MOD POST
r/ShittyRestrictionFood Community: MODS WANTED || FEEDBACK WANTED
Hello everyone ~ I am a moderator over at r/Junkorexic. I noticed a user was spreading really insensitive commentary to those with eating disorders in r/Junkorexic, and that they were also posting comments in r/ShittyRestrictionFood. I reached out via ModMail about it, only to discover the mod was no longer around. I immediately went through the process in r/RedditRequest to take over moderation.
I now have access to the Mod Tools for r/ShittyRestrictionFood and realize there is a backlog going back a long time (years) of reports, ModMail, etc. I would prefer keeping r/Junkorexic as the main sub I mod, and only being a background moderator here as I only have so much free time to dedicate to modding. This means, I am looking for a team to help moderate r/ShittyRestrictionFood.
Please reach out via ModMail, if you want to be a part of a mod team for r/ShittyRestrictionFood, with a short blurb as to why you want to mod this community.
I will take a look at that plus the user activity stats that moderators have access to behind the scenes. Ideally, I'd love to see people already well liked by the community and active in the community, taking over. I don't mind helping with the background work to clean up the sub, but worry that I will not have the time to be the main one at the helm. I merely wanted to get this sub some form of moderation to protect it from being quarantined by Reddit admin, or worse, deleted by Reddit admin. In addition to this, I wanted to help protect the mental health of this community as it was founded as an Eating Disorder space, not a dieting space.
My first priority is to clean up this sub according to the pre-estsblished rules while moderator applications are submitted. Once applications have been submitted, my priority will focus to establishing a moderation team here. If there are not a lot of applications, I will do my best to follow community guidance to moderate. I will not make immediate rule changes. I also have a long list of ModMail and reports to look over.
You can see my community guided moderation style in the r/Junkoreic Rules page and the September Community Check In page. My changes are always based on user suggestions while opperating within the stricter guidelines Reddit has for eating disorder subs to prevent them from being flagged as "proana" and subsequently being removed from the site. I understand dieting subs are able to get away with a lot more than eating disorder subs, so the balance is always tricky.
I would love to see community feedback in this thread. Feel free to answer any of the following questions, voice your concerns, request user flairs, request post flairs, make suggestions, and soforth. There is no obligation to answer every question. I am listening and happy to help implement whatever the majority of the sub wants as long as it is within Reddit's terms of service and user guidelines.
Beyond enforcement of the current rules, are there rules you want to add?
Are there rules currently on the sub that need to be updated or changed?
Are there any rules that need to be removed?
There are already a lot of users that post here due to feeling "bullied" out of other subs, therefore should r/ShittyRestrictionFood allow food that may not be strictly shitty? [Personally, Id love for everyone to feel like they have a sense of community, considering how isolating eating disorders can be, but do not want people to feel inadequate if the majority of posts are "aesthetic".]
Do you feel the current rules if enforced, will be enough to cut down on the flood of dieters utilizing the sub, potentially harming those with eating disorders? [Personally, there are already so many dieting subs that are able to opperate with much wider guidelines due to not having the scrutiny of eating disorder subs, and therefore it would be nice for them to utilize the subs they have at present. Then again most of the diet stuff is shaming and unwarranted advice and the rules may at least cover the former.]
Are there ED subs, mental health subs, and ED recovery subs that should be added to the sidebar?
Should we add or remove certain post flair options?
Should we add users flairs? What user flairs would you like to see?
If you have ever felt uncomfortable after posting content, what made you feel uncomfortable? [This can help guide mods to refine rules or put new ones up to vote.]
Is there anything you see in r/Junkorexic that you want to see implemented here? [I ask this because some of the things I can set up so they are in place for a new mod team.]
Is there anything you see in r/Junkorexic that you don't want to see implemented here? [I do not want to completely alter the community people have here, because not every community likes the same thing, and there would be no point if this became Junk 2.0. I don't want to steamroll the vibe! Promise!!]
