I have a subreddit that was once a high traffic subreddit, mainly because it was absolutely overrun with spam, bot accounts, and other nonsense. We had a lot of really great users, but they were drowned out by the noise and a lot of our best contributors were driven off by the garbage. We had very strict rules that nobody ever abided by, so a long series of complicated AutoMod rules were put in place over a number of years - we're talking about these rules starting when "old reddit" was "the reddit" - post flair didn't even exist when these rules were authored. As spammers became more persistent and AutoMod behavior changed, we kept having to tweak the existing rules and add new ones. Eventually we got to the point where we put extremely heavy restrictions on who could post in the subreddit and when. Because of that, the sub is practically dead now.

Reddit, the Moderator settings, and the tools available to us have changed drastically - It's time to completely overhaul the subreddit, and to do so we would like to shut it down completely and work on the overhaul in the background. No problem, right?

Wrong - we have to ask permission from Reddit now to take the sub private. We put in a request, it was reviewed and it was denied. We were told we weren't allowed to do what we the mod team decided was necessary with the subreddit. It was suggested that we put the subreddit in "event mode" which would last 7 days, and we could do that again to extend it another 7 days. Absolute nonsense.

Curious to to see if others have had this same problem. Recently got notifications that individuals have become followers of my account. These individuals do not have a post history but instead are just blank accounts that are soliciting inputs from only fans. It’s clearly a bot that is auto subscribing to individual profiles so that it can later spam their messages or be used for target advertising.

This has the potential to be exploitative very soon.

As a precaution I’ve already blocked these individuals but because there isn’t a way to report individual users subscribing to your profile it’s a very difficult process to even have such actions reviewed by admins.

Has anyone else encountered this type of spam bot?

Edit: for the record I’m not the admin. Please stop responding to me about what the admin is doing or not doing on a sub that has nothing to do with this topic. The notifications on my phone can’t take it anymore.

They are thinking of replacing all mods with AI.

ETA: maybe my wording was a little harsh, but the last question of the survey I got certainly seemed to indicate they are wanting to shift the majority of moderator responsibilities away from human mods. I told them their AI just isn’t there. Their AI content reporting gets it wrong about half the time.

I mod in old reddit, and when I remove a post or comment I switch to new reddit by replacing "old" with "new" in my browser's URL bar. New reddit loads quickly without burning up a bunch of my data, important because I'm on a fairly limited data cap plan. New New reddit, i.e. www.reddit.com, loads a whole buttload of crap in the background, and for some reason must start playing video or other content, before the "add removal reason" button appears. It's slow, buggy, bloated, and wastes my time and money. Apparently reddit decided to make new reddit go away sometime since last night. Is this permanent? If so, then I can no longer add removal notes for removed content. Also, banning people becomes much more cumbersome because now I'll have to manually ban them in mod tools instead of simply clicking "ban user" on the popup that used to come up when hovering over their username in new reddit. Also, though I can still use old reddit's mod queue, I had been switching to new reddit to see if a user's comment or post was removed because they're a ban evader, I can no longer see that since it can only be seen in the buggy and sluggish new new reddit. Any alternatives to that?

Edit to add: Also still running into the "Something went wrong" error message when hitting submit on the "Give a removal reason" box. The only fix for this is to cancel out the removal reason box, reload the page, and then count to ten seconds slowly to make sure everything is loaded. If the removed post is a video I generally have to wait a minute or two, then try giving a removal reason again.

My city sub is a small team, but after performing hundreds of mod actions yesterday following the election, today I've woken up to 50+ reported comments because someone doesn't like people who disagree with them.

Sure, I can report each individual comment for report abuse, one at a time, but surely there has got to be something reddit can do about this. It's been a problem for us before and not only is it a pain to deal with each comment one by one, we have zero visibility into the actual review process or what's being done about the things we've reported or what's being done to keep it from just continuing to happen.

Edit: Oh cool. I just got a response back from the admins on one report I submitted myself yesterday for harassment. Apparently DMing someone out of the blue to say

"You should try this new thing all the kids are doing called "The Kamala." It's where you choke on a dick and still can't get the job done."

Doesn't count as personal abuse or harassment.

Under Rule 4 of the Mod Code of Conduct, mods should not resort to "Campping or sitting on a community". Are community members of those Subs able to report the teams under the Rule 4 for essentially Camping on the sub? Or would it need to go through r/redditrequest? Or would both be an options?

