So hopefully they won't feel put on the spot, but I really, really, really want to give a massive shoutout to /u/imanauthority. In the META thread last month, we got into a very productive discussion which led to them being of invaluable assistance in entirely overhauling the system we use to send out flair alerts. This is something we do when we see a question that is interesting and in the wheelhouse of a flaired user, since we know that most people don't camp out on the new queue so they can be easy to miss, if watching the new queue isn't what you're supposed to be doing.

In any case /u/imanauthority pointed us towards Air Table, and helped set up a base that fits our needs pretty damn well. Not only for flair alerts, but even more importantly perhaps, also making it seamless to integrate in alerts to non-flaired users who we see contributing, and want to encourage in their contributions. After some tweaks - and a few follow-ups for further advice - we have the whole thing up and running, and it works wonders!

So anyways, as this was mostly done behind the scenes, while the mods all know about what they have done, I just wanted to make sure to also give them a shoutout for the community at large, as it really has been an excellent bit of assistance.

A recent question had me meditating on the influence of pop culture on occultism. This is a little more complicated than it might seem, but given that there are over 75 versions of Lovecraft's Necronomicon that have been produced, with at least some of them being considered legit works of occult literature by practitioners, it might be important to remember that historically the line between fiction and esoteric literature is very thin and nebulous. Works that were intended primarily as entertainment may contain ideas, concepts - even rituals and entities! - which other people believe are authentic descriptions of historical practices. When this happens today, we call it "fakelore," but the older it gets the harder it can be to discern whether something is part of an "authentic" tradition or an original creation which was then co-opted by later writers and practitioners.

Just want to register my absolute bafflement as to how and why some META threads seem to skyrocket so quickly.

Why is it called the "Secret Service" when there is nothing secret about them?

Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap

Friday, July 26 - Thursday, August 01

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I've been looking into medieval professions, and there seems to be a lot of cases of people with occupations like "combmaker" or "scabbardmaker" or "scissor-grinder" -- would people have actually had jobs quite this niche? Was there enough call for things like scissors and scythes that someone could make a daily living like this? Or would they have been for instance a blacksmith that was known for making very good scissors, etc.?

For anyone wondering why the META thread was removed.

As a general rule, we don't remove META threads, and over all the thread was fairly productive! Got some good feedback from some users.

What we don't allow is use of our subreddit for Karma Farming. It came to our attention this is just a repost of a 2 year old thread by a new account intending to built up Karma to be sold off for spamming.

We have removed the thread, banned the account, and reported it to the Admins who we hope will suspend the account shortly.

Apologies to the many users who posted in the thread in good faith, but we can't allow users to post like this here and break the sitewide rules.