The Situation

I'm making this post out of transparency for the /r/cofounder community in a good faith effort to make sure people know that a bug was fixed in our automation that may have removed a few legitimate posts by mistake. I do not need to do this, and I have no obligation as a mod to do so. However, I have always operated my communities with transparency and I'm a big fan of honestly and open communication, per my profile and acceptance of radical honesty. In addition, I have a long history of being honest with you all and I don't want to break that. Also, I feel the claims made by the spammer in their attempt to be allowed to break the rules needs a response.

So here is what happened:

• Months ago we got attacked by a spam bot. The primary use of this bot was to spam "remote" jobs on our community that did not align with our rules or goals to connect people with others who are more local to them, to build lasting communities of local founders in every country. It just wanted to get victims in other countries to send them money to do projects and as a third party vendor was not allowed by our rules to be here, anyway.

• Our subreddits auto moderator automation was updated to mitigate that spam, and assure that people were correctly saying what country they were in, and then updated to remove the ability to use the word "remote" altogether as well as to assure that ISO3 codes are used for countries in our posting format. I had been up all night and of course, thats when this happened. This was 2 different steps and that's part of what caused this bug, because code from one step made it into another in the wrong order.

• This code was then forgotten about and ran successfully for months due to the poor interface that reddit provides mods to tell automod what to do. It did not seem to remove many posts, and I am only aware of the one at this time. I will research this, anyway, because I feel its important, when I have some time. I really do want to be fair, and as you all know I put a LOT of effort into treating everybody equally.

• A user then INTENTIONALLY violated multiple subreddit and reddit rules by intentionally posting fake posts from fake accounts to test the automation in a way that is again against our rules, but in doing that, was able to find the defect in the automation as a result of the prior antispam code. They hit the defect, but only because they violated the rules so many times in intentional ways that violated both this communities rules, and the reddit rules themselves.

• This user then came to the wrong conclusion about why the antispam code was there, and then made some posts in anger to the mod in public that that also violated our rules and made some false claims after they found that they could not post their social media website clone projects, or links in their posts, because these are both also considered spam. Both of these things are against our rules anyway, so the antispam code, while a clear defect that I have already fixed, was NOT the blocking issue or the reason the original post was removed by automod as they tried to include links and other things that violated our rules initially.

• The user in question is currently banned form this community for breaking our rules multiple times and actively trying to get past the automation to post links and clone projects in violation of our rules because they also violated reddits own rules by using fake accounts to post and get around antispam measures after they tried and failed to post outbound links and violated our other rules.

Note: My hands are tied by reddit rules.

I'm personally on the fence about this ban as I can see a legitimate reason for a person who has their post removed due to a mistake in the antispam automation being angry in this case ,IF the person had not broken so many rules to find the defect, but that is not what happened, and as this user just made bad assumptions and was breaking our rules anyway, I still feel like the ban applies if I am trying to be fair, because other people have been banned for violating the same rules - spamming links, falsifying their country, etc. - and I don't want to give the person who clearly broke our rules intentionally a free pass to do so.

I also have to take into account the fact I personally feel they broke reddit rules by attacking the community and posting fake things intentionally that they knew would violate rules they clearly knew about, so the person will stay banned unless I'm told by an admin I'm allowed to do otherwise.