I know some mods have stated that they can use the sub while it's private to keep it "active", would this not also go against Rule 2 where long standing Subs that are now private are not what regular users would expect of it:

"Users who enter your community should know exactly what they’re getting into, and should not be surprised by what they encounter. It is critical to be transparent about what your community is and what your rules are in order to create stable and dynamic engagement among redditors."

Hi all,

I am making this post in hopes of addressing a serious concern for the future of moderation on Reddit. As of late, myself and many other mods are struggling with the rise of weaponized reports against moderators. This rising trend has had a verifiable chilling effect on most moderator teams I am in communication with and numerous back-channel discussions between mods indicate a fear of being penalized for just following the rules of reddit and enforcing TOS.

It started small initially... I heard rumors of some mods from other teams getting suspended but always thought "well they might have been inappropriate so maybe it might have been deserved... I don't know." I always am polite and kind with everyone I interact with so I never considered myself at risk of any admin actions. I am very serious about following the rules so I disregarded it as unfounded paranoia/rumors being spread in mod circles. Some of my co-mods advised I stop responding in modmail and I foolishly assumed I was above that type of risk due to my good conduct and contributions to reddit... I was wrong.

Regular users have caught wind of the ability to exploit the report tool to harass mods and have begun weaponizing it. People participate on reddit for numerous reasons... cat pictures, funny jokes, education, politics, etc... and I happen to be one of the ones using reddit for Politics and Humanism. This puts me at odds with many users who may want me out of the picture in hopes of altering the communities I am in charge of moderating. As a mod, I operate with the assumption that some users may seek reasons to report me so I carefully word my responses and submissions so that there aren't any opportunities for bad-faith actors to try and report me... yet I have been punished multiple times for fraudulent reports. I have been suspended (and successfully appealed) for responding politely in modmail and just recently I was suspended (and successfully appealed) for submitting something to my subreddit that I have had a direct hand in growing from scratch to 200K. Both times the suspensions were wildly extreme and made zero sense whatsoever... I am nearly certain it was automated based on how incorrect these suspensions were.

If a mod like me can get suspended... no one is safe. I post and grow the subreddits I mod. I actively moderate and handle modqueue + modmail. I alter automod and seek out new mods to help keep my communities stable and healthy. Essentially... I have modeled myself as a "good" redditor/mod throughout my time on Reddit and believed that this would grant me a sense of security and safety on the website. My posting and comment history shows this intent in everything I do. I don't venture out to communities I don't trust yet still I am being punished in areas of reddit that are supposedly under my purview. It doesn't take a ton of reports to trigger an automated AEO suspension either since I can see the amount of reports I garnered on the communities I moderate... which makes me worried for my future on Reddit.

I love to moderate but have been forced to reassess how I plan on doing so moving forward. I feel as if I am putting my account at risk by posting or even moderating anymore. I am fearful of responding to modmail if I am dealing with a user who seems to be politically active in toxic communities... so I just ban and mute without a response... a thing I never would have considered doing a year ago. I was given the keys to a 100K sub by the admins to curate and grow but if a couple of fraudulent reports can take me out of commission... how can I feel safe posting and growing that community and others? The admins liked me enough to let me lead the community they handed over yet seem to be completely ok with letting me get fraudulently suspended. Where is the consistency?

All of this has impacted my quality of life as a moderator and my joy of Reddit itself. At this point... I am going to be blunt and say whatever the policies AEO are following is actively hurting the end-user experience and Reddit's brand as a whole. I am now always scared that the next post or mod action may be my last... and for no reason whatsoever other than the fact I know an automated system may miscategorize me and suspend me. Do I really want to make 5-6 different posts across my mod discords informing my co-mods of the situation asking them and inconveniencing them with another appeal to r/modsupport? Will the admins be around over the weekend if I get suspended on a Friday and will I have to wait 4+ days to get back on reddit? Will there be enough coverage in my absence to ensure that the communities I mod dont go sideways? Which one of my co-mods and friends will be the next to go? All of these questions are swimming around in my head and clearly in the heads of other mods who have posted here lately. Having us reach out to r/modsupport modmail is not a solution... its a bandaid that not sufficient in protecting mods and does not stop their user experience from being negatively affected. I like to think I am a good sport about these types of things... so if I am finally at wits end... it probably might be time to reassess AEO policies in regards to mods.

