Update 1: Thanks for your patience, IRL got in the way. The responses to this post are quite varied, and that makes me happy that we discussed this instead of me unilaterally just banning posts and narrowing our scope. The discussion also helped us uncover ideas I wouldn't have realised on my own. Thank you all for being a community, and not just in name.
Due to the way online forums work, multiple replies suggesting they'd be happy with my decision whatever it is, and my previous experiences being too bureaucratic in casual communities, I've decided to instead make small adjustments which we can extend (or revert) easily if they don't work.
- I've added a kangaroo emoji to draw attention to the community title and to the fact that this is an Australian-themed place
- I've added a new rule: "News posts must include some body text explaining how the article is particularly relevant to the Australian perspective, rather than mere global news."
- Zagorath has offered to create an automated bot to remind posters of that rule. In the meantime, I've added them as a moderator to give us an extra pair of hands - although I want to say I'm already satisfied with the admin team's help, that was reassuring to see.
Also, in response to Nath's advice, I'm considering if the group name should change to Overseas Tidings, yes because of the pun, but admittedly I didn't even know that word so I won't go forth with that unless there's community backing.
A user has pointed out that a recent post about the US military doesn't appear to follow Rule 1 of this community, and I now notice many other recent posts from various users are also straying further and further away from having direct links to our region.
While one can argue that these posts are significant or insightful to Aussies, and I agree, these stories are general world news, for which there are many other communities on federated instances, and which may overshadow the regional-specific news that is unlikely to interest users outside of our region.
I want to begin a conversation to find out whether this community is in support of our team enforcing the rule more strictly, to keep this community in line with it's unique purpose.
I also propose that news about international conflicts, such as the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and Middle-Eastern conflicts, should also be considered as general global news unless the news itself specifically discusses the involvement of Australia or another country in our region. While Australia is continuously participating in these conflicts, and while I believe that's an important political and economic issue for Australians to grapple with, general updates on conflicts we're involved in are more suited to other global news communities.
I'm also considering adding more staff to this community to help prevent rule-violating posts staying up for hours or days if existing staff are busy, to avoid normalising general world news here and avoid non-community think tank spam from abusing this community.
I haven't yet locked or deleted existing posts which may violate this rule, even if I believe some cases are clear violations, because I don't want to suddenly clamp down on posts on a whim when they were normal to post before.
Tagging fellow community staff: @lodion@aussie.zone and [inactive account?] @deadcat@aussie.zone
Tagging all posters from the past month, as this rule affects new posts: @zero_gravitas@aussie.zone @arbilp3@aussie.zone @Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone @maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone @Eyekaytee@aussie.zone @TheHolm@aussie.zone @bpalmerau@aussie.zone
I suspect most rule violations are probably committed out of ignorance, rather than malice. Most people probably don't read the sidebar.
I wonder if it wouldn't be useful to have a very simple filter. A bot that replies to every post, and asks the user to check if they're following the rule.
Going a step further, the bot could tell the user to downvote the comment if it is following the rule, in which case the bot would delete its own comment. Anything where the OP did not downvote the bot's comment within, say, an hour, gets removed by the bot. Its message could also (optionally) threaten banning the user if the violation is clear. No automated enforcement of that, but if a human reviews it and finds that not only did it break the rule, but it very obviously did and there's no excuse for not knowing it, the human could then follow up with a ban.
Would there be any interest in something like that? Either the whole thing or just the first half? I've had a little experience developing Lemmy bots before and would be interested to try my hand at it.
I'm interested, I haven't seen Lemmy helper bots in action yet so I'm curious. Cloudflare might be a problem you'd need to negotiate with the admin.
As you suspect, and I agree, most rule breaking on this site will either be users who've skipped over the rules, or have forgotten them when posting quickly. So a simple, nonthreatening reminder should be adequate, without making good-faith users feel uncomfortable. I suggest something like "Thanks for posting. Please review the rules in our sidebar, and then downvote this reply to confirm, otherwise your post may be automatically deleted after an hour. Most importantly, make sure your post body includes an explanation of why this news is relevant to an Australian perspective - you can do this by editing your post if needed." - it's snappy, and it shouldn't surprise anyone who didn't pay much attention.
I don't know how necessary this bot will be, but we can make it low-risk of malfunctioning and use it as a low-stakes experiment that other comms can be inspired by, so if you're itching for a project, then feel welcome!
I've written a bot for Lemmy before. You can see it on !dailygames@lemmy.zip if you're interested. I agree completely re the messaging being as nonthreatening as possible.
An hour is a fairly short period of time. 24 hours is probably too long. Something in between those.
If people aren't intetested in this but you want to try your hand at a bot, I think I could think of something on one of my communities. Maybe a weekly post of National air quality or something on AusEnviro or we could vote on c/rage for a favourite aus music show that the bot could post each week. Or something else, just spitballin.
The bot would be immediately replying to a post a user has just made. I figure in that context, an hour should be more than enough time for the person who posted it to confirm that they've followed the rules.