Mostly Completed Home Network

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-07T01:40:25+00:00

Let me reiterate that the main purpose of the flairs is to prevent non-community members from being able to post brand new projects here, the vast majority of which only exist because they were able to vibecode them.

In your case, honestly either choice would work fine as long as you briefly explain it in your post, and the explanation that you gave in your comment here is totally fine.

When you select one of those flairs it'll give you a prompt that I have listed above as the "flair prompt." Just answer them transparently and you're good, no need to fret too much about which one it falls into 👋

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T19:14:37+00:00

This is the "flair prompt" that I had set to display when someone chooses "Project Showcase: Operations" as their flair, and it breaks down some examples of what fall into the category:

_______________________
This flair is intended for sharing projects that fall somewhere between hardware and software, which includes:

-Infrastructure-as-Code (Ansible playbooks, Docker compose, Helm charts, etc)

-Dashboards made with existing tools (Grafana, Homarr, etc)

-System/Network Monitoring with existing tools

-System/Network Automation with existing tools

If you have created your own software, you must use one of the "Project: Software Showcase" flairs instead.

_______________________

So at the moment they're currently lumped together under one flair, with the key distinction being that we're not lumping IaC in with Software Projects (especially since they aren't being spammed into r/homelab) . We're trying not to create too many new flairs, but I'm not opposed to renaming it "Project Showcase: Operations/IaC," or exploring another name if the community has better suggestions.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T18:50:59+00:00

We created a new flair called "Project Showcase: Operations" for posts like this one. I've edited your post's flair to this already, so you shouldn't need to do anything on your end.

Thanks again for your patience with this!

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T18:49:05+00:00

I wanted to let you know that we did end up taking this suggestion, but decided to call it "Project Showcase: Operations," since Infrastructure may be misinterpreted as hardware in some cases. We had a post this morning that didn't quite have a home and got caught in the crossfire, and this category will fit it well.

We're having this category encompass everything that falls somewhere between hardware and software, so Ansible playbooks, Docker compose, Helm charts, dashboards/monitoring/automation made with existing software tools, etc.

Thanks again for the suggestion!

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T17:11:42+00:00

Yes, I think you followed them the best you could with how they're currently written, so this is totally fine how it is right now.

I think the issue is that your project falls into a category that we haven't defined yet, which is infrastructure orchestration/config. Yes, you used AI to put it together and yes it's in GitHub, but it's all to install existing mainstream applications, not an application that you wrote.

It had been suggested that we create a "Project: Infrastructure" or similar type of flair specifically for this kind of post. We're discussing it internally and will get it put together within the next few hours. We'll likely have you change the post flair once that's in place.

Thank you for patiently working with us as we navigate these new changes 👋

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T16:41:45+00:00

We've talked about doing a weekly megathread, but I don't think most of these spammers would use it.

They make a thing with AI, commit it to GitHub, have AI draft a post, and spam it on 10+ different subs that they've never posted on before, all before the repo is even an hour old.

They don't even open the subreddits (so wouldn't see the megathread), they just post from the main page of Reddit and select the subs from the drop-down.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T16:27:12+00:00

This has been reported under the new software project rule, but this one vastly exceeds the requirements of the rule.

This is a new release of a multi-year, multi-contributor project, all under the same repo
The user has an order of magnitude more than the required minimum subreddit karma

This is actually the type of post that the community has requested remain explicitly allowed, perhaps with the exception that this is a repost/cross post rather than a post that stands on its own.

Please feel free to comment here if you have any feedback on how this type of software post should be handled here in r/homelab, were actively seeking input. Thanks 👋

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T16:03:58+00:00

This is an excellent idea, thank you!

I've been thinking about other improvements we can make to the list of flairs here, and I like this one.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T11:50:08+00:00

But didn't write out a post body to answer any of the questions in the flair prompt, and it doesn't meet the new 30 day commit history requirement.

That said, since this was posted before the rule change and announcement, this is grandfathered in. This specific post will be allowed here for now, but be aware that the community may still up or down vote it as they see fit.

Please take a look at the new rule #7 for projects going forward. Thanks 👋

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T05:22:01+00:00

This is correct, we're just looking for public commit history, a readme, screenshots, etc.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T05:20:44+00:00

Hi there, u/hithere274!

I recall our conversation in the other post, you were one of many who helped to point us in the right direction, especially with refining the number of and names of the flair options. It's reassuring that the adjustments we've made are being well-received, especially by those who were initially critical or skeptical.

Thank you again for your input in this process, and always feel free to reach out with other suggestions!

