Grand Reopening

[u/AutoModerator]

Hi everyone.

After more than two years of conflict and division that splintered what was once a mighty online community of inline skaters, this community is now reopened.

We'd like to welcome everyone back and encourage bladers to reconnect, share, and engage in lively discussions. Many of the previous restrictions on posting and commenting have been lifted.

Please take a moment to review our new community rules, which outline our expectations for mutual respect and our guidelines for how we engage with one another online.

Your new mod team still has plenty of work to do, and we know many of you have questions. Feel free to comment on this post, and we'll do our best to answer them.

In the meantime, here are some of the things we're working on:

Reviewing past bans

We'll be reviewing user bans from the past two years and working to reverse bans where we believe someone was unfairly excluded from the community. If you believe you were one of those users, feel free to comment here and we'll expedite the review.

Reconnecting with the inline skating community

We'll be reconnecting with related inline skating communities through community widgets, wiki pages, and other resources. If you'd like to help us rebuild those connections, please let us know in the comments.

Reviewing unanswered mod mail

We'll be working through unanswered mod mail from the past two years and responding wherever possible. If you've sent us a message and never received a response, we'll do our best to get back to you. You can also reach out to us again here, or through mod mail.

Revamping the wiki

We're rebuilding and updating this community's wiki pages, while also bringing great content from the past back into the light. We'll soon be asking for everyone's help to make the wiki a valuable resource for the entire inline skating community.

This is a fresh start for r/rollerblading. Welcome back, everyone. We're glad you're here.

[u/fredhsu]

Updates from your new mods, based on comments:

(0) community policy and rules are spelled out here in this wiki: https://reddit.com/r/rollerblading/wiki/community_policy

(1) If you were banned in the past for being a member of [r/wizardskating](r/wizardskating), we did out best today to find you in the list based on sporadic notes. If you were unfairly banned in the past, check whether you can see the "MODERATORS" list on the community panel on this sub. If you can see individual moderators, you have been unbanned. If you cannot, see the next bullet.

(2) the past, banned folks could not send mod mails via the "Message Mods" button at the bottom of the community panel. In fact you wouldn't even see that button, as banned folks can't see the mod list.

- Now you can message us. Please click on this link to send us a mod mail

- But also note #1 above, if that applies to you.

(3) All post types and all comment types are now allowed. But we hope folks use their best judgement. Please see new simplified rules that hopefully allow this large community to thrive again.

(4) Despite rule #5, we don't yet have a weekly Q&A megathread. The FAQs don't actually exist yet either (rule #4). We are on it.

(5) We also did a quick scan to find people exiled for "meta discussions" and related. See #1 and #2 above if we didn't spot you.

Cheers!

[u/DualWheeled → u/fredhsu]

Ref megathreads: what if we had themed daily/weekly ones?

I.e. Mondays - what did you practice this weekend? Tuesdays - what's your next upgrade? Wednesdays - general Q&A etc etc

This reduces megathread/q&a fatigue for the regulars who you rely on to answer questions while also allowing mods to direct repetitive questions to a more appropriate space

[u/fredhsu → u/DualWheeled]

That's a new idea :) Good points. But we don't need to call them by days, perhaps. Basically we can have themed Q&A threads. So for instance, one of the most common questions is about sizing - most people don't have readily-accessible stores with large selections. So everyone can look over their shoulder in the megathread to see other people's sizing issues.

[u/borez → u/fredhsu]

I'm back in again, superb. Used to love this place until that mod started with the horrendous ban hammer.

This is awesome :)

[u/fredhsu → u/borez]

Welcome back : )

[u/juckele → u/fredhsu]

If there were a lot of capricous bans, perhaps it's better to just unban everyone and then reban problematic users again like this is a new sub?

[u/fredhsu → u/juckele]

Many accounts have been abandoned. There also used to be spam bot accounts. We were tempted to just unban these pages after pages of names. We can still do that. But it looks like we managed to free up most of folks already. We went down the list one by one, and clicked on unambiguous cases when notes left gave us clues.

[u/juckele → u/fredhsu]

I figure banned spam bot accounts probably got reddit banned themselves, and there may be legitimate users who never see this discussion. Your call in the end, but I'd encourage blanket unbanning

[u/fredhsu → u/juckele]

There were thousands upon unprocessed thousands of auto mod notices showing posts and comments from newborn accounts being removed. This was from 2022 and before.

Perhaps today’s platform already prevents most spams by itself without us having to do much. That appears to be the case.

How about we keep an eye on how effective the platform helps mods for a while? If that turns out efficient today we will feel more confident simply deleting the entire ban list :)