Moderator Support & Resources

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/147ysr6/moderator_support_resources/

created by heavyshoes on 12/06/2023 at 21:55 UTC

74 upvotes, 50 top-level comments (showing 25)

Hi there,

We’ve received a number of inquiries about what to do if your community is experiencing an uptick in unwanted activity. While we’ve addressed the specific inquiries privately, we wanted to let mods at large know that there are resources at your disposal if a) your community is public, or b) you anticipate an increase in traffic if you choose to re-open your community. Many of you likely already use some of the tools and resources listed below, but there are also mods who might not yet be aware of them.

Resources:

• Crowd Control[1]: This is specifically designed to help mitigate interference by outside users. This can also help you better identify if users making comments or posts aren’t regular community participants. If you already use Crowd Control, consider revisiting your settings to ensure that it’s set at the appropriate level. Crowd control actions can also help indicate to you as a mod team when activity is coming from people who are not usual participants in your community.
• Ban Evasion Filter[2]: This can detect and prevent users who attempt to return to the community after a ban. This is a newer tool and I know a lot of you have tried it already, but if you haven’t yet, I’d very much encourage you to. We are working with the safety team to closely monitor & address reports of moderator harassment as quickly as possible.
• View Crisis Management[3] tips to help lessen the load, maintain trust with your community, and mitigate fallout when things feel overwhelming.
• /r/automoderator[4] is available for help with navigating complex or simple automod rules.
• Moderator Code of Conduct[5]: If you are being subjected to, or see other subreddits or mod teams engaging in interference and/or encouraging their users to attack other communities, please report it using this form[6]. As many of you know, this is something we routinely action via the Moderator Code of Conduct, and we are aware there will likely be increases in this behavior.

We also want to reiterate that we respect your decisions to do what’s best for your community, and will do what we can to ensure you're safe while doing so. However, we do expect that these decisions have been made through consensus, and not via unilateral action. We ask that you strive to ensure that your moderator team is aligned on community decision-making – regardless of what decisions are being made. If you believe that your community or another community is being subject to decisions made by a sole moderator without buy-in from the broader mod team, you can let us know via the Moderator Code of Conduct form above.

1: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038129231-What-is-Crowd-Control-

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/130vnbo/ban_evasion_filter_coming_soon_to_all_communities/

3: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360041256671

4: https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator/

5: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-code-of-conduct

6: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=179106

Comments

Comment by nimitz34 at 12/06/2023 at 23:30 UTC

86 upvotes, 1 direct replies

How about a tool like PushShift which allowed us to check alts for histories of spamming and scamming. This is especially important in business subreddits.

Comment by Norci at 13/06/2023 at 06:34 UTC*

81 upvotes, 6 direct replies

However, we do expect that these decisions have been made through consensus, and not via unilateral action. [...] If you believe that your community or another community is being subject to decisions made by a sole moderator without buy-in from the broader mod team, you can let us know via the Moderator Code of Conduct form above.

Since when? For as long as I can remember, Reddit's answer to any sudden changes made by top mod without consulting others (besides hacked accounts and maybe subreddit request retaliation) always been "They're top mod, sucks to be you guys 🤷".

So now that you bring it up, I gotta ask where does CoC say anything about needing mod consensus? What do you expect us to report? What's the "consensus" threshold, just majority, all of the mods, or some other percentage? Because it seems like an retroactive afterthought by you guys and not something that ever actually been enforced or written in the CoC.

Edit: Telling silence, can't even back up your words.

Comment by aaronp613 at 12/06/2023 at 21:57 UTC

122 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I dont think anyone is having an uptick in activity right now 💀

Comment by Gizoogle at 15/06/2023 at 02:54 UTC

13 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Man, it sure is cool that Reddit beats the fucking shit out of their free labor moderator team by cutting tools, changing their decade+ stance on top mods vs. other mods and ignoring any input that doesn't suit u/spez narrative - then fully expects other lemmings to step in and eat shit in their stead whenever the top ones are actually taking organized action against the bullshit.

