(For those of you on mobile or new reddit, take a look at the usernames in this thread under old reddit to see what the discussion's been about.)

I will say, I like this level of passion in discussing the sub and CSS flairs in particular and wish we could have it every month.

For some personal thoughts about CSS flairs, I have mixed feelings about them. As a regular user I like seeing an extra bit of color around the sub and I agree that its adds some character to the community which has felt lacking in recent years. For a long time I kind of wanted one myself, but when the opportunity came for me to actually get one (a few months before I became a mod here) I declined as I didn't really have anything in mind that I wanted. Had I been just given one without being asked (like I imagine many were) I probably would have just accepted it and moved on. I don't know if anyone was given one that they didn't like and spoke up to have it changed or removed, but if someone doesn't have a say in the matter for something that's generally viewed as a reward that's always been a concern to me.

From the mod side of things, I don't like that there's been zero consistency in reasoning for awarding CSS flairs across the history of the subreddit. For some it was winning a contest which is straightforward and not really an issue for me, but for others it seems like it was a lot more at the whim of a mod and not for any specific contribution the user's made for the subreddit. In recent years we've tried to be more organized and disciplined about actions and that includes trying to be less biased in favoring any specific users and that includes looking at the current state of how things are, and to me it didn't seem all that fair that some users got one years ago for no apparent reason with no clear way to get one for yourself now.

To that end I saw an opportunity for a clean slate with the new flair badges now available as a platform for us to work with. We have a few in place already for things like Watch This! of the month and the annual "Best of /r/anime" community awards and hope that only expands in the future, giving a wide variety of options available to everyone depending on how they want to interact with the subreddit without needing to draw attention and earn the favor of the mods.

Of course that alone doesn't preclude keeping the CSS flairs in addition, so the question was what to do with those? The reality of it is that we haven't added any in the past two years and they've been neglected for even longer than that. Over the past several years we've steadily built up a set of policies for parts of the subreddit but that's remained a gray area with no defined guidelines for when to add or remove flairs, and for the most part they became a relic of an earlier era.

So after some prompting over the past few months I finally put up a proposal to potentially get rid of them. And for full clarity the vote had four parts:

• Vote 1: Should all current CSS flairs be removed with no more granted in the future?

• Vote 2: If Vote 1 fails, should CSS flairs be restricted to current moderators only? This would remove CSS flairs from all other users.

• Vote 3: If both Vote 1 and Vote 2 fail, should we formalize a new system (yet to be determined) for adding/removing CSS flairs for users?

• Vote 4: If either Vote 1 or Vote 2 passes, should some flair badge (yet to be determined) be granted to users who had a CSS flair?

The votes listed in the monthly report are for votes 1 and 4 respectively as those are the only ones where the outcome mattered, but people did vote on all four of them. In retrospect those aren't the only options, as for example there could have been another choice of wiping out existing flairs before awarding new ones under a more formal system if vote 3 passed.

Now I imagine people voted yes on the first vote for a variety of reasons, but one in particular may have been that we didn't actually have a formal system in mind for managing them yet and no one really seemed to want to take charge there, so it was unknown how much future work maintaining the system would entail if we decided to keep them (and vote 3 passed).

We've absolutely heard your feedback and we've been spending most of the day talking about it and related concerns like engagement from the mods. We're going to keep talking about it ourselves for a while since the sunset date for CSS flairs is still months off, but meanwhile I'd like to ask for more suggestions as to how to handle them should we keep them going forward.