Update 3: WhereAllTheGoodMenAre is set to private because of another brigading. We have reported the sub to admins and we will set the sub back to Public when the brigading stops. Members are encouraged to go through this announcement and to register at our alt forums.

Update 2: And as is usual, the AHS post gets cross-posted to MGTOWBan and Blatantmisogyny.

Update 1: furryhare creates a new AHS post alleging that WAATGM mods have made a thread encouraging brigading and harassment and accuse us of playing the victim.

Let us reiterate again for those who lack reading skills:

Please do not harass or brigade the subs (or the members) that are mentioned or showcased in this post. Doing so will violate the rules of reddit and this sub. We do not condone harassment or brigading. If you do that, you will have missed the point of this post entirely. We will ban anyone who gets reported for harassment or brigading and/or report them to the reddit admins ourselves. Keep your opinions here. Register at the alt forums. This post was shared to our members with the intention to inform. We do not want to hear about anyone brigading or harassing anyone. If we do, we will ban you and we will report you to the reddit admins ourselves. If anyone has complaints about being harassed or brigaded as a result of this post, please send us a modmail and we will look into it to make sure we are in compliance with reddit's rules.

Most of us need no reminder about the brigading our sub went through a couple of months back. 1 During and after the time of this brigading, our mod team has had to take measures to ensure that the damage these brigaders intended (and still intend) to cause us stayed minimal. One of the initial measures involved restricting access to the brigaders (and most of our sub members unfortunately) in the short term by making the sub private and only allowing approved users to participate. This was done to ensure that these brigaders were deprived of the attention and outrage that they were seeking and to ensure their harassment campaign could not cause us more trouble than it already had at the time. Some of the measures we have taken since (and plan to take) are to ensure that we do not face the same situation again. This post, as late as it is, will serve to document the intent of those brigaders, their methodology, what they hope to accomplish, how their attempts are still ongoing, what measures we have taken so far and will continue to take in light of the campaign that is being undertaken to shut down our sub and other subs like us. We would like to emphasize that this is being presented here in an attempt to be transparent and to inform everyone of the challenges we face. Please do not harass or brigade the subs (or the members) that are mentioned or showcased in this post. Doing so will violate the rules of reddit and this sub. We do not condone harassment or brigading. If you do that, you will have missed the point of this post entirely. We will ban anyone who gets reported for harassment or brigading and/or report them to the reddit admins ourselves.

As everyone already knows, a couple of months ago, reddit banned the MGTOW subreddit. Shortly after that, the infamous AHS presented their coverage on why the reddit admins banned the MGTOW subs. Essentially, a former US Coast Guard officer who frequented the MGTOW subreddit was arrested and was to be (allegedly) charged with potential domestic terrorism charges. His frequent visit, participation and the nature of his discourse within the MGTOW sub had been highlighted in the FBI memo and in the news media. This lead to reddit banning mgtow, mgtow2 and any other mgtow oriented subs (including our sister sub r/whereallthegoodmenare which was falsely reported as a MGTOW Ban evasion sub).

This outcome was not specific to reddit and this was observed when ruqqus, the platform that former r/mgtow members flocked to and advised everyone to migrate to, banned and then unbanned their community there. They also came out saying that they cannot afford to promise a free speech platform as they initially advertised because they are afraid of real life consequences.

Users in AHS and other feminist subs (such as MGTOWBan, Blatantmisogyny etc) utilized the concerns that had been expressed in the FBI memo ("domestic terrorism", "gender-based extremist activity", "promoted discrimination and hatred towards women") as talking points very effectively. While AHS was building the narrative about fighting terrorism and while its users were building the narrative on how the admins are complicit (as can be seen in the comments in the previous archive link and in this link about an unrelated issue), MGTOWBan sub was busy building the narrative against "misogynistic" subs so that these subs can be categorized into "MGTOW Ban Evasion subs" and "MGTOW brigaded subs" so that they can "keep an eye on these subs". Pretty soon, to no one's surprise, MGTOWBan was advocating members to report mensright sub to reddit admins under the premise that it is being "brigaded by MGTOWs".

