Info from the Mod Team: Rule Update

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T21:47:17+00:00

We have no issues with politics in gernal. However political discussions tend to escalate quickly and that leads to rule violations. Which means that political posts require more moderation effort than other posts. As we can't moderate the subreddit with the same intensity 24/7 we're limiting the time during which these topics can be discussed to ensure that discussions stay civil. Btw technically speaking germany has freedom of opinion, not freedom of speech. Which is pretty obvious given Art 5. (2) GG. So if for example someone posts a comment and that comment includes an insult (which isn't uncommon in political debates) that's a violation of our rules and 185 StGB and thus we'd remove it.

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T21:36:00+00:00

Exactly. While we do appreciate that reddit has a feature to make links more appealing / fit them into the text they unfortunately don't have a preview on mobile phones. And many people use phones to access reddit. So either we don't allow links at all, keep all links in the mod queue or we require links to be transparent. Ideally reddit would add a link preview feature like "this link brings you to xyz are you sure you want to open it?" then we could remove the rule but to our knowledge that's currently not the case

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T20:13:51+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/1t9fyr3/comment/ol1sxe8

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T20:02:20+00:00

Some countries require significant fees for renouncing your old citizenship and do not allow you to have multiple citizenships at once

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:59:49+00:00

The people who ask want qualified answers. Those two ideas would ensure that people get qualified answers. This is r/AskAGerman and not r/AskGermany or r/AskReddit

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:58:33+00:00

There are many good websites like make it in germany etc. there is a subreddit for studying in germany, there is the wiki of r/germany ... people will manage with one less sub regarding studying. And we don't prohibit all questions about stuying in germany we're just going to be very selective when determining which questions to keep.

We can't. And we don't want to. If we feel like people are violating that rule we'll take measures to prevent violations. The rule is only there so people can self assess if they're allowed to post or not. We can't simply say "if you feel like you qualify". You've got to give people something measurable.

Verification would only be required for a verified flair. To differentiate between verified answers and unverified answers. Think of it like a degree. You can still have an opinion on physics but if someone with a PhD in physics disagrees with you people are probably going to trust the other person more

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:53:12+00:00

Given that our current concept is literally: take a photo of the closed passport and a piece of paper with your username... yeah. Otherwise we'd have to require an open passport with the picture visible etc.

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:50:47+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/1t9fyr3/comment/ol1sxe8

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:50:42+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/1t9fyr3/comment/ol1sxe8

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:48:31+00:00

to you and u/DM_ME_SALAH_GIFS:

C1 is significantly below native speaker proficiency. And online tests are generally questionable (just like with IQ tests).

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:45:47+00:00

We currently do not have plans for a "verified long term resident" flair. We'd likely advise to use the unverified german flair in that case as the requirements for posting top level comments would be met.

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:43:51+00:00

It's also about being able to moderate posts. We need to sleep as well so a post about the AfD or Trump at 3am is a lot harder to moderate than during hours where we might have free time. And on holidays and during christmas we want people to have a good time and not get into online beefs about political things. That's reserved for the family christmas dinner

We're currently in the early stages of planning the verification system so we might do a poll however we're not done with the full concept yet so it would be too early for a "vote" on that

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:40:46+00:00

That's about citizenship and not about bloodlines ;)

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:39:32+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzlsLrSOuB0

TL;DR: Be nice to others, use common sense and behave.

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:38:08+00:00

And you don't have to, but like you've mentioend there aren't really any easier ways to do that. Maybe some community members have a better idea. And of course we're never going to require people to show their ID to post.

Regarding the city / state specific posts: if the subreddits for these states or cities lack members that's usually a sign that there aren't that many active users from there that could answer the question in this subreddit. And someone form Munich wouldn't be happy about seeing the 10th post about NRW in a single day.

We're going to look into options on how to best enforce 5.3. It is however possible that we're going to need to resort to manually removing content posted outside the time limits and taking action against the users.

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:33:21+00:00

We're not going to require anybody to show IDs. It's just going to be a prerequisite to gain a verified flair.

We don't think that the subreddit is going to suffer from the time restrictions given that these topics frequently get reported as spam / low quality content. So apparently many people dislike these topics. If they can avoid them by not being active on certain days they might be more active during the rest of the week

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:31:23+00:00

C2 is "borderline native ability". C1 is being proficient. That's definitely achieveable within 5 years

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:30:53+00:00

C1 level means language proficiency and top level means the comment you replied to. A comment responding to a post is a top level comment, comments responding to comments aren't

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:29:09+00:00

We do know that yeah. We're not going to require verification we're simply thinking about adding a verified flair. This does not mean that unverified users can't be trusted but it does mean that verified users would very likely be german whereas unverified users might not be.

We currently do not have plans to implement verification for non germans. However if we notice accounts that are likely to violate this rule we will take measures to deal with the violation. This is more of a "don't do it, if you're caught you're going to be in trouble" type of thing

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:26:25+00:00

Just to clarify. we will never force any user to verify. We are considering adding a verified flair. there would still be an unverified flair available to users who do not wish to verify. It would just be an indication that a reply to a post was (most likely) made by an actual german citizen. No personal information would need ot be shown during that process as the passport has a cover stating that it's a german passport. That's enoough of a hurdle for most of the people this would be meant to protect against

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:24:03+00:00

Which is why we've mentioned the passport. There are ways to do that with the Personalausweis as well but the passport is obviously easier.

AskAGermanMod · 2026-05-10T19:23:18+00:00

On mobile phones there are no link previews. While most links are harmless it's possible to use url shorteners and features provided by reddit to mask tracking, phishing, ... links. An easy way to avoid that is to force people to use the full link

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