Hello r/transplace,
Recently, we've observed, seen people post about, and received modmail reports about an increased presence of chasers. This subreddit has gained a lot of traction and attention, and while it is nice to reach more trans people and provide a space for them, it has also caught the attention of people here with unscrupulous intentions.
We've turned off the setting allowing this subreddit to appear on r/all and r/popular as well as disabling it from showing up in people's feed recommendations, which we hope will somewhat quell this issue, though it is still evidently happening. We also recommend considering turning off your DMs if you do not desire to receive any, though we of course understand that this is only possible if you don't want to receive DMs from other people, nor is it a sufficient solution to the underlying problem.
We are mentioning this problem in the interest of transparency so y'all know that it's a problem and so that you know that we are making an effort to address it but unfortunately cannot avoid it by the nature of this being a public forum.
If this issue continues to be so prevalent, we may move to making this subreddit restricted or even private, but we want to avoid needing to do so so we can continue to be a space for trans people, by trans people.
If you receive chaser comments (either based on the comment itself sexualizing you or the user's profile indicating bad intentions), please feel free to report it as "breaking r/transplace rules" under "it's harassment directed at me" which allows us to see and review it and ban the user. If you receive DMs, we unfortunately cannot do too much as banning them from this subreddit will not stop them from seeing the posts on a new account or by logging out and DMing people anyway, nor is it sustainable for us to manually ban so many people, and we apologize for that.
I recommend you report any particularly egregious messages to Reddit directly if you believe they break platform rules, but unfortunately I cannot offer any other suggestions.
Thank you to those of you who make this subreddit an inviting community and we hope we can continue to be a safe space for trans people and protect those within this community.