Important updates from the mod front.

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/t0jbjq/important_updates_from_the_mod_front/

created by lift_ticket83 on 24/02/2022 at 19:34 UTC

366 upvotes, 35 top-level comments (showing 25)

It’s your friendly neighborhood Mod Experience team back with some important updates from the Reddit moderator front. For those unfamiliar with us, we’re the team that focuses on empowering, protecting, and bolstering you, Reddit’s mods by building new tools and fixing problematic bugs! Since we last spoke[1], we’ve been busy working on launching a few new site improvements, while also tackling some troublesome bugs that have popped up on our radar over the past month. Let’s dive into the details:

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/qmqs5a/we_fixed_two_problematic_bugs/

*Increasing the number of removal reasons**

In the past, we limited the number of removal reasons a subreddit could have to 20. Over the years we’ve heard from a variety of mod teams that this number was not sufficient[2] and that we needed to increase this limit. Good news - we’ve now bumped the limit up to 50 removal reasons.

2: https://i.redd.it/pqacomlv1jb81.gif

We’ve also got big ambitions for overhauling our rules and removal reasons system this year (hello mobile!), and this is the first stepping stone on that path to the greater work we have planned. Please stay tuned for more information on this front in the not-so-distant future.

*Increasing the subreddit emoji limit**

Every week we receive multiple requests from mod teams kindly asking us to bump up their subreddit emoji limit. This is a relatively easy ask of us, and given the frequency of requests, we’ve decided to universally increase every subreddit’s emoji limit from 300 to 5,000. Go forth and make use of all those additional emojis you just got!

*Improvements to automoderator**

Over the past month, we made a couple of under the hood improvements to how automoderator functions. Those improvements are:

u/gazpachuelo tackled a long-standing issue[3], where automoderator matching was slightly broken when Unicode characters were involved. This caused rules that filtered on `â` to actually matches on `’`. Huge shout to u/dequeued who reported this issue way back when, the level of detail they provided in their report was incredibly helpful to our team.
Recently we’ve been noticing that automoderator has been struggling to keep up with the volume of actions in our larger subreddits. This issue understandably was causing confusion amongst both our users and mods[4]. After taking a closer look at the issue, our team developed a solution and today automoderator is now roughly three to five times faster [5]to process an event for the vast majority of cases. This means there should now be less of a delay between an action and automoderator’s response to it.

*Crowd Control supports Post filtering**

3: https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator/comments/bn4u8j/unicode_matching_bug_in_automoderator/

4: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/so2i16/comments_removed_by_automod_have_a_bunch_of_karma/hw6u8rz/?context=3

5: https://i.redd.it/4xl4e4u5bfj81.gif

In October[6], we announced that we had improved Crowd Control so that you could filter comments from untrusted outsiders and review and approve them via Modqueue. As of last week, Crowd Control now supports filtering *posts*. For more information on this, check out this r/modnews post[7].

6: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/qhpr6i/crowd_control_can_now_filter_comments/

7: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/schw0n/crowd_control_now_supports_filtering_posts/

*Modmail rate limits**

We are testing new rate limits on inbound modmails that will prevent new accounts from sending too many messages to a mod team. To avoid accidentally rate-limiting a good user having a conversation with a mod team, we’ll be resetting the rate limit every time a moderator responds to a user. If you’re seeing something funky[8] going on please let us know.

8: https://i.redd.it/brrhrf1fbnj81.gif

Thank you so much to everyone who brings these issues and requests to our attention in r/modsupport. We greatly appreciate your posts and all the helpful feedback you provide us. Please keep your eyes peeled for future updates and features fixes from our team (we’ll be back very soon!). In the meantime, please feel to drop any questions or feedback in the comments below.

Comments

Comment by [deleted] at 24/02/2022 at 20:59 UTC

51 upvotes, 2 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by aeoveu at 24/02/2022 at 20:01 UTC

82 upvotes, 2 direct replies

I'm on mobile, and since this post has a gif, the video player has loaded and I can't even see the actual mod alert.

Really - this dumpster fire was better before this forced video player was being shoved in our dumpster fire faces.

Comment by Halaku at 24/02/2022 at 19:46 UTC

71 upvotes, 3 direct replies

Can this get crossposted to r/Modsupport, perhaps with a **gentle** suggestion to come over here and get subscribed so Moderators don't miss out on things?

The amount of "*Hey! Why did my subreddit get changed to a bunch of random letters and numbers?*" posts that still crop up, well... it couldn't hurt?

Comment by Zavodskoy at 24/02/2022 at 19:37 UTC

66 upvotes, 3 direct replies

Can we please get the option to snooze ALL reports, it's a useless feature at the moment because you can't snooze any of the report reasons people actually use to spam reports (things like this is spam / misinformation, targeted harassment etc)

Comment by gredgex at 24/02/2022 at 23:16 UTC

22 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Any chance you guys are working on banning those t shirt spam bot accounts that plague the website?

Comment by Hermione_Jean_ at 24/02/2022 at 19:54 UTC

28 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Can you provide an option to rearrange Removal Reasons?

Comment by ExcitingishUsername at 24/02/2022 at 19:39 UTC

27 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Still no way to add spam-filtered posts back to modqueue then? Why is this still not an option?

Comment by SolomonOf47704 at 24/02/2022 at 23:48 UTC

11 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Can we have the option to lock all child comments when we lock the parent?

I don't want to have to lock whole threads, just some comments

Comment by xfile345 at 24/02/2022 at 20:09 UTC

10 upvotes, 1 direct replies

With the increase in emojis available per subreddits across the board, are there any plans of increasing the number of user flair templates available per subreddit to accommodate such an increase?

r/NASCAR has been using nearly 1,000 emojis for a couple years now and the limitations to user flair templates to 350 (?) have made things a little bit more difficult than it should. It would be great to have more templates available for users to select their own flairs without the need for bots to assign them.