Here are some suggestions that may help improve/resolve the issue at hand:

• Requiring manual admin action for suspension on mod accounts that moderate communities of X size and Y amount of moderator actions per Z duration of time. (XYZ being variables decided by admins based on the average active mod)

• Suspending users who engage in fraudulent reporting that have a pattern of targeting mods... especially suspending users who successfully have launched fraudulent reports that have affected the quality of life of another user. This would cause a chilling effect towards report trolls who do not seek to help any community and who only use reports to harass users.

• Better monitoring of communities that engage in organized brigading activities across reddit as we are now hitting a new golden age of report trolling apparently. This would reduce the amount folks finding out that AEO is easy fooled since they wouldn't be able to share their success stories about getting mods suspended.

• Opening up a "trusted mod" program that would give admin vetted mods extra protection against fraudulent reports. This would reduce the amount of work admins are forced to do each time a good mod is suspended and would also give those mods a sense of safety that is seriously lacking nowadays.

I try hard to be a positive member of reddit and build healthy communities that don't serve as hubs for hatespeech. I love modding and reddit so I deeply care about this issue. I hope the admins consider a definitive solution to this problem moving forward because if the problem remains unresolved... I worry for the future of reddit moderation.

Thanks for listening.

Changing a community from "public" to "restricted" requires APPROVAL now? Why on Earth would you take away a basic function from moderators? I know we're volunteers but this is really going far out of your way to intentionally treat us like shit and make our lives harder. Why are you working so hard to make Reddit worse and make everyone hate it? Were you jealous of Musk destroying Twitter and you wanted to copy him? I really can't imagine what's going on in Steve's head that you are just being evil for the sake of evil.

The last few weeks have been a really hard time to be a moderator. It feels like the admins have declared war on us. Every time I log on, there’s another screenshot of an admin being rude to a moderator, another news story about an admin insulting moderators, another modmail trying to sow division in a mod team.

Reddit’s business depends upon volunteer moderators to curate and maintain communities that people keep coming back to so that you can sell ads. We pay your salary. If you want something to do something for free, it is usually far more effective to try the nice way than the nasty way.

To be honest, I thought the protest was mostly stupid: I cared about accessibility, but not really about Apollo or RIF. My subs have historically stayed out of every protest and we were ambivalent about this one. Then Steve Huffman lied about being threatened by a dev and the mood changed dramatically. It worsened when Huffman told another lie the next day. We’re now open, but every time a new development happens we share it amongst ourselves and morale is really low. People like me who were sceptical about the blackout have been radicalised against Reddit because it feels like we’re being treated like disposal dirt, and that you expect we should be grateful just for being allowed to use the site.

It feels like the admins have declared war on us. Not only does it feel like crap and make Reddit a worse place to be, it is dragging out the blackouts. You have made a series of unprovoked attacks on the people you depend upon. With every unforced error, you just dig yourselves deeper into the hole, and it is hard to see how you can get out without a little humility.

Please, we need support, not manipulation or abuse. You could easily say that you’re delaying implementing API charges for apps for six months, and that you’ll give them access at an affordable cost which is lower than you charge LLM scrapers or whatever. You could even just try striking a more conciliatory tone, give a few apologies. and just wait until protesters get bored. Instead every time I come online I find a new insult from someone who is apparently trying to build a community. You are destroying relationships and trust that took you years to build, and in doing so you are dragging out the disruption. It’s not too late to try a more conventional approach.

Just noticed a direct message from the /u/reddit admin account stating:

You're Invited: Participate in a Reddit Research Study:

from /u/reddit [A] sent 2 hours ago

Hi there,

The Reddit research team is interested in your experience with Reddit. Help improve the moderator experience on Reddit by sharing your thoughts as part of our ongoing research. If you're selected and successfully complete the interview, we'll send you an $80 virtual gift card from Tremendous.

Study Details

When: Monday, August 5 - Monday, August 12, 2024

Duration: 60 minutes

Location: Zoom Video conference call or Google Meet

If you're interested in participating, fill out this survey. (link to reddit.qualtrics.com/...)

Thank you!

