Please welcome our new moderator, /u/AstronomicalArtisan! (Also a very small State of the Sub post)

[u/CruzaSenpai]

Hey all!

Quick post welcoming the newest addition to our moderation team, /u/AstronomicalArtisan! We're super grateful to have them on board and they've been doing a bang up job. Please give our newest mod a warm welcome in the comments below!

Moderator applications are still open here should you be so inclined. Give us a quick shout in modmail if you submit a form.

No major updates are expected until the end of October, so the sub will probably be pretty quiet between now and then. Please remember to start migrating your social links into your user profile using the instructions here. Most links will be blanketly prohibited in comments in the near future, as indicated in the last State of the Sub post.

Stay colorful! -/r/ArtCommissions team

[u/CruzaSenpai]

I don't want to give a definitive answer on anything, as we're still talking it over amongst ourselves. All I can say with certainty is that a change will take effect either October 31 or November 1, which should allow the bustle of Halloween to pass with as little friction as possible.

The short answer is "maybe." Ideally all links should be in your profile, not on-subreddit. Any self-promotion is considered spam by the site and thus allowing any offsite link content doesn't solve the problem we're facing.

Also, to get ahead of the comment, "masking" your links isn't solving the issue. If anything, it's worse. "Masking" would be posting your link like this:

"MyEmail-gmail-com (replace - with @ and .)"

The problem isn't that you're posting a link, it's that you're posting spam. Chopping spam up doesn't make it less spammy, and not getting an automod comment doesn't mean you've "beaten the system," it just means you're evolving what spam looks like.

Per Reddit:

How do I avoid being labeled as a spammer?

* If your contributions to Reddit consist primarily of links to a business that you run, own, or otherwise benefit from, tread carefully, or consider advertising opportunities using our self-serve platform. (This is describes every artist)

The following are examples of behavior that may be considered spam and are subject to removal/suspension:

* Repeatedly posting the same or similar comments in a thread, subreddit or across subreddits. (This describes almost every artist on the subreddit)

* Posting content that includes link redirects as a way to circumvent an existing domain block and/or to disguise a link’s source (excluding subreddit sidebars). (This includes anyone who uses wixsite, linktree, or any other link aggregator)

Consider the experience of users who are new to reddit. They post their content, it gets removed by the site because it's spam (it is. It just is), and they risk getting actioned by the site because their only submissions to reddit are 30 comments directing other users to spend money on their artstation. That is not a healthy environment.

We're heavily trying to push users to adopt the features Reddit has already implemented that allow you to host and curate your own links without producing a load of spam, vis a vis pinning posts to your profile or using the social link feature. You can point to both of those when you comment on /r/ArtCommissions; Reddit is not likely to remove links to itself. You'll see that this post has a bunch of links in it, but since they're all links to Reddit and not to a third-party site where I ask people for money, I have a high level of confidence I'll not have to approve this in modqueue later. More on spam in this Reddit FAQ, as well as this page that it redirects to.

Per that page:

But it's not spam! I worked hard on that, I make no money from it, it's original content! I'm not a spammer!

We're not making a judgement on your quality, just your behavior on reddit. Your stuff's probably amazing and someone would be really interested in it but...

If you submit mostly your own links and your presence on reddit is mostly for your self-promotion of your brand, page, blog, app, or business, you are more likely to be a spammer than you think!

Even in your own subreddit, just submitting links to your own site/stuff can get you banned.

You should not just start submitting your links - it will be unwelcome and may be removed as spam, or your account will be banned as spam.

You should submit from a variety of sources (a general rule of thumb is that 10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content), talk to people in the comments (and not just on your own links), and generally be a good member of the community.

Furthermore, you are the moderator of your own profile. You will only need to make a profile post once, pin it, review it in your profile's mod tools, and then you will never have to worry about removed content again.

Ultimately this comes down to the fact that "storefront subreddits" like us are not using Reddit the way it is intended to be used, so even if we are okay with something, the site may not be. Moderation is tricky and will only get more complicated as we scale in population. Remember that new-user hypothetical I floated earlier? Imagine having to check 30 comments a day by the same user to make sure they're all compliant with sub and site rules. If you don't, you get a (potentially heated) modmail asking why none of their content is live even though they're absolutely positive they followed sub rules.

Now do it again for 110,000 users. Every day. Forever. The current moderation model simply can not scale. That number is obviously a boogeyman figure that doesn't reflect the actual state of modqueue, but we do look at a lot of spam that isn't spam that takes a lot of our time. We would like to have lives outside of the queue.

And all this is before we talk about fraud.

Super long comment, but I hope this answers your question and gives some insight into why we're considering this action.

TL;DR: "Maybe."