Comment by RichManSCTV at 24/02/2022 at 19:49 UTC

13 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Would like to see a way to limit specific users abilities to use flairs!

Comment by Shachar2like at 24/02/2022 at 19:54 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Can anyone link me an explanation to the 'live thread[1]' that's used in /r/WorldNews (in this case on the Russia/Ukraine crisis)?

1: https://www.reddit.com/live/18hnzysb1elcs/

I have a sub who can use this exact feature in the future (for the same exact reasons. War & limited conflict which causes an 'activity spike' to our sub).

Is this in beta-testing? Was this announced or explained somewhere? Is this related to the chat function?

Can anyone provide more information on this?

Comment by 001Guy001 at 24/02/2022 at 20:41 UTC*

6 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I'll take the opportunity to ask if there's an update on these issues:

Mod actions are tucked away in the mod shield[1] on comments even with Mod Mode enabled
The option of Confirm Removal only appears on filtered content in modqueue and not in the content's page (there's only an option to approve), edit: on new reddit
Users on apps get the message "that link has already been submitted" when trying to post, even though that limit is disabled in the subreddit settings (no user has reported it in a month so this might be fixed)

Comment by chaseoes at 25/02/2022 at 03:25 UTC

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Can you add a way for us to report usernames that violate the content policy (i.e. abusive or hateful)?

It's impossible to report using reddit.com/report so the only way is by modmailing modsupport.

Comment by clemenslucas at 24/02/2022 at 20:28 UTC

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I mentioned this on another post also, but:

Ability to turn off the orange mod-notification bubble in the app * When I'm using the app, I'm mainly just a user and it's annoying
maybe even a total mod-mode not-mod-mode toggle for the app

other than that: thanks for the improvements, I'm lookin forward to the snoonotes

Comment by Haveireddit at 25/02/2022 at 18:43 UTC*

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I love the increase in subreddit emojis, but it would be great if we could also get the subreddit flair templates increased along w/ css images.

We use the 3 in tandem on /r/Fortnite, /r/FortniteBR, /r/FortniteMobile, and /r/FortniteCreative for our flair system. We've had a "never ending" battle trying to get all the flair icons in the CSS, and every solution is just a band-aid that eventually tears off.

Our current system makes use of a bot that assigns the flairs; because we don't have enough templates for all 1k+ outfits in the game.

Our current system uses multiple sprite sheets, because one sheet would be far too big to try and fit within the limitations of 500kb. However, we are limited to 50(?) images in the subreddit, so we will have to start combining sheets or other assets at some point in time..

It would be nice if the CSS side of old reddit wasn't set on restrictions that made sense in the 90s, as we can make do without the templates.

Edit: Alternative solution: Allow us to use the emojis that we add on new.reddit.com to be used/visible on old.reddit.com - as it stands, they all get filtered out. If they were implemented in the same way they are in new reddit (for user and post flairs) we could use WAY LESS css for the exact same result. It would remove tons of images from our CSS, and it would even create less work for us after the initial move.

Comment by Grundlage at 24/02/2022 at 19:52 UTC

13 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Maybe this specific post title was not well thought through, given that the phrase "from the front" is a reference to battlefield updates.

Good updates though.

Comment by haykam821 at 25/02/2022 at 05:39 UTC

3 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Overall, this seems like a exclusively positive set of updates to moderators! Nice

Glad to see we moderators (or subscribers) don't have to pay for extra emoji slots ;)

Comment by FelipeDoesStats2 at 24/02/2022 at 19:50 UTC

7 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Still no usernotes, snooze. Give us an ETA please, that's all we want.

Comment by PolylingualAnilingus at 24/02/2022 at 19:56 UTC

6 upvotes, 0 direct replies

These are all good changes. Thanks for the update, hope there's more good changes to come.

Comment by techiesgoboom at 24/02/2022 at 21:16 UTC

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This post and so many of the follow up comments is incredibly positive and exciting. Thank you!

Comment by [deleted] at 24/02/2022 at 19:51 UTC

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Still waiting for you folks to stop moving the cursor when clicking to focus on the modmail compose textarea. Those of us that use middle-click to paste are driven absolutely crazy by this. Reported it multiple times, get assured each time it'll be fixed in the next code push, been waiting basically since new modmail left beta. Please? No other textarea on the site or anywhere else on the internet behaves this way. It's horrible for accessibility.

Comment by flounder19 at 24/02/2022 at 22:48 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

thanks for the automatic emoji limit increase! The freedom to add so many without clogging up the CSS is amazing & the 5k limit is effectively limitless. I've added a ton at a steady pace for years and we're still only a little past 1.1k

Comment by liamdun at 24/02/2022 at 23:19 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Any news on setting flairs being super buggy? like the typing indicator jumping from one place to another when adding an emoji, surely other people can vouch for this?

Comment by Southernms at 25/02/2022 at 01:55 UTC

2 upvotes, 1 direct replies

u/Too_MuchWhiskey will the emoji limit increase help with our user flair?

Comment by L_Cranston_Shadow at 25/02/2022 at 04:11 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Are further fixes planned to help with the delay between automod actions that lead to a modmail and the actual modmail going out? I'm happy that automod has been sped up, but on busier subs like /r/worldnews, there are a lot of criteria that trigger an action, usually remove, and then a modmail letting us know to follow up in case the user needs a ban. The problem comes when there is a large delay between the two, which seems to be the case quiet often.