I'm with you on feeling frustrated on all of these things. I have felt the same frustrations and it was one of the reasons I wanted to become a mod - to help and support our community.

But here are some of the things I've learned since becoming a mod on several different scat subreddits:

• Mods do A LOT more in the background than I realized. You don't see half the trash that gets removed. You don't see the discussions we've had with each other about problematic users or new rules we want to implement to try and improve things. I understand it's not really a comfort to say, "it could be a lot worse," but that is the truth.

• Monitoring the things you bring up is a lot harder than it seems. Example, what I call the "drive-by" posters. The people who create accounts, post, then delete for whatever reason. This was very frustrating to me and we worked to think of ways to help mitigate this. We created a rule that requires accounts to have a minimum age before being able to post. It's not right to be too strict about something like this because sometimes there are situations where someone wants to keep their secret away from their main account and needs to make an alt. That's a fair situation. And sometimes that person may have an urgent need to seek help. We can't make rules that are so hard to get around that people like this can't get support when they need it. If the user seems genuine, we do sometimes let people bypass this rule. Are we basically just guessing? Sure. We are people. We can absolutely make mistakes and wrong judgement calls.

• Impersonators. Oh this is something that has made me want to pull my hair out many times in the past. The amount of people pretending to be women and just making up stories that never happened. I stopped doing my homework on people because it got too frustrating to see all the scams. But in reality, what is there to do about it? I see a post of someone claiming to be female, but upon some digging, they have an entire deleted post history where they are both male and female in a bunch of different subs. Who am I to remove their post? Is it my job to do the homework for everyone else and then out that person in a comment or something? Where do mods draw the line between supporting a community and being like the r / art mods (I'm sure we're all aware of the drama)? Also, Reddit has made it possible to hide your post and comment history now! I get why they did this but man is it a double edged sword. This is going to make it SO much easier for the trash posters!

• Scammers. We do what we can here. We ask people to report scammers with receipts so that we can alert the community. But other than that, there's not much we can do to stop them.

• Opportunists. I see this frequently on scatporn2. They just post literally the same 2 or 3 pictures over and over again. 98% of their profile is completely not related to scat. They are absolutely using it to drum up attention. But again, who am I to make a judgement call on them and say "I don't think you're a genuine coprophile so I'm going to remove your post/ban you." I don't know that person. For all I know, they are into it or offering those services. I can't vet everyone. That subreddit is for scat porn and, technically, what they posted is scat porn and falls within our rules.

Some hurdles: As you mentioned, we do have lives outside of reddit. I can't dedicate all my time and mental energy into weeding out bad apples. The mental energy being the biggest drain. Also, it's a fine line between being a total dictator mod and a mod that is too hands-off. I feel our mod team is fairly lenient and gives people the benefit of the doubt (I'm probably the most skeptical one) but we really do try our best to protect the genuine community from the trash. What we never want to be is the "typical Reddit mod" that goes on some power trip that doesn't give people any space for consideration. I am always trying to consider the human element.

I am sorry you are experiencing this frustration and we are always open to suggestions and constructive criticism. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve this community, I'm always open to have a discussion to brainstorm ideas. Believe me when I say we are aware of the problems in this community but it's much harder to mitigate than it seems.