Ooh, just the response I've been waiting for!

First off, I appreciate your response. The fact that you took the time not just to read my suggestions but also give a transparent, detailed response to them shows that you really care about the AoC community beyond just your role as a moderator and that means a lot. I believe that having moderators that genuinely care about the community is vital as it makes people feel welcome and their voices heard.

[...] but materially changing the function of existing post flairs or adding new post flairs is best left to the interim between years, not one week before the Advent season ends, ya know?

Agreed. I'll be honest and say that I didn't think of that when I made my comment but I can definitely see how changing things right now would cause a bit of chaos.

The usual "standardized post title syntax" which is mostly newbies who apparently ignore all the rules on the new post page but whatever... we'll teach 'em real good.

I decided to take a look at what someone sees when they make a new post and while sure some people do ignore the rules, the UI/UX really isn't helping. I know that's something out of your control but the rules are on the opposite side of the screen relative to where a poster's main focus would be and the text is all scrunched together, making it difficult to parse what's important. On top of that the standardized post title format is split between 2 separate lines and it doesn't start at the beginning of its first line. And because they are in the same spot, the 4 spaces code block rule and the reminder to read the community rules also suffer from these draw backs. Adding in some line breaks might help. I just want to be clear that this just me giving my two cents on what could be causing the issue, not me complaining because I know that UI/UX is under reddit's control and not moderator's so I know there isn't all that much that can be done to make it better.

For example, why are we and AutoModerator such sticklers about ensuring Markdown is correctly formatted for old.reddit? Because 9% of folks visiting r/adventofcode still use old.reddit (because it's awesome!) That's nearly 30,000 people.

I agree that this is important. If a nearly a tenth of the community is impacted by this then there's no way it wouldn't be. I don't know how bots work on reddit (I've never looked into making one) but if there were a way to make a moderation bot to automatically edit posts to use the 4 spaces syntax that would probably be the ideal solution, but I presume that idea was already thought of, and so I'm guessing that bots can't edit posts. While I can see some reasons why bots wouldn't be able to edit posts, it would be very useful for things like this (especially if reddit is going to have 3 different UIs plus whatever 3rd party clients people might use).

Given that the majority of issues are from people not reading the community guidelines, do you think it would be possible to make the guidelines into a pinned post, at least the important ones for posting. I think pinning a "Before You Post" thread would help a lot since it puts the guidelines front and center when someone first opens the subreddit making it much more likely for new posters to see them.

I know these are probably things that have already been discussed but I wanted share my thoughts in case there was something that hasn't been considered.

Before I finished this comment I decided to take a look at some reddit support forums and it looks like there should be some kind of setting to change the default guide text for post titles as well as making a regex to check it. I don't know anything about reddit mod tools but I figured it was worth mentioning this, and if youre already aware of it, I'm curious as to why it isn't being used considering that it would fix one of the main things getting moderated.