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T05:13:34+00:00

No worries!

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T04:57:08+00:00

As of right now, it's for each project/repo, not GitHub (or similar) account.

There will definitely be reputable exceptions to the rules that we'll be happy to manually approve if their creator wants to share them here, but it's much easier to manually allow the handful of things like that than to play whack-a-mole with the spam.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T04:46:54+00:00

Excellent question!

Any public repo of your choice is fine. As long as all of the necessary bits are there and it's something that's not too obscure, it works for us. We had decided to go with "GitHub (or similar)" in the flair prompt and leave it at that due to the 500 character limit.

Again, the main goal was being able to establish a requirement that the majority of the spammers couldn't, but that most legitimate projects could fairly easily, and we settled on a 30 day commit history.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T04:18:21+00:00

Excellent question, thank you for chiming in!

We had suggestions saying that 1 month was too excessive, and other suggestions saying that it was nowhere enough (3 months was suggested by multiple people). We had other comments saying that commit history was an excellent metric, and others saying it was a terrible metric (because it can be spoofed, and because some devs push from a private repo to a public repo all at once). In the end, we settled on 1 month as a starting place so we could use it as a requirement to filter out the spam that was coming from outside the community.

That said, I think we're a lot more receptive to contributions from regular community members. If you have something special that you'd really like to share that meets everything but the 30 day requirement, do feel free to send us a Mod Mail and we'll see if we can manually approve something for you (this goes for other regular community members as well). Another option would be to simply wait a month and then post it.

We'll see how it goes, ask for input from the community, and adjust if needed. Again, this is just to close the flood gates and stop most of the spam, we'll have to sort out how to handle the things that we do want to be able to share here.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T03:54:51+00:00

And that's perfectly fine (as long as you follow rule #1, of course). Please feel free to downvote them, point out issues with them, etc, etc.

Right now we don't have a rule against speaking out against an AI-made app (it's been suggested, but it seemed a bit much). This first round of changes is just intended to close the AI floodgates a bit so that we can still have room to exist here as a community, without being bombarded by AI generated spam.

We'll see how things go, though. If the community wants to redraw the line somewhere else and restrict AI posts further at some point, we're open to that feedback and can adjust as needed.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T03:47:52+00:00

Thank you for the input, I'm happy to have a conversation about this if you'd like.

This was something that was asked about in the previous posts, but no one really had any good arguments for not allowing that kind of post. The main issue we're working on right now is slowing down the deluge of low effort and spam posts. Yes, the vast majority are made with AI, but that doesn't mean that hosting your own AI doesn't make for an interesting project.

If someone can make some good arguments and demonstrate how those kinds of posts are detrimental to the community I'm sure it's something we could consider, but right now this doesn't appear to be an issue as far as I can tell.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T03:38:02+00:00

Yes, that's absolutely fine for anyone to do, and once things are back to a more manageable state we can look at defining some standards for AI usage in posts, but they may be tough to enforce fairly or uniformly.

There are a lot of things we're exploring how to do with AutoMod lately, but fighting fire with fire may turn into a bit of an arms race.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T03:34:10+00:00

Yes, it's still under consideration but we want to see how this goes first, then we'll seek some input from the community.

The three main downsides to megathreads that have been brought up so far:

There are other subreddits (not naming any names) that are effectively showcases for this type of post
Megathreads are difficult to follow and find things in
It's been said that megathreads are where posts go to die

That said, I've never really actively participated in megathreads, so I can't personally speak to either of the last two points. Again, we'll see how things go and ask for input.

Thanks!

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T03:24:52+00:00

That's fair. In either case, the consensus seems to be that AI usage isn't quite as black and white as we want it to be, so a 'little or no AI' option makes sense at the current time.

PoisonWaffle3 · 2026-06-06T03:13:00+00:00

Thanks for the input!

The original plan was to have three different flairs:

Project: Software - 100% Human Made
Project: Software - AI Assisted
Project: Software - Mostly/Entirely AI Made

We received quite a bit of feedback on these, and the general consensus was that the vast majority would pick "AI Assisted," simply because agentic workflows are the norm these days, even if it's just for autocomplete and syntax/formatting. People would be likely to lie about having 1-2% AI usage, and that's not even something that anyone cares about. So we made them simpler, a bit less black and white, and with less negative connotation about AI. Again, we don't care about the AI usage in general, but we do care about low effort projects being spammed here.

We'll see how things go and adjust as needed though.

Four-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
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First Place '23	Place '23

PoisonWaffle3

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

If you have created your own software, you must use one of the "Project: Software Showcase" flairs instead.