Around this time, MGTOWBan mod mercinarary takes an uncensored screenshot of a WAATGM post and showcased it in their sub where an AHS/MGTOWBan user furryhare suggests that maybe WAATGM should be the next target to their community, asks for the link to WAATGM article declaring his intent to make a post in AHS if the comments are hateful enough and is provided the link by MGTOWBan mod mercinarary (Screenshot here). Shortly after that, Furryhare makes a post in AHS about r/whereareallthegoodmen accusing us of "defending MGTOW subreddit which has links to a literal terrorist attack" and suggests that we are a hate sub. Coincidentally, it is around this time, we get inundated with reports under Reddit's Rule 1.

While most of our mods were dealing with the enormous amount of false reports we received, one of our mods put up an announcement informing the members of the sub about the ongoing brigading, which prompts MGTOWBan mod mercinarary to label WAATGM as a hate group. At this time, a decision was made to make the sub private to stem the tide of this harassment campaign and the sub was soon set to restricted.

Soon after our sub went private, MGTOWBan and AHS user Furryhare diverted their attention to mensrights sub. Shortly after this, mensrights posts a mod post clarifying that they are against violence. These days, their attention fluctuates between several subs that they do not like and/or take offense to.

The methodology and intention of AHS and MGTOWBan to get all manosphere sub shuttered should be pretty clear to anyone who has continued reading thus far. Their goal is to paint all manosphere subs under the same "extremist, hate-promoting, mgtow-brigaded, filled with potential incel shooters" brush. You can see their target list here and their methodology here, here, here, here and here. Here is a comment that is made by the mod who has the top pinned post in mgtowban. MGTOWBan users continue to share, discuss and paint WAATGM members with accusations of pedophilia & ehebephilia(sic), racism and hating on children.

Whenever we see these people "use" reports or "build a case" as we have detailed here, it is to be remembered that some of these people are not above planting the evidence themselves and they only need a few unmoderated or unnoticed comments for "building their case". While we have a great mod team (if we can say so ourselves), we cannot moderate every comment (or post) and all anyone needs are a few unmoderated comments to paint this (or any) place as another violence-promoting hate group to build a "case" to shut it down. 2

In light of this campaign, some of the targeted subs have taken their own approaches. TRP, by this point, does not care much. Another sub that was targeted, Traditional muslims made their sub private but is now public again. Mensrights stayed open throughout. Marriageisntworthit routinely point out whenever their posts gets linked. What our sub did has been detailed here. We want to remind everyone that mgtow2, which was a sub that was primarily created by users who were banned from r/mgtow, mostly concentrated on not sharing stories about women or shitting on them and instead on mgtow lifestyle, was not quarantined before it was banned. Nor were most of the mgtow related subs that were banned subsequent to the banning of the mgtow sub. They were banned by association, with the official reason given being '/r/MGTOW ban evasion' and the reason we were able to get r/WhereAllTheGoodMenAre unbanned was because we could prove convincingly to reddit admins that we are not related to mgtow even though there was a membership overlap. 3 As an aside, we want to acknowledge here that reddit admins did a fair job of evaluating and unbanning our sister sub, r/whereallthegoodmenare. Kudos and our thanks to them. That said, the next time when a case is built accusing us of promoting hate against women or that we are promoting terrorism, we could be banned for that. And believe us when we tell you that they have not stopped.

Here is a link where user 1witty_username admits to making reports under Rule 1. While the comments are removed as of now, this user still seems to be active in reddit. Here is a link where they directly link to a post in our sister sub r/WhereAllTheGoodMenAre and here is a specific comment thread where furryhare explains how he uses AHS against other subs. As we have seen here earlier, this is also followed up by a post in AHS by MGTOWBan mod mercinarary where another MGTOWBan mod onlyforsex claims that "These dudes need to be on a list and that mod in particular is just frightening". In the same thread, some other user is still hard at work painting the picture that r/whereallthegoodmenare, which has existed and been a sister sub of r/whereareallthegoodmen for several years now is a backup ban evasion sub for r/whereareallthegoodmen.

