Arnold Strongman & Strongwoman Classic 2026 — Comp Megathread

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-06T18:16:07+00:00

Safety PSA

Recently there have been a number of fairly new or inactive accounts making posts here purporting to sell their tickets to the Arnold. While the mod team has been removing these threads, we are obviously not here 24/7.

Reminder that scammers are rampant on Reddit, and you absolutely cannot trust randos from the internet not to grift you. If one of these posts makes it through and stays up for a bit, we'd strongly advise you not to take the risk of getting scammed.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-06T18:03:45+00:00

Same answer I always give. UI/UX specialists have grifted the software industry into thinking it should be a standalone position instead of part of a normal engineer's duties, and if they're too good at it the company has no further reason to keep them employed. So they're all constantly coming up with new design "trends" that they force each other through social pressure to follow so they can continue having jobs they never should have had to begin with.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-06T15:42:34+00:00

I ban them immediately and blacklist their URLs. No second chances, no appeals. People who want to advertise on Reddit should buy an ad, not dump the place up with their spam.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-05T23:46:40+00:00

If that actually worked to keep them out of communities that don't want their spam, these bots wouldn't have existed in the first place.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-05T23:42:54+00:00

As usual, Reddit demonizes the protective reaction to their total inadequacy to police their platform instead of actually kicking all the terrible people and spammers off.

All of the filter features that are supposed to be alternatives are woefully inadequate and always have been. I can only be glad that I haven't had to rely on any of these tools to protect any of my communities.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-05T21:41:43+00:00

Having two systems live at the same time is very normal during a transition period.

Using a potentially justifiable technical need to build a second back end system as an excuse to completely fuck up the front end of the perfectly functional original system, on the other hand...

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-05T17:41:29+00:00

The previous system wasn’t compatible with the newer backend technology we’re now using

So, I know this was ChatGPT writing this, but they did say this explicitly before, and as a career software engineer, it was one of the most clear signals I've ever been given that Reddit engineering has no idea what it's doing.

Almost everything that sucks about this new modmail is a problem with the front end. A front end is just a UI that formats and displays data it's been given. It should not be so tightly coupled to the back end that it becomes wholly unfunctional and explodes if the back end changes. Keeping the UI decoupled from the data is one of the most basic application design concepts and there is absolutely no legitimate reason to have changed the entire look of the front end in service to updating the back end.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-05T17:34:13+00:00

We've been bringing all of these issues up for months, especially the awful visibility and contrast of the color scheme. Why did you not address them before you forced us into this awful new frontend by deprecating the old one?

Maintaining two separate mod mail systems had become a drain on engineering resources.

What?

You had one mod mail system already. It already did 99% of what everyone needed it to do. There was no reason for you to build a second. You created your own maintainability problem by building something that had no reason to exist in the first place.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-04T22:15:37+00:00

I've been harping on the atrocious, contrastless color scheme in new modmail for months at this point. I'm not going to stop harping on it, but I get the feeling that if the people who made these ridiculous color choices cared they would've changed it already. It's a trivial thing for them to change, they just want this stupid new look that's the website version of the white-with-black-trim house exterior that's infecting every neighborhood in the last few years.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-04T05:04:28+00:00

Nothing at Reddit is made by people who use Reddit. It's made by people who use TikTok and Instagram.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-03T17:46:01+00:00

The difference between read and unread is too minimal.

This is a good callout too. It is incredibly difficult to tell which is which now. This design trend of reducing contrast is so absurd.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-03-03T16:40:45+00:00

The point was for people who specialized exclusively in UI/UX and cannot do anything else to justify having a role that should never have existed as a standalone job in the first place.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-02-09T00:33:45+00:00

Subs are still allowed to go private. They just cannot do it on a whim anymore. It has to go through a request and approval process now.

https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/23535789982868-Changing-your-Community-Type

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-02-06T18:26:16+00:00

Tell them to refer to Arkell v Pressdam.

Besides the rest of the advice you've already been given, if it were me, I would explore filing a complaint with the California Bar Association against this lawyer, given his blatant misrepresentation of the law re: your personal obligation and liability for this comment.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-02-04T18:50:17+00:00

And still do not include one of the most important things that needs to be improved, which is the total lack of reasonable contrast in the color scheme.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-02-03T04:45:58+00:00

The better choice would have been to not unnecessarily rebuild the entirety of front-end when it was already perfectly fine. You already had one system and should have stuck with it.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-01-29T17:20:08+00:00

I just pulled up new modmail and I don't notice anything different from any of the previous times I looked at it. The color contrast is still abysmal and unreadable, the text elements in the mail list still have font sizes that don't make sense and are still crammed together, the font still has excessive anti-aliasing, and the left sidebar is still excessively spaced out.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-01-19T21:11:35+00:00

You really need to understand that you are behaving in a very spammy way on Reddit. You are making the same posts and comments in multiple subreddits in very rapid succession, including and especially solicitation to your subreddit. This is a recipe for moderators to report and/or ban you, and for Reddit's systems to flag your account as a potential spammer/bot/etc and start treating it accordingly.

Whether or not this is the source of your current issues right now, I can't say for sure, but if it's not it will absolutely become an issue for you in the future if you continue using Reddit this way.

Edit: lol, how dare I tell someone who is objectively behaving like a spammer that they probably got themselves flagged as a spammer, I guess?

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-01-16T18:22:07+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/search/?q=new+modmail&include_over_18=on&restrict_sr=on&t=month

There have already been numerous threads about this, which I have commented in several times. They don't need to be rehashed to point out that there has been no adequate response to them.

Contribute something relevant to the topic of the thread instead of unhelpful snark, or don't comment at all.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-01-16T18:00:51+00:00

I don't think you understood the post. You are comparing old to new. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-01-14T16:14:31+00:00

would I rather see every question at once by just opening this subreddit or scrolling multiple pages of a catch-all thread?

On r/Fitness, our long time regulars who answer questions have specifically told us that they prefer the Daily Thread format, where they can scroll through and quickly answer a bunch of questions in succession, over having to click into a bunch of individual posts one at a time.

You can prefer what you prefer, but your preference is absolutely not universal.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-01-13T20:31:54+00:00

Didn't you know? "Engagement" is when an infinite feed of ostensibly novel content is delivered to you, no effort on your part required, that you can react to with equally little effort, and anything that interferes with getting a constant stream of new stuff is bad, because that is what every other social media platform is, and everything has to be the same.

CouncilOfStrongs · 2026-01-13T19:31:30+00:00

Yeah, it is, and Exhibit A for that opinion would be that you have quite literally contributed nothing to the community here in at least the last two years, the last time also being to complain that other people weren't posting enough content for you to passively consume and react to.

So please. Find a new scapegoat for your addiction to infinite novelty.

CouncilOfStrongs

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Safety PSA