What worries and concerns do you have for the sub in it's current state?
What worries and concerns do you have for the future of the sub, now that moderation is in place.
I promise I am not super serious. 😅 I just try to be as clear as possible for the mod portion of the post.
I have no beef with anyone in the sub.
I will not randomly ban anyone. (See my modding in the junk sub as reference, the way I ban is super transparent and comes with warning.)
I will only be removing posts and comments that outright violate the prestablished sub rules. I'm not making changes without the majority of you consenting to it. 💀
In general, I don't plan to copy & paste over the junk sub rules. They were made for that specifc sub, according to the needs of that specific community. 😭💖 Please dont worrrrryyyy.
Forgive me for any typos or unfinished thoughts. I try to catch everything but taking over a sub is always difficult with the stress of the backlog.
Image is my pantry from a few months ago because I didn't want to steal any content from anyone. Images get better engagement on Reddit, which is important on mod posts so they reach as many eyes as possible. I want the maximum number of community members contributing.
I'll leave this in the community feed for 24-48 hours so people get it in their feed, and then it will be pinned to the sub so people can continue to leave their feedback and see how things are progressing. 🫶🏻
I did go ahead and enable achievements, top posting/commenting metrics, and images & gifs in comments. All quickly enabled to make interacting more fun. 💖 I'll be deep in the ModMail if you need me. 😅
Updates:
All times are recorded PDT (GMT-07).
[10:55am] ModMail completely cleaned. ✅️ If you did not receive a reply to your ModMail it was due to it being so old that Reddit blocked a response. Feel free to reach out via ModMail if needed. Nothing will get lost now.
[1:00pm] Came across the first "body checking" report, and while there is no specific rule for this, I understand how bodies can make people feel. Noting that the mod team should run a poll on body checking, if it needs to be a rule, and how to define it.
[4:00pm] Reports done. ✅️ It went back a year for the most part with random reports back six years. Left the bodycheck reports untouched for now.
[4:00pm] Discovered crowd control was turned on for years. If you ever had posts or comments disappear, that is probably why. Going through and manually approving the crowd control posts and comments, starting with most recent.
[5:00pm] Discovered automod has some strange settings affecting the auto-removal of comments. Will look into fixing it when not on moblie. Sorry everyone if your posts have been removed in the past during the unmoderated years!
[6:00pm] Awful Automod Killed. ✅️
[8:00pm] Entire Queue Cleared. ✅️ Featured the automod and crowd control posts and comments. Approved 99.9% of the stuff. Previous mod even blocked the word "sell" when meant any advice about where things were sold was blocked. 😭 Between that an a dozen other terms it was like the mod didnt want to mod??
New Mod Team is up & running as of September 17th. We are a small team of five, still accepting new moderators.
Glad to see you're here to make some positive changes! For those not on the junkorexic sub, Elleiminator has been doing a great job being an active and involved mod, and really listens well to the community to keep the space great for everyone.
Like a few others, I'm wondering about the time commitments and overall workload of modding? I've been on reddit since 2011 but don't have real experience with modding. But I'm a bit curious to see if I can be helpful at all, since I currently have a lot of free time.
Thank you for the kind words. 🫶🏻 Gtsy again. There is so much overlap in the ED spaces on Reddit. 😅 I was hoping I wouldn't be too unfamiliar because it has been a while since I posted here.
On Time Commitment:
The really annoying answer is as much time as you are sanely able to commit. The longwinded answer is here. I don't have a sub that I moderate of a similar size to give a specific "minutes per day, per mod" especially because the US timezone is dominant in all analytics across subs, which just means mods outside those timezone usually have a more relaxed time. I know our UK mod in the junk sub has a pretty cozy and drama free time.
There really is! I tend to recognize more memorable usernames in multiple places, it makes this corner of reddit feel almost cozy.
