New and improved post requirements

https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/8llgib/new_and_improved_post_requirements/

created by LanterneRougeOG on 23/05/2018 at 17:58 UTC

92 upvotes, 22 top-level comments (showing 22)

We launched the initial version of Post Requirements about five months ago. Since then we’ve gathered a lot of helpful feedback from moderators and contributors. Today, we added some slick new improvements[1] to it!

1: https://thumbs.gfycat.com/EcstaticWellgroomedFruitbat-size_restricted.gif

First, a quick refresher on what Post Requirements are and why we built them. Moderators work hard to maintain the quality of submissions in their subreddit. New contributors don’t always know the posting conventions of a community, leading to poorly labeled or off theme posts that moderators have to deal with either through automod or close monitoring of the community. For contributors, this process can often be frustrating as their post may get deleted after they submit it.

With Post Requirements, we hope to make this experience less burdensome on moderators and contributors alike. Moderators can specify certain guidelines that a post has to abide by, such as flair requirement or title length restrictions. Contributors who violate these guidelines are notified prior to post submission so they have the opportunity to fix their errors before submitting.

Individual field validation

Let’s take a look at the improvements that we added today:

• We increased title rules from five to 15. These allows you to require that a specific word be contained in all titles.
• We added regex title matching (up to five). Regex allows you to write a much more advanced title requirement. For example, r/todayilearned can require that “TIL” be at the beginning of the title with ^(TIL)
• New post guidelines. Post guidelines are a popular way for moderators to ensure quality submissions. Now you can add a few sentences that appear above the submit page to offer advice to contributors. You can even choose to show this to all redditors or just new redditors. New means new to your community, not just new to Reddit.
• A better way to handle a large number of domains. Originally, if you had a long list you’d have to scroll past them every single one before you reached the next section of the page. Now, domains appear in a separate modal so that it’s easier to navigate.
• Submit fields are now individually validated! Previously, contributors would fill out an entire post and then get an error on the title, or flair requirement when they clicked submit. Now we validate each field as they fill it out. This is a nice tweak which makes the error messages more helpful.
• Reminder, the existing requirements include: flair, title length, text post body, and repost frequency.

New Post Guidelines

As a moderator, if you navigate to the “Post Requirements” section in the “Community Tools” menu, you will see the submit validations that you can configure. Please note that for now these validations only affect posts made on the New Reddit site. **We have plans to extend this internal API to our native apps in the coming months.**

Rather than replacing automod, the validations we selected were meant to reflect common, fixable reasons that cause well-intentioned contributors to have their posts deleted after submission. Automod is not being removed, and will continue to function as it currently does.

If there are additional validations you would like to see added that would help contributors and reduce moderator burden, please let us know in the comments.

Comments

Comment by 9Ghillie at 23/05/2018 at 18:19 UTC*

31 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I would really like the option to require the OC tag, just like how the flair requirement works. /r/itookapicture is an OC only subreddit, so having a mandatory OC tag, in conjunction with the *Posting guidelines* snippet reminding users that by tagging their post OC they claim to be the author of the contents of the post, would really reduce our plagiarization rule violations.

I'd like to see this requirement option, because in this case the user would consciously need to click the OC button in order to post, instead of automod just slapping the tag on every post.

Edit: a word

Comment by MajorParadox at 23/05/2018 at 18:10 UTC*

15 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Awesome, glad to finally see some updates here!

Rather than replacing automod, the validations we selected were meant to reflect common, fixable reasons that cause well-intentioned contributors to have their posts deleted after submission. Automod is not being removed, and will continue to function as it currently does.

What I'd like to see is automod + post/comment requirements merged into one system like this. So mods can define rules like they do for automod, but decide if it should take effect before or after.

Also, any chance repost frequency can be expanded to self post titles? An example of this is in r/WritingPrompts, we get flooded with the same prompts when something interesting gets posted to places like r/AskReddit and r/Showerthoughts. Everyone thinks it'd be a good idea for a prompt and don't even consider a hundred people before them thought the same thing :)

Comment by theapoapostolov at 23/05/2018 at 20:03 UTC

10 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Instead "See the rules for those requirements", every requirement should have its own custom line of warning, and when multiple rules are breached, multiple lines should appear below the field.

