I've noticed a lot of comments (and posts) from non-Australians in here recently. For sake of brevity, when I say 'Australian'/'Aussie' here, I mean anyone who does live or has lived in Australia.
It defeats the whole point of having a separate comm for 'world news from an Australian perspective' if we have high levels of participation (votes/comments/posts) from non-Australians. It becomes just the same as any general world news comm.
I was thinking one measure we could take would be to change the display name of the comm to 'World News for Aussies'. It's succinct, clear, and may discourage participation by non-Australians to some degree.
Another matter is posts by non-Australians. Obviously, if we reduced voting participation by non-Aussies, it's less of an issue if we have posts by non-Aussies - the comm would still largely be 'from an Australian perspective' by virtue of voting selection (although it would still be annoying if, like me, you mainly browse local by 'new').
That said, when 13 of the last 20 posts in the comm are from a user that appears not to be in/from Australia, maybe there's a problem to be addressed. It doesn't help that this poster has a clear and consistent agenda.
I'm obviously not proposing we start checking IDs or anything, but we could at least have a rule for participation only by people who do live or have lived in Australia. Then, if a problem becomes noticeable, the mods can send direct messages or take action where they judge it reasonable.
Interested to hear thoughts from users and mods (@[email protected] @[email protected])
On other sites, I've done this a few times. Promise to be more active online and then end up doing the opposite. It's unfortunately common.
I've definitely seen that many times from YouTubers.