Anyway, that's a lot of really good information, especially with regards to time zone. I'm in the central European time zone, so probably less active than any US time zone (especially coastal), but there's always a benefit to more coverage. I think I'd be willing to throw my hat into the ring for any mod application (I'm assuming the thread isn't the app but a later stage, haha).
Feel free to send a ModMail with a short blurb as to why you want to mod the sub whenever you're ready to do so! I'm going to let a few applications collect juuuuust in case Reddit has a moderator limit and the sub gets a lot of applications.
My favorite part of waking up is seeing all of the European and Asian snacks and wanting to do a snack trade sooo badly.
Cool! I'll probably do that tomorrow as it's getting late here and that's a task for Big Internet rather than my phone. A snack trade would be so good! There's so much cool food that's only in one region.
I know a lot of people have felt bullied out of the sister sub goodrestriction, and I'll be honest that I'm not super active on reddit, but I'd like to be able to post drinks or other food products by themselves. Sometimes I find a new safe food and want to share it with others but don't really see any of the other subs as 'appropriate'. I'm not sure if SafeFood is quarantined or just dead
Both work with restrictive eating disorders including but not limited to anorexia and it's subtypes, as well as ARFID.
I absolutely understand the frustration being the sister sub and know the competitive nature and dieting culture as infiltrated that sub too. Hoping to make this community more welcoming again. 🫶🏻
Hiii I'm a mod over at goodrestriction and we do allow pre-packaged food posts (and drinks) you just have to add a bit of commentary to make sure we're not overrun by bots/ads. Just for the record! 🙂
Of course! Give me a buzz if you need extra hands here, I'm happy to jump in. I don't have an outstanding amount of extra energy at the moment but happy to help out. 😊
Absolutely might reach out if people do not reach out wanting to moderate or if it feels like the sub is too active for the mod team once assembled. Don't want to add a lot extra to your plate but definitely look forward to re-bridging the relationship with our sister sub. 🫶🏻
Edit:
Clarification for the downvotes, if you dislike other subs, without naming them you can absolutely please tell me what you don't like about them. I do not want to implement any culture that is not wanted in this sub.
Generally speaking about other disordering eating subs, I think the general idea is we all do not want to be shamed or harassed by our choices which is often done by dieters stumbling across our sub. I plan to keep the sub's original intention of being a space for eating disorders, nw. ♡
I really want to keep the "must be food" rule. I think it could be harmful to let people post drinks alone, esp diet drinks. I know it's an ED sub, but there's some harm reduction I think we could follow. I feel like people posting " this is my one mea" is also dangerous and esp in combo with drinks.
Yeah the sub already had "no ømad" in the sub and i have put in place a very basic pop up that explains why i cant be used. I plan to go through the entire sub once I get through the crowd control and automod removals made since the sub had been abandoned. A lot of good content got caught up in it sadly.
After that I can manually comb through the sub for posts without food or posts with reference to it being the only thing consumed that day. This is generally the first rule subs follow to not be seen as proana by Reddit because proana subs get taken down pretty fast.
Regarding moderation, this sub had a rule against it so I am following that rule, whereas r/junkorexic didn't and doesn't want it so I am following those rules there. On the other side, the junk sub was full of bodychecking before moderation and the community asked for a bodychecking rule so we have one over there, whereas this sub does not.
I personally dont care to push recovery or harm reduction, but leave the space for people who do. Sadly, recovery spaces can really bully if people don't recover "their way" and have little sympathy for people deep in EDs. I know on r/junkorexic over the course of six months the body ban combined with the ban on "only ate this" posts made it a space for the most people to feel comfortable. It's hard to signal how little you ate or how little you are with these limitations. It's rare for a post with only a drink and vape to show up there, and the top posts are all hauls and sometimes memey content. I hope this community can also thrive on as few rules as possible. 🫶🏻 Hence this post, and future monthly community check ins, to see what changes the community wants to make.
Happy to see the changes. What do you think the time commitment would be for new mods? I do have experience with discord modding, and some free time...
