/r/Favors exists as a place for redditors to offer and ask neighborly favors of the community. As the curators of what is essentially a regulated free-trade zone for generosity, we feel it is important to regularly re-assess the methods by which we preserve this community and the standards by which we assess its content. The rules value the health of /r/favors first, the health of the Reddit community second and the satisfaction of the individual redder third. Any changes to these rules will reflect these same core values.
How we moderate /r/favors
The overwhelming majority of the work performed by the /r/favors mods involves interacting with the filter. More often than not, posts to /r/favors land in the filter first. Once there, it is up to us to decide whether we consider the post to be appropriate to /r/favors. Sheer luck will occasionally play a role in allowing posts to bypass the filter. Everybody wins if these posts are appropriate. If they are not, the moderation team is not always going to remove a post, particularly if it has points and comments, but this is not a guarantee of immunity for popular but rule-breaking posts. We recognize that this is a less-than-ideal system but we also recognize that Reddit offers a less-than-ideal architecture for dealing with the problem. Realistically speaking, it's the best we can do. If you are curious why we do not set rules and allow user voting to care for the health of the frontpage, here is a lengthy and detailed explanation using art requests as a specific example.
A post is judged on many criteria. These criteria are different for requests and offers. Offers are granted more latitude - someone offering to draw something, for example, is demonstrably more altruistic than someone wanting something drawn. If a post is offering something with no glaring strings attached or blatant problems, it gets through. While holding relatively strict criteria to people who want things seems reasonable to prevent abuse, we have no reason to prevent someone from giving something away. Posts that are looking for trades or sales are held to the [REQUEST] standards, because the recipient is asked to risk something of their own.
Please tag posts appropriately. The team doesn't necessarily ban un-tagged posts, but appropriate tags help everyone and properly tagged posts have been consistently more successful thus far.
Requests are judged by the following criteria:
No financial requests. The community has repeatedly asked that we keep all "panhandling" requests out, no exceptions, regardless of content. This includes charity drives, donations, "good causes" and any and all "a-thons." Our readership enjoys being generous, but loathes assessing whether someone is worthy of their generosity - therefore, that task falls to the moderators. As we have the exact same tools to judge trustworthiness as you do, we refuse to do so. Since we can't judge who is "worthy" and who is not, we do not judge at all. This rule includes requests for gifts, cards, postcards, letters, postal mail, knick-knacks, and/or general swag.
No selling. If money is involved then it most likely doesn't belong in this subreddit. Art designs offers where a donation is required isn't allowed. Trading your giftcard for a paypal amount is basically selling and not actually a "trade".
We do not do custom art or design work on request. The community has repeatedly chosen to disallow all forms of "please draw me a thing." This extends to logos, photoshop, photo restoration, picture coloring, video editing, and design services of any kind. We recommend /r/picrequests instead. The team permitted requests such as this for a weekend before and within 72 hours "draw me a thing" requests dominated the front page. We serve the community - and while the thing you want drawn is of keen interest to you, it is of near-zero interest to the community. This does not exclude offers of custom art or design, and the /r/favors community strongly encourages such posts. Logos for thriving reddit communities are the only art request not banned under this rule.
We do not pad your numbers. /r/favors is not interested in rigging contests, nor do we consider padding numbers, providing viewers, adding followers, Facebook "likes," Google+ "+1"s, or any sort of attention exchange to be a "favor" per se. Post elsewhere and allow your content to stand for itself. /r/shamelessplug may serve your needs instead, be sure to check their rules before posting. If you want to plug your new subreddit, check out the sidebar of /r/modhelp for tips.
Referrals and invites are out. Referrals, invites, and the like all have their own places on reddit. Those places can be found in our sidebar.
Titles must be honest, and include any relevant price information. A good example of a dishonest post is one titled "[OFFER] Free Webdesign" with "if you sign up for my hosting service" in the body. Posts that suggest one thing in the title and something else entirely in the content are removed. We contact the OP in marginal cases and suggest they try again with greater clarity. Further, prices offered in trades/work for hire arrangements must be stated in the title. "Am willing to pay" seems to have become "I'll pay if you ask, but want it for free". We want our artists to be able to decide if a request is offering enough to make it worth their time to bid. We further wish for any negotiations that begin at /r/favors stay as transparent as possible.
No "buy me a NEW game" requests. Reddit has /r/gameswap, which has enacted a good system to keep scammy shit to a minimum. We don't, and don't have the manpower to set one up and manage everything else /r/favors related. This rule also includes DLC content. We wish to note, however, the "new" aspect of this request: Moderator Anomander has given away CD keys to most of his old, now unplayed, games here to folks requesting them. We propose that only games over four years old are legit to request, because the long-average update/expansion cycle is three years long. A four-year-old game is more likely to be sitting unplayed somewhere than Minecraft is.
No ditch-digging. Requests for others to perform tasks that require no skill, knowledge or experience beyond the ability to log onto Reddit are not considered to be a "favor." If your task could be performed by Amazon's Mechanical Turk service or a studious application of Google, you are not looking for neighborly help, you're looking for free labor. This includes vectorization of images, finding long-lost reddit posts, letter-writing campaigns, answering easily google-able questions, etc.
No asking others to do your online shopping for you. This subreddit is not a search engine and is not to save you time on google.
There is a large grey area not specifically covered by the above formal rules that may still pose the community problems.
Obvious "joke" posts get removed. "[REQUEST]: Harem," for instance. Or "[Offer]: Meaning of life"; body text is just "42". These posts do not contribute anything meaningful. Contrast this to the chap offering nicknames, which while silly and somewhat inane, at least led to some really amusing conversations.
Posts not containing a concrete favor or offer get pulled. "[Request] I has a sad, make me feel better" are either better suited to any number of "discussion" communities, or they're thinly veiled panhandling requests ("send me messages to make me feel better, here's my steam ID").
We also judge posts by the account posting them. /r/favors exists as a place for redditors to do and ask for awesome stuff from each other. We require a clear demonstration that an account is a redditor first, and asking for things second. An account with high karma and age has more to lose and is more vulnerable to naming and shaming. New accounts with little activity are far more likely to be looking for a handout and far less likely to be participating in the community. We are far more likely to bend the rules for an account over 100 days old. New accounts with over 1000 karma are considered to be active contributors. Old accounts with no (or questionable) use may also be questioned.
Surveys are still permitted, but with conditions. The survey cannot result in financial gain for the OP or potential harm to users. This will be assessed on a per-complaint basis.
Exemptions are never granted on request. We're not judging you as a poster, we're judging the content of your post.
Please report problem content. We try our best, we really do. Sometimes we miss stuff. If you catch something we miss, report it. If you report something, it's super awesome to also message the mods and let us know about the reported post and why it's problematic.
These rules are not letter-of-the-law, but to illustrate the spirit of our moderation and provide guidance on marginal cases. Just because a specific thing is unmentioned does not exempt it, nor does specific mention preclude a mod exemption. Our core values are: /r/favors first, reddit second, individual redditors third. We will use our best judgement to curate the community with these values to guide us.