Hello community!

In light of recent events it seemed like a good idea to create a post about the modteam and increase the transparency. We’ve received quite a few questions and it seems that the community doesn’t always know what we do, how we do it and how we reach decisions. Reddit doesn’t work like most forums, which means the modteam also works in a different way. We’d like to clear things up as far as possible.

The team
Our team consists of 23 mods: 17 men, 3 women and 3 robots, with our ages ranging from 18-35. Almost all of us live in NA, EU or AUS, together we speak over 15 languages (and some programming languages) and we span the ladder from unranked to Bronze to Diamond. We all moderate next to our own daily commitments like education, work, significant others, children, parents, friends, sports and the list goes on and on. We have a Skype group with all the moderators to stay in touch and be able to make quick decisions where necessary. A lot of brainstorming and discussion goes on in there, although we use modmail and our own subreddit (more on those later) for formal discussions that need to involve the whole team.

There is 1 head moderator (top of the list) who the team has elected when the previous head moderator left. The head mod has leadership responsibility and is expected to be available to resolve emergency situations. Individual members can contact them when they have issues with procedures or other team members. There are also two elected facilitator mods that support the head moderator these activities; they’re expected to maintain a culture of cooperation and make sure the team follows our decisionmaking process (more on that later).

Most mods are 'fulltime' mods; they’re expected to participate in the decision making process and dedicate a minimum amount of time to moderating activities each month. We also have a few (temporarily) parttime mods; due to circumstances in their daily life they are unable to dedicate a consistent amount of time to moderating. They are urged to step down if they don’t expect this to be a temporary change.

The three robots all have different functions. Automoderator is a well known moderator created by admin /u/Deimorz that gives us many extra functionalities. We use it mostly to remove content that breaks the rules (RP scamsites, account selling, porn, etc) and moderate comments (hatespeech, Twitch memes, etc). LoLbot helps us in tracking, controlling and removing spam. Xzile helps us with applying flairs.

Moderating
Moderating on reddit means we have limited tools. Most of our modding is done in modqueue. This is a list where everything you guys report shows up. If we click on “reports”, we can see report reasons. It’s also one of the ways we use Automoderator: certain words or titles trigger it to report threads to us. We have the option to remove, mark as spam or approve anything that’s been reported.

Another big part of moderating is modmail. This is where messages that subscribers have sent the mods go. Any message you send to us (by clicking on "message the moderators") goes to the whole team and any reply we make is visible to the rest. Sometimes we get many, many messages on a busy day, which explains why we miss messages sometimes.

Decision making
We have our own private subreddit in which we communicate with each other. We use it to discuss issues, policy and rules for the subreddit. We have a structured and predefined decisionmaking process to make sure everyone in the team has the chance to be involved and we can reflect on it later if need be:

If a teammember has an idea for the subreddit that they are unsure about, they can create a Brainstorm-thread. In this thread they can share an idea that they’d like to discuss with the rest of the team. They can then use whatever input they received to come up with a concrete idea for a Proposal-thread. In this thread, the moderator suggests a change, a policy or a new feature for the subreddit that is much more fleshed out than a Brainstorm thread. The rest of the team can give their final input before the teammember then takes it to a vote (this has to be done within a few weeks of the Proposal thread). This process has been created over the past years through trial & error and is there to make sure individual moderators don’t go ham and create rules for themselves.

Whenever we see something that makes it to the front page, we require at least one other moderator to give a “+1” (unless there are no other mods available at all, which barely ever happens). That way it’s never any single moderator that removes something that has reached front page.

Reddit & Riot
We have several ways of being in touch with Riot. First of all, there’s the infamous Skype chatroom that has been reported on a little while back. It’s a chatroom with any moderator who has signed the NDA and the Riot NOC team, who’s responsible for server maintenance. Here’s the type of conversation that usually takes place in there. Whenever we see a spike in server issue reports we let them know, they check the servers and let us know what the problem is. It helps us keep the header updated, which will be even more present in our new CSS (check it out here: /r/lolcsstest). In addition, they let us know when issues have been resolved and things should be going back to normal.

We also have a contact person within Riot who lets us know which reddit accounts should get a Riot-flair. Accounts that haven’t been presented to us by this individual will not be flaired; it’s our process to make sure only Rioters actually get the Riot flair. This person also helps us out with stuff for you guys, like when we had our big 500K subscribers party.

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This subreddit is massive; between 8 and 9 million unique visitors, hundreds of thousands of comments and thousands of posts are created each month. On a monthly basis we have over 25000 human actions (approving, removing, banning, moderator comments, etc) and about 25000 bot actions. And it keeps growing every day... Sometimes it's quite a challenge, but we try to keep up!

We hope this post makes it a bit more clear who we are, what we do and how we do it. If you have any questions please ask so in this thread (or through modmail) and we will try to answer.