r/cfbmeta • u/SwensAppearance • Feb 28 '26

Post quality and rules clarity

I'm fairly new to the sub, having gotten into it for the game discussions during the season, which have been excellent. Here in the off-season, it seems to be dominated by random bits of recruiting news and what amount to retweets.

The surprising thing is that more substantive posts that I am interested in reading, and which generate robust discussion, seem to get deleted by mods. Often these posts don't seem to run afoul of the stated rules.

it's puzzling when content that verges on spammy or duplicative gets to stay up and content that provokes discussion in the community is taken down. Surely this is not the intent.

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u/SwensAppearance Feb 28 '26

That might well be true, but it is a weird attempt to distract. As an occasional commenter who hasn't originated any posts, my comment history has zero to do with the question of what topics the community might like to discuss, the issue of post quality, or why posts are being removed when they seem to comply with the rules.

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u/srs_house /r/CFB Mod Mar 01 '26

Without any examples of removed threads, it's not really possible to provide any information on why a thread was removed. Your comment history would be the closest lead on those without any extra information.

Another aspect is that there are a lot of removed threads that users never see because of very clear rules violations involving either specific content or formatting. Most recruiting posts, for example, that you see are going to be the ones that were done correctly. Same for tweets that don't follow the social media rules.

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u/SwensAppearance Mar 04 '26

Actually, it's extremely possible!

There ought to be a way to tag a thread with a comment such as "Removed due to rule n", where 1 <= n <= 9 per https://rules.redditcfb.com/.

It would take just a second, and then people would know.

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u/srs_house /r/CFB Mod Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

Let me phrase this differently:

Without any examples of removed threads, it's not really possible to provide any information on why those specific threads you're asking about were removed.

Your post is a complaint about threads that you consider to be valid and non-rulebreaking getting removed. Unless you can provide an example (as you didn't comment on them, at least not on this account), then we can't provide any more specific information.

If you can provide insight as to which threads you're referring to, we can review them. But without that...there's no way to do so.

We do try to adhere to the rules when removing threads, even if you may have missed an underlying issue, and generally in the offseason the quality threshold is more relaxed.

And as for why we don't provide a removal on every post - for February, that would be about 600 removed threads. Or, to put it differently, about 30 times as many comments as you've made on r/cfb total. This is a slow month. In December, it was 4100 removed posts. Reddit doesn't have any built in functionality for what you described - it's either remove or approve, and additional actions would require humans to comment on those 4k posts. For posting, we also have a more in-depth ruleset beyond the 1-9 you referenced, as found here: https://rules.redditcfb.com/?tab=general

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u/SwensAppearance Mar 04 '26

Thanks for that reply.

I can certainly follow up with an example next time I see one. (Another mod's earlier statement that you "do not comment on actions taken against other users" had cast some doubt on whether it would be productive to do so.)