Hello Folks -

I wanted to provide a community update on a rule change I made today. I know this is a controversial topic but I've decided to move forward with no longer allowing mourning content on r/orangecats. This rule is in effect as of posting this and won't retroactively result in post removals.

Losing a pet is difficult, and people do deserve support. But mourning posts can also be distressing for people and can be difficult as a mod to sometimes discern the authenticity of. We also have folks who like to regularly memorialize their pets months or years later as just a regular posting type. When these get a lot of attention they become catnip for the repost bots.

We will be directing mourning posts to the r/petloss subreddit which is a community specifically for support and mourning. In the past other moderators in cat communities haven't wanted to do this because of it being a slower subreddit. Based on some regular pulse checks that isn't the case anymore - and the sub will be more active and supportive if more people start using it for its intended purpose.

For the folks who often just want to share their pet and have them appreciated - you can still post about them, you just can't make it a mourning post/a post about their death/a celebration of their life because they died. We will use moderator discretion with handling these kinds of posts and comments. If it comes up organically that a pet has passed away we aren't going to remove it. If it's showing a pattern we likely will.

Please report these posts moving forward if you see them. As long as the poster is respectful and doesn't start attacking the mods for removal it's not going to have any consequences beyond removal - you aren't getting someone in trouble. The only way they'll get banned (temporarily or permanently) is if they react uncivilly which is a different problem.

I do apologize for folks for will be unhappy with this decision - but it's time for this community to make this change.

I was thinking about making a flair bot so that you could message it with your cat's name and the color of the cat... and then I went 🤷 and decided "why not?"

Users can select their own flair instead and edit them and use an emoji in the flair. The user flair match the colors on the sidebar... with an exception for me. My cat happens to be deficient in orange awesomeness.

As these are user editable, don't be a jerk. It would make me unhappy and I'd have to figure out how to do other moddy things.

https://imgur.com/a/q1y14h2 has an example sequence of editing your user flair.