You may have noticed that /r/IAmA was recently set to "private" for a short period of time. A full explanation can be found here, but the gist of it is that Victoria was unexpectedly let go from Reddit and the admins did not have a good alternative to help conduct AMAs. As a result, our current system will no longer be feasible.

Chooter (Victoria) was let go as an admin by /u/kn0thing. She was a pillar of the AMA community and responsible for nearly all of reddit's positive press. She helped not only IAMA grow, but reddit as a whole. reddit's culture would not be what it is today without Victoria's efforts over the last several years.

We have taken the day to try to understand how Reddit will seek to replace Victoria, and have unfortunately come to the conclusion that they do not have a plan that we can put our trust in. The admins have refused to provide essential information about arranging and scheduling AMAs with their new 'team.' This does not bode well for future communication between us, and we cannot be sure that everything is being arranged honestly and in accordance with our rules. The information we have requested is essential to ensure that money is not changing hands at any point in the procedure which is necessary for /r/IAmA to remain equal and egalitarian. As a result, we will no longer be working with the admins to put together AMAs. Anyone seeking to schedule an AMA can simply message the moderators or email us at AMAVerify@gmail.com, and we'd be happy to assist and help prepare them for the AMA in any way. We will also be making some future changes to our requirements to cope with Victoria's absence. Most of these will be behind-the-scenes tweaks to how we help arrange AMAs beforehand, but if there are any rule changes we will let you all know in a sticky post.

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We'd like to take this moment to thank Victoria for all of her work on thousands of AMAs. Her cheerfulness, attitude, work ethic, and so many other attributes made her the perfect person for this job. We mods truly feel that she is irreplaceable. Thanks for everything, /u/Chooter, and we wish you the best of luck going forward.

Thank you all for your patience during this debacle (and for the hundreds of messages of support!), and we hope to have many interesting AMAs for you all in the future. Please let us know if you have any questions in the comments below! Additionally, a former admin has asked to do an AMA about his experiences with Reddit, and you can ask him questions about the inner workings of the site as soon as his AMA goes live here.

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Edit July 5, 2015 - Alexis Ohanian (/u/kn0thing) has been working with us over the weekend to institute new protocols for how reddit, inc. will work with the mods of communities looking to hosts AMAs (including, but limited to r/IAmA). The goal is to create a much more 'hands off' system regarding the scheduling and facilitation of AMAs. He has described the team of existing admins in charge of funneling AMAs to the right mods for scheduling in the interim. This team will be replaced by a full time employee in the future.

He has also described the new team in charge facilitating AMAs and some of their broader objectives concerning integrating talent as consistent posters rather than one off occurrences. This more relates to the site as a whole rather than how /r/IamA functions day to day. While we're still unhappy with how this transition occurred, it would be unfair for us not to publicly recognize the recent efforts on the part of the site administration to 'make it right'.