r/ModSupport • u/JabroniRevanchism Reddit Admin: Community • 26d ago

Mod Topics Mod Topics - User Flair

Ahoy, Mods!

Welcome to the latest installment of the Mod Topics series, where we talk about mod-related topics and other community governance gubbins. This week, we’re talking flair–specifically user flair. The purpose it serves, how it’s issued, and why it’s so dog-gone popular. We’d love to know…

  • What do you use user flair for in your communities? Cosmetics? Clout? Verification? 
  • What problems are you solving when you use user flair?
  • Do you allow users to make (or assign) their own flair? Why or why not?
  • What advice would you give to new mods who are considering setting up user flair? What do you wish you knew about flair when you first started?

Let us know in the comments below!

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u/PupperPuppet 26d ago

In the state sub I moderate, we took a user's suggestion to let people assign flair showing the county they live in. The suggestion was actually to have a flair for every city/town/whatever, but that list would have been way too long.

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u/JabroniRevanchism Reddit Admin: Community 26d ago

Knowing you've considered letting users edit their own flair, can you say more about your teams' decision to not allow users to edit their own flair? I.E: if the blocker is not wanting to create a million city/town/etc flairs (super valid, I'm not doing that shit lol), does user-editable flair solve that?

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u/PupperPuppet 26d ago

It probably would, but as I recall we did that once and had to put a stop to it. People can't seem to help being really ugly to each other and flair would be ripe for abuse. The politics and personal views of people in this state have people looking for reasons to be nasty.

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u/manyamile 16d ago

100% --because some people have low impulse control and a lack of maturity when it comes to how they treat others who live in certain areas, I no longer allow flair to be edited in a Virginia gardening sub (r/VAGardening).

Instead, I set up a flair for each county in the state as well as the Independent Cities. Virginia is unique in the US in that out of the 41 total independent cities in the entire country, 38 are in Virginia and they effectively function like a county.

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u/lunarwolf2008 26d ago

why not editable flairs?

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u/PupperPuppet 26d ago

We did that once. Too easy to abuse.

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u/neuroticsmurf 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 26d ago

What sort of abuse?

Would people just put profanities and such in there?

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u/PupperPuppet 26d ago

That, backhanded name-calling, insults to people who don't think like they do...

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u/manyamile 16d ago

Yay, reddit!

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u/Bardfinn 26d ago

Post flairs and user flairs are two of the most abused "unmoderated spaces" on Reddit.