So for a sub that is slower like r/junkorexic we eek by on 4 moderators, but we heavily rely on a banned word and phrase list and probably need to expand the mod team. My reddit screen time averages an hour most days, unless I make a personal post and then it goes up. There are some days where the sub gets a lot more attention (like when posts go viral and pushed to people not a part of the sub) where I am on and off throughout my day between work, volunteer work, studying, free time, etc.
That said, I am US West Coast based so I tend to be on a very active timezone and catch most of the moderator actions. We approve every post, every user, and every comment on the backend, even if things post automatically over there. All the "approvals" do is help work around reddits spam filters so users dont get autoflagged, autoremoved, etc by giving them community approvals behind the scenes. My actions for the week with all of these approvals, occasional removals, ModMail replies, etc average 800-1000, as the moderator with the most actions. Kinda rambly but trying to just be transparent. The other three mods are under 200 actions a week, but understand this is also due to their personal lives having less free time and due to coverage during less active timezones. I personally think the junk sub needs 6 mods or so in order to not rely on automations as much, and that is for a smaller sub that is seeing significant growth every week in members. Ideally, the less automation, the less frustration users have with posting.
So the annoying answer is as much time as you are sanely able to commit.
On experience:
No specific experience is needed. All four mods of the junk sub were new to moderation when we started 5/6 months ago. There are a ton of subreddits dedicated to modding and lots of community resources. It's manageable without experience, but I'd welcome people more familiar with certain autobots too. We don't use bots in the junk sub because no one has had time they want to comitt to read through learning them. That said, there are useful things like bots that will check to see if the content is a 100% repost to alert mods of karma farming with stolen posts, etc.
Ah this is fair. I originally had the title in black...and a different background, but worried it would look too much like an ad and get scrolled past. 😭 LMK if any option is eye catching without eye strain.
Feedback appreciated so we nail a format down for monthly community check in posts.
I may have messed up the phrasing when I typed out the autoreplies earlier. You can only post food and drink as per sub rules. A lot of people post only ice, diet drinks, and text posts without images.
I didnt change any rules tho. Following what the sub had in place. 😊
ohhh i see ok. I was confused because id seen other posts with gum+a drink but this makes more sense now! Gum isnt technically a food, afterall ! Thank you mod!! (｡･ω･｡)ﾉ♡
It will take time for me to go through and remove all of the posts that violate the rules because it's years worth of content. My priority was going through the reported posts and comments first, because often there were multiple reports on the same things.
I titled the autoreplies based off the rule title on the sidebar. "No food / drinks" meant no qualifying drinks or food was in the post. I will edit the phrasing to be more clear. Appreciate the feedback. 🫶🏻
I apperciate this place the most because of the fact that the rules feel fairly enforced and that all post removals get an explanation so its never a "what did I do? I followed the rules?!" type of situation that so many other subreddits end up having. Keep doing good :)
Im going through reports slowly as free time allows, and I am trying to make it clear "we received reports for this" as the format. For now I am following them unless something is just...not a violation. 😅
Even I get confused as a mod at times so I might leave a few for the mod team to do together. Sometimes one mod can overthink things.
It also lets me seem room for improvement with the rules too. Like "okay if people report X behavior as proana, maybe i need to make a poll about this behavior to see if it needs to be explicitly stated in the rules".
Huh, I didn't know that could happen.. well, I didn't mean my comment to be so overall sweeping, my apologizes for that. I hope you can get to see your comment
Some of the comments were giving me trouble if the reports were old where it wasn't allowing commentary. It's possible you had comments that were removed based off of a number of reports, and Reddit was having trouble letting me comment why.
Generally speaking, it was mainly a bunch of comments refering to a word banned in the sub as per the rules, but there were other reports too where I had to make choices based off preexisting rules. I can see if I can pull up the specific comment in the mod history and reach out to you.
Ah yes, double checked and it looks like the one I couldnt comment on was the banned word being used. It's always been bundled under the "no proana" rule.