Example: Rule 1) Your title must include "cat". Rule 2) Your title must be longer than 5 words. When both are breached, these custom made funny or informative warinings are shown below the field:

• This is reddit for cats only. Please include a cat in the title of this post.
• Our cat does not approve of your short titles. Please make it 5 words or longer. Maybe add few "cat" words?

Comment by ShaneH7646 at 23/05/2018 at 18:04 UTC

22 upvotes, 3 direct replies

Will this be ported back old.reddit.com?

Comment by TheMightyCraken at 23/05/2018 at 20:09 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Any plans to allow markdown for the posting guidelines? (ability to insert new lines and bold/italicize different parts).

Thanks!

Comment by SirBuckeye at 23/05/2018 at 23:00 UTC

6 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Can you combine these regex expressions with post flair? For example, if the post has [Live] flair, then require that the title has a date in it. Basically, can you have different title rules depending on the flair? I don't want the same rules on every post type.

Comment by Glumalon at 23/05/2018 at 23:41 UTC*

7 upvotes, 2 direct replies

Our sub has found some pretty significant bugs with the post validation methods. By changing the element focus on the submission page, the post button can be reenabled even when post requirements are not met, allowing users to completely bypass the requirements.

Comment by azgoodaz at 23/05/2018 at 20:57 UTC*

7 upvotes, 3 direct replies

For "Advanced: RegEx requirements;"

It's currently at 5 strings only. Possible to expand this to 40 - 50? For example like on the r/battleroyalegames subreddit there is a tag system in place which covers all the PU Battle Royale Games then those tags give posts specific flair. If the post doesn't have it, the thread gets deleted (all via the old Reddit on the AutoMod Config).

With this system, it's cool and all. But, it's very limited.

----

For "Posting guidelines" also;

Markdown isn't supported and when you press "Enter" to start a new paragraph, it puts everything in one paragraph.

Comment by reseph at 23/05/2018 at 18:07 UTC*

9 upvotes, 1 direct replies

We have plans to extend this internal API to our native apps in the coming months.

There are a lot of 3rd party apps out there, some which are still updated but just ignore new features (like not implementing new modmail).

I understand you're providing this client-side (redesign) and also intermediary (API). (EDIT: I just realized you said internal API, and this is different from what public API)

Are there any plans to do this server-side? So the server returns an error code when submitting a post that does not meet the Post Requirements. This would cover 3rd party apps without waiting them to make use of the API (and some may never do so). A big concern is AlienBlue, which I believe many users have stuck with and it is no longer updated. I assume AlienBlue users (just one example) will just bypass any and all Post Requirements?

If there are no plans, then what will be done with classic Reddit and i.reddit.com?

Comment by likeafox at 23/05/2018 at 19:53 UTC

8 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Hey folks - thanks for the UI improvement for long lists of domains. That one was huge for us.

The thing we'd really like to do is enforce both a whitelist system *and* domain blacklist system using post requirements. The reasoning is that for non-whitelist domains, we want to let a user know that a domain has not been reviewed yet, and may be eligible for consideration. Meanwhile, we have various groups of reviewed and rejected domains that fall into one of several categories such as:

• satirical / humor / entertainment
• re-hosted / stolen content
• personal blog platform / social media
• state sponsored propaganda

It would be very important for us to make the user understand *why* a submission is being rejected, along with context dependent information on how they should proceed. Currently auto-moderator does a very nice job of this overall, but pushing our tailored removal reasons to the pre-submit form would be a much better user experience.

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

For the love of god: can we please get pre-submit duplicate link detection working? As far as I know this still isn't implemented at parity with the r2 / Old Site submit form. We also have to do a ton of custom and manual work for duplicate detection - checking the canonical URL rather than just checking the unique URL string would be of YUGE benefit to us.

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The pre-submit validation tools are an excellent idea, and we hope to see that product continue to develop, and be used in conjunction with auto-moderator for a long time to come.

