Astronomy Feeds Moderation

1. To post to the feeds, you must be a professional/amateur/student in astronomy/astrophysics/astrobiology/planetary science/astronomy education—or you must represent an astronomy-related organization. It’s also OK if you left academia but still want to sign up. You are still welcome here! 2. Be respectful of others in the community. We will not tolerate discrimination of any kind; that means no racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any other kind of discrimination. 3. Content you post to the feeds must be appropriate, scientifically accurate, and not spam. No off-topic posts, no misinformation/impersonation, and no spam, including repetitive or overly promotional material that clutters the feeds and detracts from meaningful interactions. AI usage should be minimized, and AI fakes or low-quality generative creations should be avoided. Ask a moderator if you aren’t sure about your content before you post. 4. Attribute content that is not your own. You must credit the original author/creator of any content you post. Whenever possible, link to the original author/creator’s content. 5. Only limited promotion of items for sale is allowed—and they must be astronomy-related. Independent creators may use the feeds occasionally to promote or sell their astronomy-related work. We ask you to limit your promotional posts to no more than once per day on the main Astronomy feed. Promotional posts should not be the majority of your contributions to the feeds.

The current rules of the Astronomy feeds are always available at github.com/bluesky-astr...

Here's a screenshot of the latest version:

@testing.astronomy.blue test of reply notification

@jwstfeed.bsky.social you have been banned from the Astronomy feeds and your posts will no longer appear there.

We asked you multiple times to make sure you always included credit in your posts, which you did not do.

It can take days of work to create a good astrophotograph, and posting it without credit is lazy and won't be tolerated here.

We will send multiple warnings first before banning someone. 🔭

If you are not the original creator of a piece of content, please *always* credit the original creator in your posts to the #astronomy feeds.

We just banned a large account from the feeds for repeatedly not doing this, and we are looking to crack down on uncredited posts in the next months.

You have multiple posts to the Astronomy feeds that break this rule, and you were warned once before - this is your final warning.

Also paging @danirabaiotti.bsky.social as these posts break science feed rules too AFAIK.

A screenshot of the original source of the image.

Hi - posting to the Astronomy & Science feeds requires that you add credit for your images.

Please *always* credit whoever processed them - it's not good enough to just say that it's a JWST image.

It took me ~60 seconds to find who to credit for this image - it is not difficult.

Hi Sacha - please don't include the telescope emoji in posts like this, as it meant that this entire thread ended up on the Astronomy feeds (including this account's scraped content).

We can't control how Bluesky displays threads - including a single reply will also always display the original post

Ah I see why - one of the replies did it. Thanks!

As a reminder, the mod team for the Astronomy feeds can only deal with posts on the Astronomy feeds, for which these rules apply. 🔭

Screenshot of the feed rules, which are: 1. To post to the feeds, you must be a professional/amateur/student in astronomy/astrophysics/astrobiology/planetary science/astronomy education—or you must represent an astronomy-related organization. It’s also OK if you left academia but still want to sign up. You are still welcome here! 2. Be respectful of others in the community. We will not tolerate discrimination of any kind; that means no racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any other kind of discrimination. 3. Content you post to the feeds must be appropriate, scientifically accurate, and not spam. No off-topic posts, no misinformation/impersonation, and no spam, including repetitive or overly promotional material that clutters the feeds and detracts from meaningful interactions. AI usage should be minimized, and AI fakes or low-quality generative creations should be avoided. Ask a moderator if you aren’t sure about your content before you post. 4. Attribute content that is not your own. You must credit the original author/creator of any content you post. Whenever possible, link to the original author/creator’s content. 5. Only limited promotion of items for sale is allowed—and they must be astronomy-related. Independent creators may use the feeds occasionally to promote or sell their astronomy-related work. We ask you to limit your promotional posts to no more than once per day on the main Astronomy feed. Promotional posts should not be the majority of your contributions to the feeds. If you ever have any concerns or issues with moderation, get in touch with @moderation.astronomy.blue.

We've made some updates to the rules for the Astronomy feeds:

1. We've added a new rule (Rule 5) limiting promotional posts

2. We have clarified our policy about AI in Rule 3 (i.e. low-quality generative AI isn't appropriate for the feeds)

3. Many things have been slightly reworded & improved. 🔭

We can't do anything unless it's a post made to the Astronomy feeds by a user that we've approved to post there - however, we are at least able to keep that feed as clean as possible from content scrapers.

The list of current moderators is always available in our rules GitHub repository: 🔭

Say hi to our new moderators for the feeds! 🔭

@jamiezvirzdin.com, @noelstoj.bsky.social, @jakepost.tech, @epsori.bsky.social, @kellylepo.bsky.social, @nrutkowski.bsky.social, @naztrono.my and @spacemarschall.net join our existing mods @celtuk.bsky.social, @kwcookastro.bsky.social, and @mpoessel.de!

The most we can do is remove posts (or ban users from) the Astronomy feed & subfeeds:

This isn't a post on one of our feeds, so there's nothing we can do about it unfortunately.

If you spot this happening, please DM this account or one of the moderators. The influx of new users is keeping us quite busy, so we won't always spot cases where this happens on our own. Thanks!

Please let the feed's moderators know if you see any posts that break the rules. The easiest way to get in touch is to DM this account, but you can also tag one of us in a post. 🔭

GitHub - bluesky-astronomy/rules: Rules for posting to the Astronomy feeds. Rules for posting to the Astronomy feeds. Contribute to bluesky-astronomy/rules development by creating an account on GitHub.

As a reminder, please always credit the original author of content that you post to the feeds. 🔭

'Content scraping', where you take someone else's work, and post it without credit, is against the feed rules.

The feed rules are always available here:

official account

yes, obviously =p

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This bot is still a work in progress - please message @emily.space for now if you need help!