Introducing Flair_Helper

https://www.reddit.com/r/Flair_Helper/comments/hunrfv/introducing_flair_helper/

created by Flair_Helper on 20/07/2020 at 15:57 UTC*

105 upvotes, 24 top-level comments (showing 24)

What is Flair_Helper?

/u/Flair_Helper is a new bot written by /u/Blank-Cheque and /u/justcool393 which allows you to perform various actions on posts, simply by setting their flair. This type of bot is frequently referred to as a **"flairbot"** and is by far the single most common request heard by bot authors. Now, for the first time, you can have a flairbot on your sub without the need to develop it yourself or contract an outside developer.

Okay, but why do I want that?

Here are a few reasons you might want a flairbot:

1. You or your mods frequently moderate from mobile devices, or would like to do so, and this bot would make it far easier for you to do so by allowing you to perform multiple actions, including leaving a removal comment, with a few taps. (This is the most common one)

2. You just want to save time performing removals and associated actions such as bans or usernotes, and this bot allows you to do multiple things at once.

3. You don't want to clog up your reddit profile with removal comments, and this bot would let you avoid leaving removal comments yourself.

4. Your mod team frequently performs controversial removals likely to result in harassment for whoever leaves the comment, and this bot can be used as a proxy for them.

5. Your mod team frequently brings on inexperienced mods whom you don't completely trust with certain permissions, and this bot lets them perform necessary actions (bans, for instance) without having full control.

Sounds great, how do I set it up?

We have created a detailed guide to using /u/Flair_Helper at its subreddit, and you can find it here[1]. There is even a quickstart guide[2] for setting up the bot for its most common use case (removing a post by flairing it with the removal reason).

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flair_Helper/wiki/tutorial

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flair_Helper/wiki/tutorial/quickstart

What sorts of things can it do?

/u/Flair_Helper can do all sorts of things just based on a flair. That includes any combination of removing, locking, commenting, banning, notifying to a Discord or Slack channel, flairing the author, usernoting the author, etc. Here are some examples[3] of common uses.

3: /r/Flair_Helper/wiki/tutorial/examples

One of my subreddits has /u/Flair_Helper, but I have no idea how to use it!

Fortunately, we have created a guide[4] for using /u/Flair_Helper on whatever platform you choose, whether that be Old Reddit, New Reddit, the Official App, or any of the myriad third-party apps.

4: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flair_Helper/wiki/tutorial/usage

I have a bug report, feature request, suggestion, question, etc.

For any of these, feel free to reach out to /u/Blank-Cheque over reddit.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Happy modding, everyone!

Comments

Comment by [deleted] at 20/07/2020 at 16:12 UTC

9 upvotes, 2 direct replies

u/blank-cheque u/justcool393

Send Flair_Helper a private message with the subject line "list" and your subreddit's display name as the body and wait for it to respond (should take 10 seconds at most). The response will be a list of mod-only flair templates in the format of "TEMPLATE_TEXT": TEMPLATE_ID. Based on this information, replace the keys in the flairs section of the config that you saved in step 2 with the corresponding template IDs. If you're confused, check out the examples page to see the correct format.

Can I recommend instead having the bot read from a subreddit wiki the way MAGIC_EYE_BOT does? I believe this will improve/ease useability, increase transparency among mod teams, and increase the likelihood of adoption of the bot by subreddit mod teams.

Comment by [deleted] at 20/07/2020 at 17:04 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by [deleted] at 20/07/2020 at 17:14 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[removed]

Comment by [deleted] at 20/07/2020 at 16:48 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So, is this just a way to get around having to use Toolbox? Maybe setup the bot to post removal reasons instead of having a mod post from their own account? That or I'm guessing just being able to flair the post from mobile and the bot is able to post the removal reason to the actual thread while removing it?

Or is there another reason for the bot that I'm missing?

Comment by BuckRowdy at 20/07/2020 at 20:21 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Thank you guys for building this and making it available to the rest of us. I was about to try to get one of these going in a few subs when I heard you were building it. Excited to try it out.

Comment by tuctrohs at 01/08/2020 at 12:49 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies

A few suggestions for /u/Blank-Cheque and /u/justcool393 :

It's a little hard to find the index to the wiki pages, other than from this post. I suggest a linke

A link from https://www.reddit.com/r/Flair_Helper/wiki/index[1] to https://www.reddit.com/r/Flair_Helper/wiki/tutorial[2] so you can get there from the wiki tab, and,

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flair_Helper/wiki/index

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flair_Helper/wiki/tutorial

A link from the bottom of each tutorial page back to the main page of the tutorial.

Note that it doesn't work on mod posts, if I'm correct about that limitation.

There's a discrepancy between the format shown on the examples page and that given in the template that the bot PM's to the mod: flair is in double quotes in one and not in the other. That probably doesn't matter but can be a source of confusion. (I wasted time trying both when I was troubleshooting.)

