https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/py2xy2/voting_commenting_on_archived_posts/
created by baxter8421 on 29/09/2021 at 19:38 UTC*
1303 upvotes, 92 top-level comments (showing 25)
Hiya Mods
Does this sound familiar - it’s approaching dinner time, you’ve stumbled across a delicious-looking chicken parm recipe, but have a key culinary question for OP? You try to ask it only to discover you’re unable to do so due to the post being archived after hitting the 6-month mark. Chaos ensues and now you may be left without any chicky-chicky parm-parm[1].
1: https://i.redd.it/c6ll91kar4p71.gif
We’ve all been there! In fact, every day 6.6 million Redditors land on archived posts where they find themselves unable to vote or comment on it due to the limitations we’ve put in place.
This summer we ran a pilot program with a smörgåsbord of subreddits to see what would happen if users were able to engage with previously archived posts (thank you to all the subreddits that volunteered to participate in this program). These subreddits represented a wide variety of communities on the site and you can see some of the highlights from the program below:
The results and the feedback we received from our participating mod teams directly impacted our plans for this initiative, and as such we’ve decided to move forward with this feature. Starting today, mod teams will have the opportunity to decide if they want to automatically archive posts after 6 months or if they want users within their community to be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts.
Important note - this is not intended to be a one size fits all feature. Thanks to our participating subreddits we found this feature was most beneficial to communities that hosted more evergreen-type content (ex: food and recipes posts, gaming subreddits, etc). Subreddits that were more focused on real-time discussions (ex: sports and politics) did not experience the same benefit out of this initiative. See below for some testimonials from your fellow mods that helped drive this point home for us:
Given this feedback, we’ve created an “Archive Posts” toggle for mods to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their community. **Today this toggle will appear in Mod Tools and will be turned off by default. All posts will remain archived for another two weeks (until 10/13). This means mod teams will have a two-week period of time to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their subreddit. After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on.** To do so, please follow the below instructions:
2: https://i.redd.it/omnjywowr4p71.gif
​
Another major piece of feedback we heard from mods was the need for them to be notified of comments on previously archived posts. In order to do this, we have updated automoderator to flag comments on posts older than 6 months. This automod update will be live starting on 10/13, the same day that users will be able to begin commenting and voting on previously archived posts (in subs who have not changed their toggle). If you’re interested in using automoderator for this function, please use the below script to do so:
type: comment
author:
account_age: < 23 hours
parent_submission:
past_archive_date: true
action: filter
action_reason: comment on old post from new user
Thank you to all the mods who participated in our pilot program, and took the time to provide us with valuable feedback. We greatly appreciate your partnership throughout this entire process!
Questions? Comments? Feedback? Please let us know in the comments below where we’ll be hanging out to respond to them.
Comment by Georgy_K_Zhukov at 29/09/2021 at 19:51 UTC
282 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I see pros to this, and cons. But with the Auto mod rule it feels like a pretty balanced change.
Comment by Meepster23 at 29/09/2021 at 20:03 UTC*
394 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Comment by dequeued at 29/09/2021 at 20:13 UTC*
92 upvotes, 1 direct replies
past_archive_date: true
This would be **far** more useful if this was simply implemented as an "age of post" parameter like:
past_age: 6 months
(Ideally, allowing that parameter to be used on *anything*, not just parent submissions, because looking at activity on old comments and submissions is also useful.)
That would allow it to be used more broadly for spam rules. I've implemented something like that in the /r/personalfinance subreddit bot and it catches a significant amount of spam (i.e., comment spam posted on old submissions) by looking at parent submissions with an age over a few weeks with some expressions to look for phone numbers, links, requests for offline contact, etc.
Here are some example rules:
body (regex): ['[\w-]{1,64}\.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'chat', 'contact (me|us)', 'dm', 'pm']
parent_submission:
past_age: 3 months
action: filter
action_reason: "Possible spam comment on old submission [{{match}}]"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
type: comment
body (regex): ['[\w-]{1,64}\.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'bonus', 'referral']
is_edited: true
past_age: 4 months
action: report
action_reason: "Possible spam edit on old comment [{{match}}]"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
type: submission
body (regex): ['[\w-]{1,64}\.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'chat', 'dm', 'pm']
is_edited: true
past_age: 1 month
action: filter
action_reason: "Possible spam edit on old submission [{{match}}]"
Regarding the overall functionality, I like the idea, but I really wish it was possible to disable archiving on specific posts. For example, megathreads are often active for more than 6 months and only get reposted because they get archived, but most threads don't really need to continue being active.
Edit:
Since it's not possible for posts to have a negative age, I renamed the proposed configuration option to be simply `past_age` and took out the `>` part of the syntax.
Comment by MajorParadox at 29/09/2021 at 20:05 UTC
47 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Any plans to help users and mods discover old conversations that have new activity? Otherwise, the new commenters will only get seen by the OP and possibly mods if they have automod alert them to it.
