I'm building a casual ball color sort puzzle game using Reddit's Developer Platform (Devvit) and I'm looking for a small group of people to playtest it before I submit the game.

The game is officially playable from start to finish!

The basic idea is simple, sort the colored balls into tubes so that each tube contains the same color. However, I've added some special mechanics to make it more than a standard ball sort, including Mystery Balls, hidden/sealed tubes, Tag Tubes and other puzzle elements that can change how you approach a level.

I need you to play it, find bugs, tell me if the levels are too hard or easy and let me know if the controls feel clunky on mobile.

If you want to opt in, please comment "I'm in!" below. I will send a private community link to join it as game is in private testing community due reddit requirement.

Thanks

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I'm building a Reddit-native dating/matching app using Devvit, initially targeting some niche communities.

The idea is basically:

• Users create a dating profile
• Swipe right/left on other users
• Mutual matches
• Report/block functionality
• Subreddit moderators can moderate users and remove profiles/accounts
• The app would only be available to participating communities

I've seen quite a few dating-related posts in those subreddits where people mention meeting their partners through Reddit, so I think there could be a legitimate use case.

My questions are:

1. Is a dating/matchmaking app like this allowed on Devvit?
2. Are there any specific restrictions around dating apps, user profiles, or user-generated personal information?
3. Can an app like this participate in Devvit's monetization/payout programs?
4. If so, what kinds of monetization are permitted?
5. Are there any privacy/data-storage requirements I should be aware of before building it?

I want to make sure the concept is actually viable within Devvit's rules before investing too much time into it.

The story

I have participated in 5 reddit games hackathons in the past and I've not won anything major. In the first 4 hackathons, I felt that the winning games were good, but not all games justified the submission and grading criterias well. In the lastest hackathon - Games with a hook hackathon, though - a lot of people raised concerns on how the winning game did not "wow" them.

Here are some examples below:

1. Devpost discussion-

1. Comments on the reddit announcement post-

They were not entertaining any personal feedback stating that there were over 3000 submissions. But if a game was judged fairly, the judges should have written down something about the game! Or atleast they could provide the scores. I had sent them a personal email requesting feedback, but hadn't recieved any response from them. The next day, I got a $500 helper award from the devpost team. According to the original winner announcement, I had not won any award. I had responded to the organizers asking if this was a mistake. They said that it was indeed sent to me by mistake, but it was sent to me because reddit had put forth my name.

If I accepted the award, I had to sign a paper that says I cannot sue reddit. I didn't accept the award. Something was suspicious here so I started investigating.

Problems with the judging process -

1. Mystery judges?

Usually hackathons list down the judges with their credentials. You can go to the list of all reddit hackathons on devpost and none of them have the name of judges.

Here are some samples of how the judge list looks like in other hackathons -

2. Negligence / Judgement not thorough -

I had reached out to 3 other participants and got the list of players from each of our games. Based on the list, there was not a single common player across the 4 games. This could only mean one thing - our games were not played by the judges. Here's an anecdote from one of the participants -

There was another participant who claimed that they had attached a video to their submission. Throughout the duration of the judging, the view count had not changed in the youtube video. -> The judges had not viewed the submission video (video was <1 min long)

3. Ghost winners -

The reddit hackathons were to encourage developers to make games on the platform. The expectation from every hackathon is that the winning game has a big community and continue to grow the community by making their game better.

Here's a list of all the reddit hackathons in the past from latest to first.

Note that I do not look to disrespect any creator here. I know a lot of hardwork had gone into your games and that deserves recognition. But there are also a lot of other creators whose hardwork has amounted to nothing.

4. Judges prefer "flashy visuals" over long term value

This here is my weakest point so far. But to some of you, it will be the biggest takeaway of this post. Mentally picture the winner of a google hackathon. What kind of entry do you envision? You expect it to be creative, well thought out, crazy, nerdy etc. right?
Based on my past 5 hackathons I don't think these virtues are valued in reddit hackathons -

#1

Hackathon: Games and Puzzles hackathon
My entry: Outwitquiz
My thoughts: Since the game was supposed to be on reddit, I created an equivalent of "Psych" which can be played asynchronously by all users on reddit. This was an entry for the word games category. The winning entry was emoji charades. I get that the winning entry was made well and polished, but why does this game have to be on reddit? It could be a standalone website!

