These are the old rules on voats /v/news:
Must Be Recent: News should not be older than 30 days at the time of submission. If the article is directly relevant to today, it will be allowed.
Submission Titles: User-editorialized titles are subject to deletion. State only the facts, not opinions or speculation. Do not use ALL-CAPS. If a submission is removed and rule two is cited, re-title the article and post it again.
No Image Posts: Submissions must be articles or videos that depict news.
No Social Media Links: Personal Blog Posts, Wiki Entries, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This includes links to Reddit. Please use /v/meanwhileonreddit.
No Paywalls: The link must be easily accessible, without signing up or spending money. Please use an archive for known paywall sites or include one in the comments section.
No URL Shorteners or Redirects: Link directly to the article. Archive links are allowed.
Please translate non-English articles: Use Google Translate in the link or post the translation in the comments.
Please Be Civil: Arguing is fine as we all have differing opinions, but please respect each other.
Feel free to give input, I will give my own in the comments as well.
Thoughts on rules
@THC and @Ventus had some comments on this. I think we should allow older news articles, but make people write the date of the article in the title if it is more than a month old. There are some instances where old news becomes relevant again, so it doesn't make sense to completely disallow it.
Everyone should copy and paste the original article title. This is one thing that Reddit got right and Voat got wrong.
I think this is a good rule. However, in exceptional circumstances (such as someone being in the middle of a "happening" and posting photos of it) images should be allowed. There are a lot of instances of highly upvoted posts being deleted on Reddit because they don't exactly fit into the ruleset, but if we make exceptions like this, it won't happen as often.
Keep this rule, but have something similar to rule #3. In the event of a happening, let people post social media links because it is often the only way to figure out what is really going on in a situation that unfolds too fast for media outlets to keep up.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
I would like to keep this on the sidebar. Clearly it did not do wonders on Voat, but it is nice to have it there anyway.
Thoughts on /s/News mods and mods in general
Make sure the people modding the important defaults know how to moderate. It does not matter how much content they submit, and being able to tell when a post is breaking sidebar rules is not everything. A lot of drama and bad modding could have been avoided on Voat and on Reddit if the mods were good at looking at posts on a case by case basis. Clearly there are some posts which definitely should be removed, but sometimes a post will be made that sits in a grey area.
I think we would benefit from finding the middle ground between Reddit and Voat. Reddit moderators remove far too many posts and stick to the rules too much. Voat mods are either non existent or there are basically no rules left on the defaults because a certain "free speech" group took them away.