The best part? You've got the gall to spam us with new fucking banners every 2 days in what I can only assume is an attempt at saying "see guys? we do support mods". Really, you're just pointing us to "resources" that have existed for years and are comparatively ineffective and/or the information is completely irrelevant to day-to-day moderating.

Fuck you guys for pitting your unpaid labor force against each other and then, once again, lying to your users about policy that has been publicly (and privately) stated hundreds of times.

Comment by [deleted] at 12/06/2023 at 22:37 UTC

54 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So 5 years ago, the top mod of r/xiaomi removed all the other mods after coming back from being inactive and put his own team in. At the time you said the top mods word is final, or something to that effect and nothing was done.

Why is this policy suddenly changing?

Comment by lookatthatsquirrel at 12/06/2023 at 23:30 UTC

43 upvotes, 1 direct replies

While you are here. Last week, I had removed a post for not fitting the definition of the sub and clearly against the rules of posting in one of my subs.

The user came to modmail and wanted their post reinstated.

They gave a snippy answer and got muted. This 10 year old account was suspended for 3 days for 'harassment' after muting the user.

Why give us a moderating tool to be able to mute users and then suspend an account because of it? Of course, I appealed the ban and got crickets as a response.

Comment by paxweasley at 13/06/2023 at 00:04 UTC

42 upvotes, 2 direct replies

I’m more concerned about accessibility, some of those apps had more functionalities for hearing or vision impaired users than the core app is currently able to offer.

Comment by [deleted] at 12/06/2023 at 21:57 UTC

46 upvotes, 2 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by flattenedbricks at 12/06/2023 at 22:27 UTC

38 upvotes, 1 direct replies

r/medical has a top mod who threatened to remove the rest of the mods because we banned their friend after numerous rule violations. The top mod is not active on the subreddit but the top mod removal request was still denied.. does an uptick in unwanted actions from a mod acting in bad faith warrant attention? The sub decided not to shut its doors

Comment by BarackTrudeau at 15/06/2023 at 00:47 UTC

7 upvotes, 0 direct replies

You people really need to realize that half of this stuff is useless if the applications that people are using to actually mod from go tits up because you made the the API pricing outrageously expensive.

Just implement delivering ads via the API like any other regular post and move the hell on.

Comment by BearCatcher23 at 12/06/2023 at 21:59 UTC

41 upvotes, 3 direct replies

I just tried to make a post here that is API related and it didn't show up so I'll ask in the comments here.

To the community of fellow mods, is there a list of bots that we know are going to have functions that are disabled due to the new reddit API restrictions?

I have a few bots that run in my subs and I would like to get a heads up so I can start working on alternatives/work arounds.

The only bot I have seen mentioned that is going to die is the RemindMe bot. Though this isn't mod related it is a disappointing this one is going away.

Comment by Glitter_Bee at 14/06/2023 at 20:29 UTC

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

My subreddit is routinely targeted by people who downvote our posts. They used to be more aggressive by writing nasty comments, but that has tapered off. However, the voting manipulation is bad. If anyone knows of any tools that could help us clean up our approved list and could some subreddits have the ability to restrict voting to approved members? I don’t care about hitting r/all, I just want to weed out the element that makes modding and topic discussion unfun. We’ve had people downvoting civil rights articles and stalk out mod team around Reddit.

Comment by CaptainPedge at 14/06/2023 at 21:16 UTC

6 upvotes, 0 direct replies

It would be awesome if I could use a third party app to moderate my subreddits

Comment by StPauliBoi at 16/06/2023 at 08:59 UTC

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

The recent comments[1] by the CEO deriding the populace that does a huge amount of work (unpaid, mind you) to keep the website running smoothly make me have significant doubts as to your statement that you respect our decisions to do what's best for our communities.

1: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544

Furthermore, he proposes changes to make the site more democratic, so us "landed gentry" - (yes, an actual real quote that the head of the company used to describe the moderators on reddit) don't get too comfortable in our rich and luxurious lives of hate mail and abuse while doing the aforementioned work to keep the website functional. Reportedly this will include allowing mobs of trolls and bad actors to vote to remove moderators when they don't like their actions. In a healthcare based subreddit, that would be disastrous, especially with the amount of abusive activity we were subjected to during covid by antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists. We banned swaths of people for posting misinformation and antivax content that goes against science. He's proposing that those same people will be able to attempt to remove us?

