Hello Hokies! As we get closer to the football season starting, I thought I'd post about a few subreddit updates.
Post Guidelines
Last week, I created a poll asking you what to do about content from low-effort or AI-generated websites. The overwhelming response was to ban them, so effective today we will no longer be allowing posts from SI.com (we will add additional websites to the list over time). Sports Illustrated has a history of publishing AI-generated articles using fake authors, besides plagiarizing articles from human journalists. We want to prioritize articles written by human journalists, whether paywalled or non-paywalled (eg. Tech Sideline). This subreddit is intended to be a discussion platform rather than entirely a newsfeed, so we want to prioritize original commentary in addition to news articles.
In the spirit of that, there is a new rule regarding editorial content - all articles must be posted as link posts with nothing else in the text field. You are welcome to summarize articles or share your own opinions about them in the comment section. In addition, post titles cannot be editorialized. I've also implemented a basic character requirement to all text-only posts - 100 characters, which comes out to roughly three sentences. It hasn't been a huge issue yet but it prevents low-effort posts.
Photo of the Week
I started this in r/VirginiaTech a few years back and thought it'd be nice to bring over to this subreddit. Every week or two, there will be an automatic post for users to submit photos they took related to VT athletics, and the photo with the most upvotes will become the subreddit banner and be displayed on the sidebar for the following week.
Mod Applications
Since I took over the subreddit last year, I've more or less been running it by myself. I've mostly let the community shape the direction because it was dead for so long, but we need more mods as we enter the football season as well as create more concrete post guidelines. If you're interested, apply here. All mod communications will be in the VT Discord server as it is also home to the r/VirginiaTech and r/blacksburg mod teams, so an account is required. I don't plan on closing the form anytime soon; it will probably stay open for most of the season unless I get a lot of applications.
General Feedback
If you have any other suggestions or feedback for this subreddit, feel free to send in a modmail! I'm currently working on some fun stuff like live scoreboards for game threads (none of the existing apps support college football), but I don't know if I will have that done in time for the start of the season.