Comment by TheNewPoetLawyerette at 29/09/2021 at 19:53 UTC
40 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Ooh the new automod filter option is an excellent addition to this. Thank you for adding that
Comment by BuckRowdy at 29/09/2021 at 20:04 UTC
25 upvotes, 0 direct replies
What I like best about this is that you are considering that a one size fits all approach just does not fit a site this vast and diverse.
Comment by HQna at 29/09/2021 at 21:41 UTC
23 upvotes, 2 direct replies
This was a 2.86% increase in votes and a **1.48% increase in comments** amongst the participating subreddits.
This additional engagement also caused only a **0.3% increase in mod actions taken**. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken.
You make it seem like this is a good thing. But logically you would expect the increase of mod actions to be about equal to the increase of comments. The fact that is not the case just means that almost all of those comments are basically invisible to moderators.
Anyway, you already gave us a solution for that (new AM feature and opt out), so I'm not complaining. But I also don't particularly enjoy the PR twisting here.
Comment by byParallax at 29/09/2021 at 19:46 UTC
55 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I hope r/reddit.com will remain archived.
Comment by SuitingUncle620 at 29/09/2021 at 19:58 UTC
17 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is cool! Thank you.
Comment by skeddles at 29/09/2021 at 20:01 UTC
35 upvotes, 1 direct replies
this is great news, I always hated archived threads. glad it's turned off by default too.
Comment by [deleted] at 29/09/2021 at 19:54 UTC
43 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by breakneckridge at 29/09/2021 at 19:58 UTC
42 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This is a welcome change.
Comment by MajorParadox at 29/09/2021 at 19:56 UTC
14 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Is there any way we can make a sub start working now instead of two weeks from now?
Comment by roionsteroids at 29/09/2021 at 20:05 UTC
12 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I kinda like the idea of having a accurate, complete archive, including all the silly and cringy stuff, and the votes at that time. Not changing history in hindsight, mass voting and commenting on year old posts because something happened recently.
Comment by techiesgoboom at 29/09/2021 at 20:24 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I can’t imagine this will work on the sub I mod, but I absolutely love that you’re giving us the option. It’s always better to be able to make this choices on a sub by sub basis.
Thank you for this!
Comment by iheartbaconsalt at 29/09/2021 at 22:10 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
That is so cool. So many uses for this. I got a random award yesterday for a 6 year old comment. I don't even knooow how that is possible. haha
Comment by Master_JBT at 29/09/2021 at 22:11 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I think this feature will be a great addition, especially for tv show centered subreddits. Now, people who are late to watch the show can still contribute to past discussion threads of previous episodes
HOWEVER, suppose there was some brigade of mass downvotes on someone or some post. In that case, mods should be able to re-archive the post as a countermeasure
Comment by superfucky at 15/10/2021 at 13:21 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
i can't help but notice that your test group said to allow mods to turn it ON if they wanted it, and what you actually did was force mods to have to turn it OFF if they DON'T want it, while also basically stealthing the implementation of this feature - which at best allows people to bother someone about a 4-year-old recipe and at worst allows people to stalk and harass vulnerable women in abusive situations for YEARS across accounts and subreddits. the only reason i'm even here now is because one of my co-mods happened to pop into /modsupport and happened to notice the "bee tee dubs we're rolling this out tomorrow" thread and told me about it in modmail.
how about instead of letting people trawl through years of archived posts to bother them about some "aged like milk" thread when they're having a hard time, you give us the ability to turn off reports on (and external links to) archived threads? we are regularly bothered by trolls abusing the report button on archived threads because they were searching for keywords to harass people over and reporting was the only way they could superdownvote the OP, or somebody linked an ancient thread in some "check out this crazy bitch from 6 years ago" subreddit. better yet, give subreddits the ability to opt out of being linked to at all.
Comment by Yay295 at 29/09/2021 at 20:02 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Why not allow us to set how long before a post is archived instead of just 6 months or never?
Comment by [deleted] at 29/09/2021 at 20:11 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Glory be!
Comment by [deleted] at 29/09/2021 at 20:37 UTC*
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[removed]
Comment by asphaltdragon at 29/09/2021 at 22:27 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Goddammit now in going to have to field new comments on my cellphone repair AMA.
CAN'T YOU PEOPLE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE? IT'S BEEN SEVEN YEARS
Comment by Zavodskoy at 30/09/2021 at 06:55 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
RIP all the subs that track The "X of all time" for reddit threads etc because there's now going to be no point in them
Things like https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/[1] are going to be completely defunct and pointless.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/
Also why is this defaulting to archiving off by default? So many subs are going to get screwed by all the extra moderation this is going to cause because they happened to miss this one very specific post.
Comment by sequence_string at 15/10/2021 at 02:12 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Found out about this by a user immediately reigniting an archived argument, not a fan so far.
Comment by Xenc at 29/09/2021 at 20:08 UTC
12 upvotes, 2 direct replies
This makes so much sense. It was holding Reddit back. Thank you. 👏