Reddit Research Team

Note: This is an automatic message and we won't receive your replies

The account it's sent from is a legitimate Reddit admin account (as evidenced by the bold, red font it appears in and the large [A] shown next to it), but this sets off all sorts of alarm bells in my head - mod study? Gift card? Reddit Research Team? Last time I got a "mod study" message it was from some sort of crypto drop scam. Gift cards sounds similar to a scam attempt (although they can be a legitimate form of payment), and I've never heard of the "Reddit Research Team" before in my life. I don't know if Reddit actually uses Qualtrics for their surveys so I can't tell if the link helps confirm or deny the legitimacy of the message. It doesn't ask for any account info at least though so I guess that's good :P

If this is legitimate, great, I can calm down. If not, something's probably gone really wrong.

We recently banned a user for continuing to violate not only our group rules but Reddit community guidelines. They have threatened to have our page banned by a relative who is an employees of Reddit. How can I send this exchange to Reddit ?

Has anyone had a recent issue with the mod suggestions from the ModSupportBot being way off base?

In my most recent request for a list, the 6 users suggested as a “strong” candidate were 4 people who I wouldn’t even consider at all due to their spicy behavior, 1 who shortly thereafter received a site-wide ban, and 1 who is already an active moderator on the team.

It’s not usually so far off-base in its suggestions. Any clue why this might be? Did parameters change? Could we be doing something on our end that’s throwing off the suggestions?

Hi,

We recently got a message from ModCOC asking us to remove NSFW status on our sub. However, our sub allows NSFW content (and always has, this is not new. We are /r/tooafraidtoask , and this includes content such as 'graphic, sexually-explicit, or offensive.' etc. ex1,ex2,ex3,ex4. These are from years ago ). Complying with the request would put us against reddit's and ModCOC's rules. The reply button seems to be bugged, so we're unable to get into contact with them about this confusion. Not sure what to do?

Original message is here. We replied but it's forced to private mod note:

https://mod.reddit.com/mail/all/1lz9ou

edit:

Content of original message/reply in image form: here

Picture showing only Mod note button: here

Edit2:

A lot of people are commenting assuming that we're like other subs. I would ask that you please check the content of our sub before assuming. And just as a random bit of evidence of good faith (I'm obscuring the name, until I can confirm they're ok with posting it), here is a discussion from 2021 between mods:

https://imgur.com/a/Aj1rksC

Honestly TATA should be default NSFW.

This is not a new stance for us, we've wanted to be. We didn't think we were allowed to be NSFW.

I mod daily and was in no way marked as an inactive moderator. I’ve taken thousands of actions in the last 2 weeks alone and that was even cited in the mod log next to my name. However this morning I woke up and found that the entire subreddit has been banned due to being unmoderated. Upon scrolling through the new requests in redditrequests I noticed a lot of nsfw subs have new requests and as this was an nsfw subreddit I’m wondering if it’s the same issue previously dealt with.

Editing to add: I for obvious reasons can’t see the mod log but upon checking my outgoing messages can see that the last one sent via my mod actions was only 7 hours ago.

Given recent circumstances it seems unclear whether transitioning a SFW subreddit to NSFW is allowed, even if content is correctly marked and a sizable portion of the community agrees with the decision. To my knowledge this does not violate any rules, and as viewing NSFW content is opt-in it shouldn’t endanger anyone, but clarification would be much appreciated.

I have just completed a second 3-day suspension for alleged harassment in the past month. Both suspensions occurred in response to modmail conversations I was having with banned users, where I refused to unban them.

In the first case, I run a dating subreddit which has a rule that says “no monetary arrangements”. One man repeatedly posted to advertise for sugar babies. I warned him, then banned him. He challenged it. The conversation went back and forth. At one point he said, “I will adhere to the rules and anything out of topic will be done outside of the community.” So, I knew he would post in my subreddit pretending he wasn’t looking for a monetary arrangement, and then discuss money in the private messages with people who responded. I told him “No means no” and muted him.

I got suspended for 3 days, for harassment.

In the second case, someone was posting anti-transgender talking points in a subreddit which has a rule against “anti-transgender rhetoric”. When I banned him, he responded “No worries, I'll be back. Users can very easily evade even site-wide permanent bans from fascist moderators nowadays.” I responded “When you come back with more anti-transgender rhetoric, we'll just ban you again. And again. And again. Until you learn that this isn't the right subreddit for that shit.”

