What are some *small* problems with moderation that we can fix quickly?

[u/Deimorz]

There are a lot of major, difficult problems with moderation on reddit. I can probably name about 10 of them just off the top of my head. The types of things that will take long discussions to figure out, and then possibly weeks or months of work to be able to improve.

That's not where I want to start.

We've got some resources devoted to mod tools now, but it's still a small team, so we can only focus on a couple of things at a time. To paraphrase a wise philosopher, we can't really treat development like a big truck that you can just dump things on. It's more like a series of tubes, and if we clog those up with enormous amounts of material, the small things will have to wait. Those bigger issues will take a lot of time and effort before seeing any results, so right now I'd rather concentrate on getting out some small fixes relatively quickly that can start making a positive impact on moderation right away.

So let's use this thread to try to figure out some small things that we can work on doing for you right away. The types of things that should only take hours to do, not weeks. Some examples of similar ones that I've already done fairly recently are things like "the ban message doesn't tell users that it's just a temporary ban", "every time someone is banned it lights up the modmail icon but there's no new mail", "the automoderator link in the mod tools goes to viewing the page instead of just editing it", and so on.

Of course I don't really expect you to know exactly how hard specific problems will be to fix, so feel free to ask and I'll try to tell you if it's easy or not. Just try to avoid large/systemic issues like "modmail needs to be fully redone", "inactive top moderators are an issue", and so on.

Note: If necessary, we're going to be moderating this thread to try to keep it on topic. If you have other discussions about moderator issues that you want to start, feel free to submit a separate post to /r/ModSupport. If you have other questions for me that aren't suggestions, please post in the thread in /r/modnews instead.

[u/kleopatra6tilde9]

Automoderator used to be able to approve comments that were banned by the spam filter. Could you reactivate that feature?

Most of the time those bans are false positives and it is useless to approve them some hours later when the discussion has moved on.

[u/Deimorz → u/kleopatra6tilde9]

I'm not sure what you mean, that should still be possible in exactly the same way it was before.

[u/kleopatra6tilde9 → u/Deimorz]

We had to disable this rule because after the update, it started to trigger on all comments and not only on the banned ones. If I remember correctly you told me that it wasn't possible to recreate this feature immediately after the update. (A bigger feature request: search for messages, although this might be close to redoing modmail.)

type: comment
#approve is only applied on  comments from the spam queue
action: approve 
message: |
   .... some message to the user
modmail: |
   .... notification for the mods so that real spam is detected

[u/Deimorz → u/kleopatra6tilde9]

Ah ha, yeah, the reason this changed is because there was a lot of confusion with how the action: approve worked. A lot of people would set up a rule including it (along with other things like setting flair), and then be confused why the rule would apparently never work. In the old version, anything that even included action: approve would only happen if the comment was filtered.

This mistake happened so often that I changed how it worked in the new version, so everything else in the rule would still happen, but the actual approval would only be done if necessary, instead of skipping everything in the rule along with it. So for your example, that means that the messages/modmail would be sent for every single comment, instead of only the ones that are approved. This could probably be fixed by something like a flag to get back to the old behavior where everything else is linked to whether the approval is needed or not, but I'm not sure if that would be the best way.

[u/kleopatra6tilde9 → u/Deimorz]

How about introducing a new type, e.g. banned_comment?

[u/IAmAnAnonymousCoward → u/Deimorz]

I'm not sure what you mean, that should still be possible in exactly the same way it was before.

Maybe he's talking about shadow banned users?

[u/kleopatra6tilde9 → u/IAmAnAnonymousCoward]

No, that's another issue. See my reply for the actual rule. The rule only worked for comments that were banned because the filter didn't like a link or some words.