As it has been pointed out by various people before and as it can be seen from what has been displayed so far, these people are not trolls. They are far more organized to be dismissed as brigaders or as trolls. While we are not their goal and only a part of their goal, it is our (skeptical) belief that given a choice, reddit will always choose to worry about PR than to preserve any sub, whether it is a manosphere sub or otherwise. Maybe we are wrong to hold that belief. The fact that reddit admins unbanned r/whereallthegoodmenare stands in favor of that counter-argument. But, we cannot assume that there is any guarantee that reddit will quarantine a sub first before banning it or that we will be treated fairly the next time. That might happen sometimes, depending on the popularity of the sub, but it is never a given.

Considering all of this, here is how our future looks:

Right after this announcement, a report will be made to the reddit admins with all the links shared here. Progress on that report will be shared with the members in future announcements, as necessary.

We will have to clampdown our subs here (in reddit) whenever there is even a hint of a brigading. The sub will be put to private mode if we see any of these subs targeting us and if we see too many Rule 1 reports that can only come from an organized harassment campaign. While we apologize in advance for the inconvenience this might cause, please understand that this is a necessary measure and we might have to do it as necessary going forward. We are not sure how often this will be since the trend these days is to directly report to reddit admins instead of inundating us with false reports.

For us to stay in reddit long-term, we will have to not only strictly adhere to the rules of Reddit, we might even have to go a step further and enforce Reddit's Rule 1 (as explained here) vigorously to stay on the safe side. While we understand that this is an unappealing compromise, fighting against the tide in reddit rarely goes well for the longevity of any sub.

We want to remind everyone that we have official backup forums at forums.red website here for WAATGM and here for WATGMA that are subject to the same rules of our reddit subs and is free of any censorship. We recommend all members to register there and to start participating there. While our backup forums is still a work in progress, it might be a better fit for you and your values. We also want to point out that it is our only official backup and any other offshoots you might see anywhere else in the internet is not being handled by the mod team here. If you are concerned about the longevity of our subs in reddit, you can post in our alt forums and then cross-post them to our subs here.

Content archive of WAATGM can be found here) and content archive of WATGMA can be found here). While our backup forums has an archive of most of our posts, it will not be the complete archive at any given time since it is a backup forum and not a dedicated archive as the site linked here.

For those who can afford it, please consider contributing to either one (or both) of these websites so that alternate venues stay available. Let us clarify that we have nothing to do with these sites and stand no monetary benefit. Our intention in promoting them is to ensure the availability of other reliable, smaller venues that can serve as alternatives.

Only approved members can engage and participate in the subs when the sub is set to Private. While we approved most of the users with a comment/post history in the sub during the last brigading, not everyone was approved because of the volume of requests we received and because we cannot distinguish between lurkers, new users and brigaders and we want to minimize the harassment during a brigade. If you want to participate during a brigading, we advise you to start participating in reddit or at our backup forums so that you have a verifiable comment/post history if this happens again.

Additionally and most importantly, if you find any rule-breaking comments or posts in our subs, please hit the report button and let us know. This can help us weed out trolls and brigaders early. Don't let the brigaders be the only ones to use the report button.

If you have read the post this far, we would like to thank you for your patience and would want to re-iterate again to keep the discussion here and to not engage in any rule-breaking behavior. We will clarify any questions in the comments or via updates in the text here if necessary.

PS:

1 For those who either did not go through it first-hand or did not read any of our previous announcements on it, you can refer to the links here, here, here and here.

2 This is the main reason we decided to make the sub private and only allowed trusted members to participate at the height of the brigading being discussed here.

3 To further clarify the definition: Ban evasion is when members or mods of a sub create a backup sub incase they get banned. Just because we agree with some subs and have mutual members does not mean we are related to them. None of our mods are mods in mgtow. In our time of existence, we have only had one mod who was a mod in mgtow and he is no longer a mod in our subs. The fact of the matter is that this is just an accusation made to associate us with mgtow sub so they can get us banned.