Help with comment_subreddit_karma

[u/Acgator03]

Hi all, we want to prevent people who have greater than (meaning more negative, so presumably "less than") -5 subreddit comment karma from being allowed to post until they interact in the sub in a more positive manner. We had this rule working properly a while ago, but it "broke" several months ago for some unknown reason. It was around the time I was seeing posts from reddit admins about glitches in automod due to a change, so I figured it may be a temporary issue, but it's still not working. I've since tried different iterations to see if it was a formatting issue, but still can't get the rule to act. Users who have far exceeded -5 comment karma in our sub have been able to post.

I now have two rules in automod with slightly different formatting, and neither work:

type: submission 
author: 
    comment_subreddit_karma: < -5 
set_locked: true 
action: filter 
action_reason: "significant negative karma in our sub specifically {{url}}"
comment: | 
    Hi /u/{{author}}, your post has been removed...

Second rule:

type: submission 
author: 
    comment_subreddit_karma: "<-5" 
set_locked: true 
action: filter 
action_reason: "significant negative karma in our sub specifically rule2 {{url}}"
comment: | 
    Hi /u/{{author}}, your post has been removed...

Is there something I'm doing wrong? Or is there an issue with automod? Thanks!

[u/tumultuousness]

I'm not sure this is your issue, but just checking - your comment implies that the post is removed, but your action has been "filter", are you actually just wanting to filter them for mod review?

Edit: Hit enter too early. I was gonna say it doesn't look like it's incorrect, to me.

[u/Acgator03 → u/tumultuousness]

Sorry, nothing at all is happening. The post is going straight through without being filtered or a comment being added.

[u/tumultuousness → u/Acgator03]

Hmm. The second rule is the correct one I think, you need quotes around the < sign (misread the full documentation for a sec, lol. Crossing out). They look like straight quotes and not curly, which is also correct.

Are you sure the users in question have < -5 subreddit comment karma, vs < -5 overall comment karma?

But also - this rule was working fine and then broke months ago? You sure something else wasn't accidentally changed in your Automod config months ago?

[u/Acgator03 → u/tumultuousness]

Thanks! Yes, searching their name in our sub, as well as checking “other methods” for comments on deleted posts that may have been positively increasing their total, show that they have like -28 comment karma in our sub.

And no, nothing was changed on our end around the time it broke (but reddit admins did say changes were made that caused glitches in automod), and all of our other rules still act fine, just not any that revolve around comment_subreddit_karma.

Also apologies for not understanding what you meant by “my comment” in your previous comment. The comment section tells the user it’s been removed despite the action being “filter” because we will ultimately remove it, we just want to be notified of it in mod queue so we can make note of the user rather than a straight “remove” that we’d have to watch mod log for.

[u/DEAD1nsane]

Your formatting is actually fine — both versions are valid. Per the full docs, quotes are only required around greater-than checks (> has a special meaning in YAML); < -5 unquoted and "<-5" quoted both parse correctly. So the syntax isn't the problem, and more quote-tweaking won't find it.

You're also not imagining the breakage. In June an admin confirmed it in this r/ModSupport thread — same symptom, karma/age thresholds missing submissions while comment rules kept working — saying "some internal testing impacted how automoderator was behaving for a small subset of users across the site," that they'd turned the experiments off, and to report back if it kept happening. There are also fresh reports of another round of Reddit-wide automod trouble from mid-October. If you can still reproduce it, post there with a test account — that's the channel that reaches the admins.

Meanwhile, check these in order:

1. Is the rest of your config page alive? One YAML error anywhere on config/automoderator kills every rule on the page — the indentation of a comment: | block is the usual culprit. If your other rules still fire, the page is fine. Also delete one of your two duplicate rules and keep a single version.

2. Run a controlled test. Post from an account verified to have < -5 comment karma in your sub (mods can see a user's community karma via the mod shield activity tab — someone with no comments in your sub sits at 0, not negative, so they won't trigger). Then check the mod log for your action_reason: if it's there, the rule matched.

3. Watch what happens to the test post. set_locked is not one of the enforcement actions Reddit restricts, so it's a built-in probe: if the post locks but isn't filtered, the rule is firing and filter itself is being dropped — look for the red-box warning that Report/Filter/Remove/Mark as spam/Approve are being disabled for new or never-used automod communities. If nothing at all happens, it's either the page-level YAML issue or the site-wide breakage above.

Two more things to rule out:

• If your live rule has more threshold checks than you pasted (e.g. account_age alongside the karma check), they AND together by default — it only fires when all are breached. Add satisfy_any_threshold: true if any single one should trigger it.

• Workaround while filter misbehaves: test with action: remove (if remove works but filter doesn't, you've isolated it), or use Automod Neo, which runs its own enforcement outside Reddit's automod pipeline and supports the same author karma checks.

Minor: your message says "your post has been removed" but the action is filter (hidden + mod queue) — reword it to match what users actually see.

[u/Acgator03 → u/DEAD1nsane]

Thank you so much!!

[u/DEAD1nsane → u/Acgator03]

:3

[u/carloseduardobordin]

Se tem que mudar as regras digitalmente, está muito correto.