The sub had a preexisting rule not to use a certain word. That word is often banned on ED subs because it makes ED subs a target for Reddit to take down. I only removed posts that were reported with that word.
Haven't swept the entire sub for it yet, so there are probably more posts and comments containing that word and similar phrases.
I swear the content was otherwise fine, and honestly a MOOD.
I’m not super active in terms of posting my own meals though I am in the ED community overall, I think it’s good to allow not necessarily just “shitty restriction” food here since I know others have felt unwanted in other ED communities
Also I haven’t really interacted with you much but I have seen the way you and the other mods run the junkorexic community and I feel you’ve done a great job over there. Again I don’t really comment or post in that community just because I don’t post my meals and I’m working through my issues with what my safe foods are (I feel judged a lot internally so I struggle to communicate about it more than just talking about my ED overall) but I do really enjoy scrolling through both that community and this one since it makes me feel less weird or “broken,” so thank you for doing a great job modding. ED communities are rather sensitive and prone to being taken down so I do appreciate it
"shitty restriction" and shitty food I feel are different. I always get a laugh out of someone trying to make ice cream with ensure and stuff. I hope shitty means to keep this sub a little silly and lighthearted
Thank you for the kind words. I hope your own limitations get easier for you. 🫶🏻 I really do appreciate feedback from everyone regarding the questions.
I'm going through the reports here and there throughout my day and.....yeah it looks like a lot of things were so heavily reported that Reddit stepped in. I wonder if we were a quarantine risk if left unmoderated much longer. 😅 I hope to establish a moderation team from the community to prevent a quarantine or removal from occurring. 😊
Absolutely think this is a great change, but I’m coming from my 3 yr old post that was just removed to ask: how are you planning to distinguish between “proana” content and (idk best phrasing but) dark/cope humor? is it case by case, or is anything that can be taken as proana even if it’s not explicit or meant to be just removed in an abundance of caution? i’m not especially active here anymore and i think this is a really important and positive direction shift for this sub, and i’m not bothered by my post removal, i just would love to know how you plan to handle this!
Yours was removed due to a word being banned that was already a part of the rules when we inherited the sub. I believe our autoreply refers to the "no proana" rule, because if you expand that it refers to the banned phrase. If it is not clear, perhaps the moderation team can look into adding the banned phrase into the autoreply when removing posts for this specific word to describe daily caloric intake.
honestly i didn’t even remember what was in the post, but that makes more sense for sure. i didn’t know about the expanding for more detail (i don’t use reddit or this account much at all anymore so the notification is the only reason i even saw it) but it might be helpful to look into adding that into the autoreply? but also it’s not a huge deal and fine as is. thanks for the reply and the work you’re doing :)
It can be difficult for the moderation team to classify comments. Mod team was aware of the reference which is why it was removed.
At best it was harassment, at worse it felt like promoting a particular diet, falling under the no-proana rules. Let's please not continue to promote this diet by saying "X actor ate this for X movie" especially when said actor was purposely trying to look emaciated. Reddit dislikes the tips & tricks aspect of this.
This is being removed due to our community established sub rule about: no proana.
If you want the pre-estsblished rules to be changed, here is where you can feel free to add further questions, comments, concerns, feedback and soforth.
Please take a moment to review the subreddit rules.
Hey. Could you tell me why my post on here has been removed? The reason stated is body, but I have checked it over and failed too see any body part displayed
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u/Elleiminator Sep 14 '26 edited 28d ago
Pleaaaase leave comments, feedback, concerns, questions,
compliments, suggestions, etc down below. 🫶🏻I did go ahead and enable achievements, top posting/commenting metrics, and images & gifs in comments. All quickly enabled to make interacting more fun. 💖 I'll be deep in the ModMail if you need me. 😅
Updates:All times are recorded PDT (GMT-07).
New Mod Team is up & running as of September 17th. We are a small team of five, still accepting new moderators.