I got suspended for 3 days, for harassment.

Reddit’s message about getting suspended includes a link to the content which triggered the suspension, so I know what I got suspended for, but not why.

Obviously, in both cases, I got reported by users as revenge for banning them.

When I got suspended the first time (about three weeks ago):

• On Day 1, I lodged an appeal via Reddit’s appeals form. No response.

• On Day 2, I lodged another appeal via Reddit’s appeals form. No response.

• After the suspension expired, I messaged the modmail here in /r/ModSupport to ask for a review, and got told “Will see if the appeals team can give things another look.” It’s been three weeks, and I’ve received no further response.

When I got suspended the second time (just three days ago):

• On Day 1, I lodged an appeal via Reddit’s appeals form. No response.

• On Day 2, I lodged an appeal via Reddit’s support request form. No response.

(To anyone thinking that I could message the mods of /r/ModSupport to appeal my suspension: when a user is suspended from Reddit, they can not use any feature on Reddit. The whole site becomes read-only for a suspended user.)

Nobody has explained how I allegedly harassed these users who contacted me in modmail. Nobody has reviewed my suspensions. Nobody has responded to me at all.

I am very aware, as Reddit keeps reminding me, that my next suspension could be my last: “If you’re reported for any further violations of Reddit’s Content Policy after your three-day ban, additional actions including permanent banning may be taken against your account(s).” The next time I ban a user, they can report me for harassment, and I could end up suspended from Reddit forever.

It’s ironic. Us moderators are expected to respond to users who appeal their bans, and engage with them in good faith – which is what I was doing in both cases when I got suspended. However, we don’t get the same consideration from Reddit employees when they ban us.

And, when a malicious user can get a moderator shut down for upholding their ban, it makes me a lot less motivated to actually respond to those users and engage with them – which, I think, is contrary to what Reddit wants from me.

As I said in my title, I am beyond furious at the way I’ve been treated in these past few weeks.

EDIT TO ADD:

In the 10+ years that I've been moderating on Reddit (this ain't my first rodeo, not by a long shot), I've prided myself on not being one of those moderators who just shuts users out. I've taken the time to explain things to people. It has made me a highly visible target for anti-mod attacks, but I keep doing it because I think it's the right thing to do.

However, these recent suspensions have left a bad taste in my mouth. It's one thing to get attacked by users. It's another thing entirely to get shut down by the Reddit admins.

I've been reading this subreddit a bit more since I made my post. It seems I'm not the only one this has happened to. I'm seeing quite a few moderators here talking about "users weaponising the report system".

So, I might have to become one of those moderators who just shuts users out, and stops engaging with them - as much as it goes against my personality and my moderation style.

UPDATE:

As well as the public reply from an admin on this post, I have also received a private reply from another admin, in response to this post.

• They have recognised that I was wrongly suspended on both occasions.

• They have erased both incidents from my record.

• They apologised "for the trouble that this has caused".

It took a while, but I got there in the end.

Couple of issues:

1. Reddit spam filter recently started targeting a specific user's comments (in a daily discussion thread) and deleting her comments (marking them as spam). I've reinstated her comments on an almost-daily basis but it seems the filter didn't "learn" from my mod actions.
2. Today, her comment was deleted again and me clicking on the mod shield (on reddit's desktop site) did not expand any options at all that I can take with regards to that particular comment. Is the filter actually preventing me from un-deleting her comment?
3. Other stuff: the official IOS app broke today and I was unable to see any comments on posts in our sub (which prompted me to try to reinstate s/n user's comment on desktop and then finding out I couldn't do a single damn thing).

BOTH desktop site AND the official app have screwed me over as a mod today.

Hello. I run a small Boeing sub that is growing in popularity due to another "unofficial" reddit group banning everyone that is making any pro-union comment. They require flair, and if you select IAM (the union) you banned within 4 hours even though they say its open to everyone.

Now there mods are directing people to our Unions subreddit and my new Boeing sub and telling people to downvote everything and it was revealed via leaked internal emails that that the "unofficial" Boeing is actually run by Boeing, and is in violation of NLRB by doing what they are doing. And our Unions sub as well is being attacked.