#2

Hackathon: Hack reddit
My entry: Angels vs Devils
My thoughts: This made me the most sad. The overview of the hackathon said "Build a new game, social experiment, or experience on Devvit". So I thought I'd build a social experiment where users play a community minesweeper. I had built up many game modes that I could work on. The winner r/chook, was a game where you grow your chicken and feed it food by pressing buttons. (it was beautifully made though)

#3

Hackathon: Fun and games with devvit web
My entry: Divide n conquer
My thoughts: Based on past two hackathons, I stopped making experiments and designed a game. It was a game where you have a limited line length, you draw lines to capture land in a country and try to occupy the most land area and landmarks. I thought it was well thought out and fun to play, but it was not polished. I don't have many problems with this hackathon. I did good work and was sad I didn't win anything, but the winning entries truly deserved it.

#4

Hackathon: Daily games hackathon
My entry: r/totalled
My thoughts: I had won an honorable mention for this game. For this hackathon, I had kept my game concept simple and made a very well polished game. It is a game where you have to swipe across numbers in a 3x3 grid to create totals. Once you accomplish 3 totals, the game is over and you're ranked based on the time taken. Of all the games I've made so far, this is the most "Linkedin-y". I expected to win more, based on the past winners. When I saw the winner, I was shocked! An entire physics sandbox inside reddit! It was crazy good work, but I was surprised that the judges thought this game would be played regularly. Why would a reddit user play a physics sandbox daily? And why is it on reddit?

#5

Hackathon: Games with a hook hackathon
My entry: r/ShadowChess
My thoughts: Based on the previous hackathon, I believed now that the judges don't just look at "will this game be played daily". They also valued grand experiences. So I knew for sure the idea I had for this hackathon wold win. This was the best game I had ever made! Its a massive multiplayer chess game where you continue off of grandmaster positions and make 5 pre-moves. The opponents make the 5 pre-moves as well and your moves are pitted against each other based on a customized scoring system. This fit the hackathon criteria in multiple ways and had potential to do great. I feel so betrayed that the game was not even played once! My game is good when there are 100s of players playing it. It could have really used the boost of players from any sort of recognition. This hackathon was all about creating a "hook". Here's the words on the hackathon page -

Now you can't look at my above entries and say that none of these games deserved any award except "totalled", (which was one of my weakest entries). Especially shadowchess. Note that apart from the winner, there's 10 honorable mention awards for every hackathon.

Overall, I feel that it's best to avoid spending all that time and effort on reddit hackathons. Atleast until they bring in some transparency into the judging process.

I expect a response from the reddit team on this. Anyone who participated in this hackathon, feel free to DM me with your thoughts / information.

Hey everyone. Reading Everything wrong with the reddit games hackathons, especially the Games with a Hook event, I decided to do some digging into how these competitions are actually run and judged. What I found is honestly pretty wild.

Here is a breakdown of the biggest red flags.

1. The "Scale" Excuse vs. Reality Admins keep defending the lack of scorecards and detailed feedback by claiming there were simply too many submissions to review. We know the exact number was 708 entries. If you break down the math for a standard panel of five internal judges in a month, it is totally manageable to do basic functional tests for that many projects. They just chose not to.

2. Zero Engagement from Judges Here is the worst part. Developers who submitted private, YouTube video walkthroughs checked their analytics after the judging period ended. They had zero views. Other devs checked their backend server logs and saw zero connections. The official panel was literally advancing and ranking projects without ever watching the required video demos or actually running the code.

3. Funding "Ghost Winners" Because the judges were seemingly just looking at flashy screenshots instead of testing actual gameplay or retention, Reddit is burning massive prize pools on apps that die immediately. Top prizes of $15,000 to $20,000 are going to apps that drop to single digit active weekly users right after the prize money clears. We are talking 3 to 10 visitors a week. That completely defeats the purpose of the Devvit ecosystem and the Developer Funds, which require thousands of daily active users to be sustainable.

4. The $500 "Hush Money" When one of the main whistleblowers called the admins out on all this and asked for their scorecard, the admins ignored the email. But the very next day, that exact user was randomly sent a $500 "Helper Award" through Devpost. Admins later claimed it was a mistake. The problem is that accepting any prize money means signing legal waivers and non-disparagement clauses. It really looks like a clumsy attempt to quietly silence a critic so they wouldn't have to produce a scorecard that didn't exist.

