139 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: API Updates & Questions
Q: How will rate limits impact my bot that is used for moderation, fighting spam, or is non-commercial? ContextMod, Toolbox, anti-spam bots, remindmebot, etc.
A: If usage is legal, non-commercial, and of **reasonable scale** – especially if it helps our mods, and keeps our users safe – you should not be impacted. We will work to ensure your tools face as little disruption as possible.
Can you clarify what "reasonable scale" means?
A lot of us rely on 3rd party bots for moderation tools. /u/SafestBot is one of the more important parts of our setup on /r/me_irlgbt due to the huge amount of brigades we get. We are not able to make our own bot, so we rely on the work /u/blank-cheque has put into maintaining this. Given AEO's lack of response to community interference, I doubt this feature is going to be turned into a native reddit feature any time soon. Safestbot has to look at every user in almost 500 subreddits. Is that reasonable? If not, what do you propose communities do when they rely on tools like this?
Comment by itskdog at 05/06/2023 at 20:52 UTC
28 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As far as I can tell, individual bot devs need to get in touch (at least for now) to let the admins know what they need and the admins will judge case-by-case. I get the feeling they're still figuring the specifics out, and developers advocating for their own needs is something that can be useful for the admins that are still the active Reddit users, to be able to present to management to get things done as good as they can.
TLDR: any bot dev that's knows they need more than 100QPM no matter how efficient they make their code, should get in touch with admins to see what can be done to help. The admins seem to legitimately want to support moderation workflows, that part isn't just corporate speak.
Comment by lift_ticket83 at 05/06/2023 at 20:48 UTC
-52 upvotes, 3 direct replies
By “reasonable scale” we mean bots that meet our developer terms and rate limits. We’ll make exceptions for beneficial use cases that aren’t burdening our systems. If your app needs to run at a scale above the published rate limits, let us know; if it adheres to our terms and is a legitimate mod bot, you most likely do not need to pay–we’ve already got a few exceptions in place.
If you are concerned or confused, get in touch with us, and we will work with you to remove any hurdles as quickly as possible.