We reached out to reddit many times with no response. Our next step is reaching out to their legal department but there is no contact info available for them and short of our lawyers serving them papers, seems we cannot reach them. Anyone have any suggestions?

Edit: I think we have a plan of action now based on all the responses. Thank you all for your advice, it has been both eye opening and helpful.

r/worldnews has been hit by a wave of ChatGPT accounts.

Somewhere over 1500 2400 bot accounts have been banned so far.

Most of the accounts start off their activity with a self-post on their profile with 4-12 post karma. They then move on to other subs to farm comment karma. The self-post on their profile is mostly gibberish. The title of that self-post sometimes breaks mid-sentence if there's a comma or semi-colon in it.

The accounts were all created during the past 80 days.

This is an example list of posts that the bots attacked.

/r/programming noticed that their sub was being hit with the same wave of bots before they went private. The bots hit other subs such as /r/askwomen, /r/askmen, /r/askreddit and TIL.

Recently, each new bot comments 2-3 times per minute and it sometimes fluctuates down to 2-3 times per hour.

Is anything being done to help reduce the amount of these bots from registering new accounts or spamming different subs?

For example, how would they handle the following:

• British slang for a cigarette

• A perjorative word for a gay man

• The NATO reporting name of the MiG-15 fighter

Note that the the last two words are very similar, the only difference being one or two of the letter "g."

I am a moderator of an aviation-related subreddit, and sometimes poster submissions will use the NATO reporting name in a somewhat ambiguous manner, presumably as clickbait and to increase engagement. "Oh my gosh, they said a bad word! Oh, it's just a MiG-15 trollolol" This can then bring out the trolls in the comments.

I'm just trying to decide what the best way is to handle this, and have been discussing this with my moderation team. If we let it slide, is Reddit going to not like it at some point in the future and potentially punish and/or ban our subreddit? Or do we need to crack down on this behavior and remove posts that do something like this in the title?

Any other moderators have any experience with something similar? How do you handle it?

Thanks.

So, the German help center was recently updated, and we (as in, German mods from various communities) stumbled upon an interesting bit in the article on ban evasion. That bit also exists in the English help center:

Some moderators may be okay with a user returning to their subreddit on another account so long as they participate in good faith, as such we only review ban evasion reports when they are reported by the subreddit moderators.

This is a completly senseless ruling. Let me explain:

We as mods do not know who performs ban evasion. All we can really do to catch ban evaders is guesswork. Now, if reddit says that they only take action against ban evaders that are reported, that automatically means that most ban evaders probably remain undetected as soon as they are smart enough to not utilize the exact same writing style as they did with their original account.

This is also going hand in hand with the Community Digest, which every month tells us that Reddit has found hundreds of ban evaders, but only took action against a bakers dozen. That means that somehow Reddit knows about ban evaders in our communities, from our dozens of reports knows that we do not want ban evaders in our community, and still lets hundreds roam free without ever telling us about them.

I understand the idea that some communities might not have a problem with ban evaders if they behave afterwards - However, you are leaving the communities that do have a problem with it completly helpless.

At least send community moderators a list of suspected ban evasion accounts so we can decide wether we want to report them.

The shreddit sidebar hides the mod names, as it should, but it is also not providing a "message the mods" link. That's a serious problem. Not all banned users will still have a ban message to reply to. I just had to redirect someone to old.reddit.com to send us a modmail.

Our sub is frequented by a lot of minors, this is a liability for the sub and the content creator that owns it. we've reported the user and their alts for sexualizing minors but it's been ignored so far. Is there anything that can be done to automod or spam filter these kinds of posts?

This is a bit of a weird one. I moderate a few communities - one of which we had a commercial account which was suspected of vote manipulation and alt accounts, so we took a group decision to ban them.

Ever since then, all of my comments ELSEWHERE on Reddit have been heavily upvoted. Previously to ~50 upvotes, but now it seems to ~100 upvotes. Is this some kind of weird retribution? A bug? Something else? Looking for any kind of explanation really.

Will leave a comment below to see if it happens here - it usually takes half an hour or so.

Hi admins,

Why have I now received a second message from /u/modcodeofconduct despite replying to it and our sub being public again for nearly 48 hours.

Secondly why can I only reply as mod note only which means they're never going to see we've replied?

https://imgur.com/EjZKD4w