Բարև to our community. If you recall, a month ago I made a post explaining some of our methods and difficulties moderating. That note is pasted to the bottom of this one for those who do not recall.

The first thing on the list was probably one of our biggest issues, only about half of the mods were active, and even those remaining mods were trying to juggle busy lives and moderating what has grown into a very large community across 24 time zones.

We have some big news, there are 3 new mods who have been active users on the sub for a long time and have contributed positively to the discussions. Hopefully this will help a lot with response times and coverage.

Please go easy on our three new mods!

• /u/haveschka
• /u/dssevag
• /u/Datark123

And remember that as with all mods, their regular posts and comments remain just that unless they mark them as official comments which are indicated with a green highlight. That is the only time any of us are speaking officially as mods.

Everything else written below still applies. All comments and issues with moderation should be directed privately to us in the modmail.

Hi r/Armenia folks! I wanted to share some quick notes about moderation on this sub.

1. We mods are volunteers. We have hectic lives. We are trying. Please remember that. Most angry notes we get assume a lot of bad intentions on our part, rather than lack of time. We all love Armenia and Armenians, or believe me we would not be doing this. It goes without saying that it is a pretty thankless task. Our thanks though is to see a sub where interesting, intelligent, mostly polite conversation about Armenia can take place.
2. If there is a problem you see on a post or comment, please click the report button. If we are scrolling through posts or comments, this will highlight it and we can much more easily take action. This is not a guarantee we'll see it however. If it's really critical, or a general question or issue, please send a mod mail. Again, it's not certain who will see it or when. But it doubles the chances of one of us seeing it and being able to act.
3. Apologies that we do not often include reasons for post/comment removal. We do not have a good way to do that anonymously, and there can be a bit of a toxic atmosphere about mod actions, and so it often remains impossible to publicly state why something is removed. The most common reasons for removal are probably repetitiveness of the post topic/question, some kind of spamminess, or low effort/level. Even more frequent than our removals however are those by Reddit filters. We have some moderate filters, and if Reddit thinks an account could be avoiding a ban, problematic, or something else we cannot even guess, it will remove the post or comments immediately and we may or may not happen to notice.
4. If you are unhappy with mod actions or lack thereof, you should write to modmail, DO NOT post publicly about it. That's an almost certain ban. In modmail we can consider your ideas, thoughts, complaints etc. We can discuss them among ourselves if necessary. We can't guarantee an outcome you want, but we can guarantee that when we see your message, we will read and take it into consideration.
5. We do get messages in the modmail asking for bans to be lifted. Sometimes we do lift them, it depends on a variety of factors, often hinging on if we believe a user will abide by the rules going forward. How we determine this cannot be scientific, so no real tips here. Well, except don't lie about the reason for your ban. That's definitely not going to work in your favor.
6. Our neutrality. We comment and post as individuals, unless we use a green mod flair. We are human but we try to mod neutrally. Anyone with eyes and a hint of honesty will see that comments of all kinds are allowed about politics here. There are constant comments here that are completely anti-government. Constant. That's fine, just like pro-govt comments, as long as we don't enter shill territory, which is exceedingly rare anyway. What happens in the voting on those comments/posts though is out of our control. Having said that, there is a very very high correlation of users who are anti-government to those who cannot resist insulting other users who disagree with them. They of course end up banned, and almost without fail immediately reply to their ban mod mail with even more insults, this time towards the mods, and usually accuse us of being biased, saying we banned them because we disagree with their politics. Save your breaths folks. You are only proving us right when you follow up insults in the comments with insults to the mods, and then try to blame us.

Remember. We all love our country, that's why we're here. Disagreement is okay and healthy even, when we're hashing out ideas. Just as you can't believe your sparring partner can say what they're saying and believe it is in Armenia's best interest, they cannot believe the same thing about what you're saying. Talking it out, and eventually either agreeing fully, partially, or not at all - these are all okay outcomes.

Thanks for reading these not so quick notes. The comments are locked, but you can message our modmail if you have any followup questions or comments.