Comment by Zmodem at 24/05/2018 at 03:54 UTC

3 upvotes, 0 direct replies

How complex can the regex be? Is it limitless, or only basic? Complex regex checks can make one match solve a plethora of submission requirements in one definition. For instance, requiring titles to adhere to something generic like: `[Help] [PC] [Windows] Title Here`, or `[Advice] [WiFi] [Router] Title Here`.

Comment by V2Blast at 23/05/2018 at 18:06 UTC

4 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Thanks for the detailed update on this feature!

Comment by mattreyu at 23/05/2018 at 18:37 UTC

6 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Nice to see some useful features to simplify things for new users!

I've gotta know - is that your cat?

Comment by metalCactus at 23/05/2018 at 22:58 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Do you really need the brackets in your example ^(TIL)? What purpose do the brackets serve here as I don't imagine you support additional logic based on matching groups?

Comment by NvaderGir at 24/05/2018 at 05:43 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This is a godsend for our subreddit :') ty team

Comment by miss_molotov at 30/05/2018 at 23:30 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Would/could this ever be extended to comments? For example you could use it to prevent things like affiliate links being posted. That's something automod lacks.

Comment by _ihavemanynames_ at 24/05/2018 at 10:10 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This is great! I really appreciate the extra notifications we can give users about what we want from their post while they're making it.

What I'd like to see:

• Different requirements based on flair, like someone else already suggested. Some posts in the sub don't have any requirements; others do. It'd be extremely useful to warn users about the specific requirements their post should abide by after they've chosen their flair.
• The option to display a different message based on whether someone is a new user or not, instead of it being either/or. So one message for older users, one message for new ones.
• Being able to make more specific requirements for body text, similar to how it works with the title.

(edited for clarity)

Comment by Hafem at 15/10/2018 at 21:14 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I believe some of those post guidelines are detrimental and are not producing the desired outcome.

Minority opinions are more likely to produce negative karma, which is a requirement for starting a topic. And minority opinions are very important for any discussion, cause there is no discussion without them.

Additionally other users do not necessarily use the Karma systems as intended for its intended purpose of gratification.

The timelimit for commenting consecutively is bothersome aswell. If the user has already made up his mind bound to his own knowledge and experience, he might want to comment before the restrictions let him do so.

Comment by docnoahbody at 21/10/2018 at 13:26 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I like this..but it doesn't work..at least on my sub..I have flairs listed and in the title..words that must be in title [question] etc..

but when I test it out..it still allows any comment..and yes I do have the button on at the bottom that says "Post Flair, require a flair to be set"

Nothing seems to work any advice?

I am just trying to make people use the flair in their post titles

​

Thanks in Advance!

Comment by [deleted] at 23/05/2018 at 20:32 UTC

0 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Feedback as a moderator: Unless you add some kind of security layer (such as a rapidly escalating delay in response after repeated validation failures), I can't even begin to consider using pre-submit validation functionality. This goes doubly if the validation is ever added to the public API, and triply if that implementation exposes the specifics of the validation rules rather than a single endpoint that returns yay or nay. Giving spammers, trolls, and people trying to circumvent our rules an instant testing mechanism for the gates we try to put in their way is not something I'm about to do.

All that being said, my expectation is that your goal is not to get every mod to use these features, and it doesn't much matter to you if anyone doesn't, so at the end of the day I don't care much what you do as long as you don't break the tools I already have.

Comment by FreeSpeechWarrior at 23/05/2018 at 18:58 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Please note that for now these validations only affect posts made on the New Reddit site. We have plans to extend this internal API to our native apps in the coming months.

Does this mean post validation functionality is not coming to third party clients?

If you provided a JSON description of the active rules in a community that ought to be enough for client devs to implement the restrictions on their side, it seems like these new validation rules are client side only even in the redesign anyway.

If there are additional validations you would like to see added that would help contributors and reduce moderator burden, please let us know in the comments.

I would like the ability to validate that the mods of the subreddits I read do not unnecessarily censor contributions beyond the requirements of reddit.

Comment by cdoern01 at 24/05/2018 at 01:37 UTC

0 upvotes, 1 direct replies

where is night mode. please that’s all I’m asking for.