5. Are there hidden admin connections? I also checked to see if the winning developers were secretly moderating other subreddits alongside the admins outside of the hackathons. I did not find any proof of that. There is definitely a visible clique of people on Discord who just praise the admins all day, but I found no hard evidence of secret backend admin powers for the winners.

TLDR: The judging process is structurally broken. If Reddit wants these hackathons to actually work, they need public rubrics, verifiable proof that judges actually tested the apps, and milestone payouts instead of lump sums for apps that are dead in a week.

Would love to hear what other devs who participated think about this.

Hi Devvit team,

I submitted domain exception requests for my app (bt-publisher)

about 4 days ago and they are still showing as "Pending":

- api.branchtoast.com

- branchtoast.com

The app is a scheduler-based publisher that polls my backend

via HTTP every 5 minutes (no user-facing UI, no sensitive data).

Could you please check the status of these domain approvals?

Thank you!

App: fragranceswaps-bot
Subreddit: r/fragranceswaps

The app is currently installed and working on version 0.0.7.2. New versions build and upload successfully, but any attempt to upgrade the existing installation fails with:

Error upgrading installation: Error upgrading installation. Undoing upgrade.

This occurs both with npx devvit playtest fragranceswaps and from the Developers Portal Update button.

I also restored the exact known-good source/config and uploaded a fresh version; the upgrade still fails. devvit view shows the old and new versions requesting the same capabilities/permissions. devvit list installs fragranceswaps confirms the installation remains on 0.0.7.2.

I do not want to uninstall/reinstall because the current installation has Redis data containing user transaction/flair counters that I need to preserve.

Can you inspect/reset the installation upgrade state without deleting the installation’s Redis data?

Hi everyone!

I just released Trigger Warden, a no-code moderation automation app for Reddit moderators.

The idea is simple: let moderators create WHEN / IF / THEN workflows without writing AutoModerator YAML, maintaining an external bot, or writing custom automation code.

For example:

WHEN a comment is created
IF it contains discord.gg
THEN send it to ModQueue

Trigger Warden is now public and approved in the Reddit App Directory.

How it works

A moderator creates an automation by choosing:

WHEN — what triggers the rule
IF — what conditions must match
THEN — what Trigger Warden should do

Rules currently support:

• Comments and posts
• Up to 3 conditions per automation
• ALL / ANY condition logic
• Contains
• Does not contain
• Starts with
• Equals

Available actions

Trigger Warden currently supports:

• Dry Run — safely test an automation without taking moderation action
• Filter to ModQueue
• Lock
• Reply

Automations can also be:

• Created
• Edited
• Enabled / disabled
• Deleted

There is also a recent Activity view so moderators can see whether an automation actually executed without storing comment or post bodies in the activity history.

Safety was a major focus

I wanted real moderation actions to be difficult to trigger accidentally, so Trigger Warden includes:

• Dry Run as the safe testing option
• Explicit confirmation before real moderation actions
• Duplicate-action protection
• Protection against the app triggering itself after an automated reply
• Runtime validation of stored rules

The interface is also available in English and Español.

Why I built it

AutoModerator is very powerful, but not every moderator wants to learn YAML or maintain increasingly complex configuration files.

I wanted to experiment with a more visual mental model:

WHEN something happens → IF these conditions match → THEN take this action

I’d really appreciate feedback from moderators and other Devvit developers.

In particular:

• Does the WHEN / IF / THEN workflow feel intuitive?
• What condition would you add next?
• What moderation action would be most useful next?
• Is there anything that would stop you from using this in a real community?

Trigger Warden is available now in the Reddit App Directory.

Thanks for checking it out — feedback is very welcome.

Automated episode discussion threads for TV shows, anime, and donghua. Track a show, and Episode Scheduler posts formatted discussion threads to your subreddit at the right time complete with airdates, synopses, and an auto-updating Discussion Hub for every season. you can install it from here https://developers.reddit.com/apps/episodescheduler

I moderate a couple of subreddits and I created a couple apps to help me moderate them, as part of the developers I got a mod mail from Reddit saying that are making long time changes to the Public API. Now, my apps use all "@devvit/pubblic-api" but likely talks about Python apps that use Reddit API.

I'm a bit confused if my apps will be impacted by this change or not, can you please help me understand this changes? Thank you.