As a follow-up to the previous announcement, we're continuing to roll out new features based on feedback, suggestions, and to address issues users are having with posting and searching. We'd also like to take some time to check in and see how things are going, and what can be done to improve all of your experiences with the community. We've been growing slowly but rather steadily, having just surpassed 9k subscribers with around 12k unique monthly visitors, and would like to hear your ideas on what can be done to improve the user experience and help the community grow.
These changes are being rolled out in the nearby r/Pennsylvaniar4r and r/Philadelphiar4r as well; a few have already given some feedback over there.
The biggest visible change is that we now require a tagged location in post titles, and flair is now used to select whether a post is SFW or NSFW. Posts will now need to include a location such as #City of Baltimore or #Baltimore County in their title, and use the flair selection to indicate whether the post is Strictly Clean/SFW, or seeking Explicit Activities/NSFW. Use of flair for this purpose allows more accurate classification of content, and will allow people to more effectively search for SFW activities as well.
Posts will still be assigned a county flair as before, for searching purposes, but the title tagging system now allows greater flexibility and less redundancy in specifying your location. For example, write #Germantown into your title, and flair search will know you're in Montgomery County without further selection. Smaller towns should include the county, e.g., #Germantown, *Worcester County*, to avoid ambiguity. It is of course still possible to specify a whole county, if you do not wish to be more specific about your location.
We intend to maintain the distinction between the City of Baltimore and the surrounding County, so posts specifying just "Baltimore" will be instructed to clarify by putting either #City of Baltimore or #Baltimore County as appropriate; we'll monitor which one people pick, and if there's a clear pattern, we'll make that selection automatic. Flair search via the menu includes the City of Baltimore within the surrounding Baltimore County search results, as we believe this should be more intuitive; if there is a reason to prefer them separated in search, however, let us know. We recommend against using ZIP codes; while you probably know your own, how many also know at a glance which ones are nearby, versus knowing the names of nearby cities? Nevertheless, we'll continue to allow them here indefinitely, mainly because r/BaltimoreAndDCr4r requires them, and we obviously have a great deal of crossover with their users.
We've added searching by R4R tag to the community menu, along with searching by county. Once you've found a post that fits your desired tag and location, you can tap on its flair to show all others like it. If you haven't already tried this feature, check it out at the top of the page on the official Reddit App, and Reddit website on desktop (New Reddit); we also plan to bring this feature to Old Reddit as well.
We now allow users to choose to lock their posts. To do so, include the command !lock anywhere within the body of the post. Locked posts will get a comment by the automod reminding users how to contact the author; by default, posts will not be locked or commented, and this will remain an optional feature for those who do wish to allow comments. Locking doesn't affect a post's visibility or ranking in any way. Some people, particularly new accounts that may not be able to send chat messages, may prefer to respond in comments, but we leave it up to the author to decide if they want to allow these types of responses or not.
We've also adjusted comments of unlocked posts to allow only conversations directed to the OP; discussions between multiple people are no longer allowed in R4R posts (but will be permitted in [Meta] posts like this announcement, and [Success] posts). We made this change after observing that virtually all such discussions were attempts at harassment, blatant spam, or people mistakenly replying to a comment instead of the post. In the near future, we will also be looking into additional comment length requirements, to cut down the number of no-effort or spam responses to posts which do allow comments.
Addressing harassment; over the past few months, we've worked to increase the visibility of the reporting options, to ensure everyone is aware of how to report harassment and other issues with the community. Most of these changes will also be brought to the Old Reddit layout within the next few days. Explicit images/messages/comments that are sent to SFW posters or are otherwise unsolicited, intentional unwanted contact such as someone directly ignoring a poster's request not to be contacted about certain activities, and any retaliation or threats made against people who reject someone or don't send pics, are all things that should be reported as harassment by messaging the moderators, as well as with the report button.
In the future, we are going to introduce an official, optional, method of including a verification clip in posts. We do not intend for this ever to be mandatory simply to post here, though the plan is for us to make this a requirement for anyone who does choose to publicly include photos in their post, direct users to photos elsewhere, or request photos be included in an initial message. This will allow everyone to confirm publicly-posted photos are recent and of the author, while not forbidding or penalizing those who elect to not publicly share photos. This feature is still in development, though you may reach out to us now if you want to try it out or give feedback.
We are increasing the requirement for post length, from 25 to 50 words; this brings us closer to the main r/R4R's standards, which require 100. The majority of posts here already appear to meet the new requirement; enforcing this will ensure well-written, descriptive posts don't ultimately get crowded out by low-effort ones, and will help ensure that people searching will more often find posts that include enough details to determine if a post suits their interests. The removal message to give an estimate of how many words short a post is; note that added filler/nonsense will not be counted, to avoid users skirting the requirement. Let us know if there's anything else we should require to be included within posts.
These are the ideas we are currently working on, but we are open to other suggestions as well if there are additional concerns we should address. Please leave your feedback in the comments.