Does this newfound democracy extend to the userbase to vote on things like, say, the timeline for extortionate API pricing solely designed to kill third party apps, or is it only going to be things that are convenient for the admin team/CEO and only at their pleasure?

Comment by paskatulas at 12/06/2023 at 22:39 UTC

18 upvotes, 0 direct replies

What's the purpose of reporting Mod of Conduct violation for ban on subreddit if admins claimed that they won't remove any subreddit ban(s)?

Comment by devperez at 12/06/2023 at 21:57 UTC

14 upvotes, 4 direct replies

Is there a feature to nuke a whole comment chain? it can get quite frustrating to remove a whole chain of individual comments.

Comment by MisterWoodhouse at 13/06/2023 at 12:18 UTC

4 upvotes, 0 direct replies

An autorespond function for access requests would be great

Comment by kristoferen at 15/06/2023 at 04:58 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Top mod or democracy, which is it?

Comment by TheAdvocate at 16/06/2023 at 00:09 UTC*

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

We also want to reiterate that we respect your decisions to do what’s best for your community

oh really?

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/15/reddit-threatens-to-remove-subreddit-moderators/[1][2]

1: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/15/reddit-threatens-to-remove-subreddit-moderators/

2: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/15/reddit-threatens-to-remove-subreddit-moderators/

what a mess. get your shit together folks. Your passionate unpaid workers would like to get back to normal. Let's just pretend your head never went where it did this month. We won't speak of it again and you all can still sell out in IPO.

deal?

Comment by Kvothealar at 13/06/2023 at 00:37 UTC

19 upvotes, 1 direct replies

/u/heavyshoes or /u/Chtorrr

Can you please give some information / transparency on the issue many mods teams are facing now regarding the error you get when trying to set a subreddit to private?

you must be an active moderator to update this setting

• Is this error new since the blackout started?
• What constitutes an "active moderator"?
• Does the threshold for an "active moderator" change depending on various subreddit metrics such as size / traffic? If so, how?

Comment by sucrose_97 at 13/06/2023 at 08:01 UTC*

17 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Hi, u/heavyshoes and u/Chtorrr:

Last month, the former moderators of r/britishcolumbia submitted multiple reports and messages regarding the top moderator of that subreddit

• limiting the moderation privileges of the rest of the team without warning;
• removing us as moderators without warning; and
• banning us from participating in the subreddit after we made his behavior public.

At the time, Reddit was not interested in intervening, claiming that such action was reserved for inactive top mods. But, after reading this post, I am delighted to discover that your view of this has changed!

If you believe that your community or another community is being subject to decisions made by a sole moderator without buy-in from the broader mod team, you can let us know via the Moderator Code of Conduct form above.

r/britishcolumbia deserves to be moderated by someone who is not an Indigenous genocide apologist, or "a sole moderator without buy-in from the broader mod team", and our team is so glad that admins are now on the same page.

Please let us know the best way to resubmit our reports or otherwise contact you, so that we can get this situation taken care of.

Respectfully yours,

u/sucrose_97

Comment by sinyanmei92 at 14/06/2023 at 21:53 UTC

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

The ban envasion filter is very cool. I just wish it noticed us the moment the banned users join our community again instead of waiting for them to make a comment and detected it. We have been swammed with scammers that make alts in seconds and delete right after they get their targets paid for them. I have tried to report to modsupport to get their IP banned but no one bothered

Comment by Myztic-Seeker at 15/06/2023 at 10:07 UTC

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

How about a MOD that can see who is abusing the report button. WE REALLY NEED THIS

Comment by calsutmoran at 17/06/2023 at 00:12 UTC

4 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Reddit leadership created this mess. This is an admin problem now. I’m going outside to ride my bike.

Comment by IranianGenius at 12/06/2023 at 22:01 UTC

23 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Good luck to the community admins who had nothing to do with what's going on right now.