Another possible confusion: Because of markdown, there's a difference between the source text in the configuration wiki, the way it's rendered when you view the wiki page, the way the examples are rendered in the tutorial wiki, and the source code used in the tutorial wiki. It seems that one wants the source of one to match the rendering of the other. You might think that's obvious, but when someone is troubleshooting, it's little things like that that they need to start questioning and clear documentation helps.

Comment by RokieVetran at 31/12/2021 at 12:35 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

can the bot mark specific flairs remove as spam rather than just removing them?

Comment by [deleted] at 20/07/2020 at 18:15 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[removed]

Comment by [deleted] at 20/07/2020 at 19:30 UTC

1 upvotes, 2 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by tuctrohs at 20/07/2020 at 19:31 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Thanks for creating this!

I'd like to suggest that of the help pages be an overview of the capabilities and examples of applications, independent of the details of how to do it. You could think of that as an expansion of the "what sorts of thinks can it do" sentence above, or as a version of the examples page, but instead of code under heading, have a description of what it accomplishes and why people might want that.

I don't know if others are in the same boat I am, but I want to first know "how can this make my sub run better" before I want to learn "how do I set this up."

Comment by bakonydraco at 20/07/2020 at 21:16 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Just to clarify, this is strictly for link flair and not user flair? Cool stuff!

Comment by tuctrohs at 21/07/2020 at 08:17 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I suggest modifying the text for

What sorts of things can it do?

to say

/u/Flair_Helper[1] can do all sorts of things triggered when a mod sets flair on a post. It's only triggered by a mod setting flair, not by a user setting flair. Things it can do include any combination of removing, locking, commenting, banning, notifying to a Discord or Slack channel, etc. The concept is that the mod sets flair not to label the post for users, but specifically to trigger the bot.

1: https://www.reddit.com/u/Flair_Helper

Comment by PJ09 at 26/07/2020 at 07:00 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Great work!

Comment by [deleted] at 31/07/2020 at 08:21 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This is cool! But I don’t understand what flair bot means?

Comment by ModernJazz-2K20 at 01/08/2020 at 17:04 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Big thank you for this. I mod some big subs on another account and this has been really helpful.

Comment by [deleted] at 03/08/2020 at 10:22 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by [deleted] at 04/08/2020 at 16:29 UTC*

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

This account is no longer active.

The comments and submissions have been purged as one final 'thank you' to reddit for being such a hostile platform towards developers, mods, and users.

Reddit as a company has slowly lost touch with what made it a great platform for so long. Some great features of reddit in 2023:

Killing 3rd party apps

Continuously rolling out features that negatively impact mods and users alike with no warning or consideration of feedback

Hosting hateful communities and users

Poor communication and a long history of not following through with promised improvements

Complete lack of respect for the hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours put into keeping their site running

Comment by WhoKnowsWho2 at 16/08/2020 at 18:35 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

/u/Blank-Cheque, hi, thanks for writing this bot. I looked over the examples of common uses, but I need to apply a comment+remove+lock to some flairs, and only a comment to other flairs. I don't see a way to combine the actions within the config page.

Comment by Thumbs0fDestiny at 29/09/2020 at 02:49 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Thanks. Can't wait to try it out.

Comment by quentinwolf at 10/03/2024 at 04:16 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I created an open-source Flair Helper Clone, /r/Flair_Helper2

Though I'm not hosting a bot for everyone to just add and use, Instead I've made the code available for anyone to start up your own instance of it. My code now monitors the mod.stream instead of individual processes watching each individual subreddit, so I may make an exception to add a couple subs that previously used Flair_Helper for further testing of the code, although be warned it's still in development and may go down occasionally for maintenance or tweaks.

It's 100% backwards compatible with any existing flair_helper wiki config.

As of now, it loads your existing config, and will process all flairs that are configured to comment, remove, lock, spoiler (added functionality the original didn't have), add contributor, remove contributor, add usernotes (full integration made to work with toolbox usernotes wiki page), add User Text flair and User CSS Flair, with full {{placeholder}} functionality.

To make your own bot, you'll just make a reddit account dedicated to running the bot, generate your client_id client_secret and refresh token, fill in the praw.ini config, pip install the requirements, and run the python code. It will check if there are any existing flair_helper wiki configs on all the subs the account is a moderator of, and immediately watches for mod-log changes in order to process the flair requests.

Python code is available here: https://github.com/quentinwolf/flair_helper2[1] for anyone to contribute to and use themselves.

1: https://github.com/quentinwolf/flair_helper2

Since blank-cheque unfortunately doesn't seem to respond to messages, and haven't released the source to their own original Flair_Helper, I felt it was in the best interest of everyone who previously used Flair Helper to have an open-source alternative that can be improved as a community.

Comment by Runsfromrabbits at 01/11/2024 at 19:36 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I miss you, u/Flair_Helper

Comment by Original-Cinikal at 30/07/2022 at 15:17 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Why was my post removed?

Comment by westcoastal at 16/10/2022 at 17:32 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Is it possible to use flair_helper to message the user instead of leaving a comment when removing a post?

Comment by zkyf at 02/01/2024 at 18:39 UTC*

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Hello, New user. Trying to add flair. Tried interacting with /mycompass bot. No success. Please advise.