Hi /r/Canada,

We need to have a discussion about submission content again, as the moderators are unsure of how best to handle this.

First, as a bit of a preamble, I'd like to remind everyone about Rediquette, and what that means in our community. We encourage subscribers to PLEASE UPVOTE posts which are diverse and well reasoned, even if you disagree with the opinion expressed by the commenter themselves. The goal here is to have a balanced discussion, one where opinions are respected and where discussion can take place in an honest manner.

Likewise, we definitely encourage you to downvote posts which are overly hostile. Please note however that emotional posts are sometimes distinct from hostile posts. We all get worked up when arguing about something in which we strongly believe, and it's understandable that people's emotions sometimes get the best of them. As long as posts aren't obviously rude or hostile, please have some understanding.

Furthermore, as moderators we rely on the community to "police itself" as much as we can. But in order for us to do this, the community needs to show that it's capable of downvoting posts which fall outside the spirit of the rules, and those posts which don't follow proper rediquette. Too often we see posts merely voted upon based on popular or unpopular opinions, and that's not something we're trying to strive towards. We also implore you to please stop upvoting very similar stories at the same time or within the timeframe of a few days. We understand that not everyone sees everything all the time, so "reposts" are sometimes understandable, but we really do need your help with this as much as possible.

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Now, as some of you may have noticed, there has been a recent influx of Temporary Foreign Worker related posts of late, and most of them appear to be coming from a couple of users all linking to a website called ntfw.ca. Now personally, I'm pretty appalled at the TFW program, and definitely think that exposure of such issues is both a valid and worthwhile cause, even on /r/Canada. The concern that we have as moderators is that it seems a couple of users are "gaming" the subreddit and spamming almost every single article posted on that website, which isn't something that we entourage. It also somewhat violates reddit's guidelines regarding spam, particularly from a rather non-mainstream website.

Of interest is also the users' collective post histories, where we have a number of very old reddit accounts who haven't posted in a number of years all starting to post links from that website at the same time.

Now, generally we would be okay with letting the community decide with upvotes, but reddit's voting system is not immune to gaming, and the large influx of suspicious posts leads us to believe that something is not working as it should. When very repetitive articles get posted and always upvoted to the first few posts on the front-page, either you as users are not doing a good job filtering redundant posts (which lets face it, sometimes we need to be better at this), or something else is going on. I suppose the third option is that readers are so interested in this that they feel most posts should be related to this issue, but I honestly don't feel that only focusing on one issue (even the "hot button topic") is beneficial to us as a community.

The purpose of this post is to get some feedback on how you feel we should handle both these posts and similar things in the future. If the community has shown that it isn't capable of filtering out duplicate/similar posts, should we be taking a moderate and reasonable amount of action to try and ensure that the content of the subreddit is diverse and not just used as a staging point for various interest groups?

Thanks for your continued engagement and understanding. Hopefully everyone has a good Father's Day (hint hint, for those of you who forgot ;) ).