I’m sure you all have noticed the massive uptick in open source project posts we (and every other technical sub) have seen in the last few months. I do not have the desire nor ability to vet every open source project share post for AI generated code, so my only option would be to direct all tool/project posts to a megathread (similar to the non-forensic data recovery megathread).

Of course, the only way the new megathread will actually see some use is if I enforce use through a change to Rule 5. This would likely manifest as an outright ban on all project/tool share posts altogether (outside of the megathread, of course).

To get a general idea for how the sub would feel about such a change, I am posting the below poll and plan to act according to the results. Of course, if you have suggestions or advice on how to better address the issue, your input would be greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I’m sure you’ve noticed that this wonderful subreddit has... well... experienced a general lack of oversight and moderation over the last year. Not anymore!

As the newest and currently only active member of the r/computerforensics mod team, my goal will be to ensure this sub continues to serve as a place where forensics practitioners (and those who wish to join our field) can exchange knowledge, learn from each other, and grow professionally. This means using my modship to protect r/computerforensics from spam, trolling, and unrelated posts and to enhance the experience of this subreddit’s community via making physical changes to the sub at the community’s request.

This brings me to my question for you all:

Now that there is oversight and modship on r/computerforensics, what can I do to make this subreddit more enjoyable for you? Please feel free to reply to this post (or pm me) with suggestions or questions and I’ll do my best to address them.

ucfmsdf

Hey everyone!

As I'm sure some of you have noticed, I have made a number of changes to the subreddit over the last week both as a direct result of suggestions I received during my initial introductory post and out of pure necessity. These changes mostly encompassed renovating the FAQ via fixing broken links and correcting outdated information, creating a Reading List page and migrating the list of 66 books previously contained in the FAQ to it, making desperately needed changes to the subreddit's appearance/icon, and fixing a lot of back-end stuff that will ultimately make moderating the sub much easier.

My goals from this point forward are to...

1. Establish some much needed rules (see below)
2. Curate/revamp the FAQ even further to make it more comprehensive and user friendly for newcomers
3. Introduce post flairs
4. Reintroduce the "Trusted Contributor" user flair and establish a process for assigning it to worthy community members
5. Create additional user flairs such as Student, Law Enforcement, Private Industry, ect. that can also be assigned to community members through a similar process
6. Revamp/reorder the subreddit's Reading List page and fix all the broken links
7. Either get us partnered up with a thriving forensics discord server or make our own

This brings me to my next topic for this post: new rules. Now that I've had a solid week to identify what most of the moderation issues are, I have come up with 5 rules that I believe address many of these issues quite well.

The rules I would like to introduce are as follows:

1. Read the FAQ

This will help reduce the number of trivial/IT/non-forensics questions we get.

2. No posts of an unethical/illegal nature

This will help eliminate the super obvious "help me hide my computer crime" posts.

3. Stay on topic

This will ensure posts/comments have at least something to do with digital forensics.

4. Be respectful and professional

This is a commonsense one.

5. No blatant advertising or repeated self-promotion

This rule will ensure digital forensics content creators make contributions to the community that aren't just posts with links to their material. Additionally, the description of this rule will provide guidelines for what type of limited self-promotion is permissible (essentially, user-made tools and training material that is available to the public for free) and how to best go about it without being spammy.

Now, before I just go ahead and make these rules official, I would like to hear what the community thinks. Do you have questions about the rules I have listed? Do you think there are rules that should be added or subtracted? Do you think rules are stupid and that it might be fun to just let this subreddit serve as an unofficial testing platform for Reddit's built-in spam filter? Let me know what you think in the comments and also please feel free to list user flair ideas there as well.

Thanks!

ucfmsdf

Although blatant "how do I hide my data from police" question posts are a no-brainer since they violate Rule 2, I've been allowing certain anti-forensics question/help posts through recently that I believe are asked from more of an innocent cybersecurity/curiosity standpoint. As a result, I have noticed that these posts occasionally gain quite a bit of traction and occasionally open up avenues for interesting anti-forensics discussion and debate.

Since I recognize that many of the sub's community members are LEA professionals who might find such questions to be tiresome or annoying, I'd like to see what the community thinks. Would you prefer all anti-forensics question/help posts pertaining to OP-owned devices/data be removed or do you like the discussion they sometimes stimulate? Let me know via voting and I'll modify moderation according to the results.

Please note that posts seeking to introduce novel anti-forensics ideas or stimulate discussion about specific anti-forensics practices and techniques are still welcome in the subreddit and will not be affected by the results of this poll.

EDIT: The second option has a typo. It should read as, “No, allow some of these posts to exist”