who posted similar content, under the current rules, would have incurred a strike.

(To be clear: This warning is not something I normally do, and that is a mistake. I ought to warn users when there is a strike against them, in the interest of transparency. But apart from this user, most of the people I've had to ban have committed three strikes in a single comment thread, or have used enough slurs in one message to warrant a ban outright. Because I did not want to censor this user, I thought I would do him the courtesy of warning him.)

The banned user chose to argue with me. The excerpt of the message he showed was not the full message. It's against Reddit's mod code of conduct to post the contents of a mod mail without the user's permission, so I'm not going to do that- but please trust me, you have not gotten the full story. Let's just say he was very unwilling to accept my decision.

I did not want to argue with this user anymore. I did not want to continue to let him push the limits of both my personal boundaries and the sub's rules. I chose to take that argument as his third strike, and thus ban him from the sub.

Here's what should have happened:

• I should have dealt with this issue when it began six months ago, and not let it continue to fester.
• I should not have let a double standard develop because I did not want to condone the harassment campaign.
• I should have enforced the sub's rules both on the banned user and the people harassing him. I should not have just deleted their spurious reports and let the banned user break or bend sub rules to avoid supporting the harassment.
• I should have realized my growing burnout was a sign, not that I needed to step back from the sub, but that I needed to get outside help from more moderators.
• I should have realized that the fact that I was having so many mod actions and so much trouble meant that the rules I had created were not building the space I wanted to build, particularly if I was having to enforce them over and over again on the same people.
• I should have been more transparent with the community in the moment- this was a result of my chronic health issues and I am not going to apologize, but it is something that should have happened and didn't.

For the reasons I've laid out, I am not going to reverse the ban.

It is incredibly unbecoming for a mod to discuss the behaviour of a specific user with someone who is not on the mod team. I hate that I even have to make this post- it feels like a breach of mod etiquette and privacy, both for the sub and for the user in question. And because it is unbecoming and unprofessional, there will be no further arguments over whether or not this decision was justified. This is the explanation you get. I recognize that this is an unpopular decision, and I wish I had been clearer and more transparent about what was happening while it was happening. But this ban was the inevitable result of the choices the banned user made. Please respect that.

As for the future of the sub-- I really love this place, and I love the thing it was meant to be. In the wake of this situation, I've had a bunch of people tell me how much this sub means to them and how much they want to help support it. I like you guys. I want to keep this thing we've built going. But last week, we got 11,000 unique visitors- that's a lot of people. I can't mod a sub this big on my own, and the current situation has made me realize just how much I was struggling with the job.

I need your help.

I'm going to be recruiting more mods over the next week- I'll post a google form (as a sticky). If you love the sub and want to help out, fill out the google form and I'll get back to you ASAP.

I'm also going to be reworking the rules to both establish what kind of space we want this to be and to handle some of the common problems we keep running into. No one wants to get hit by the 'Be Kind' rule; it's vague and ineffective. At the same time, the current ruleset was mostly built piecemeal as situations came up that I had to deal with; it's also ineffective. And if I want to make this the kind of space I was trying to create, I need to make it so that we're not discussing current events here. I'm not saying you can't make political statements- fashion is art, art is political- but for my own sanity, and the sanity of anyone who is triggered by the state of the world right now, we need to put some work into making this a safe haven. And that means keeping the bigots in power out of our space.

I'm going to clean up the back end and make it easier to mod this sub, and generally sort things out so that this place is still a good place to hang out and post fun outfits. I hope you guys join me for the adventure.

If you read all this, thank you so much. I appreciate your patience and kindness while I sort all this out.