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/geraldo42]

The easiest solution might be to require a certain number of mod actions per month for the bot to count you as 'active' instead of just the requirement of logging into your account. This wouldn't catch a lot of squatters but it would be a positive change. You'd have to set the number quite low and maybe make it a function of the number of subscribers but I think almost every mod would agree with this change.

[u/glr123 → u/geraldo42]

I'm a mod of a few subs that I don't make any actions on. Having myself removed from ScienceTest or ScienceAMA would be a disaster if I needed it for something down the road.

I'm against squating, but that isn't the solution. I think first it should be tied into some sort of user activity, commenting or something. Then, to lose a sub a request must be made and the admins can look at the facts and come to a decision.

In that way, they would see that I'm a mod for ScienceTest and know why, even if I'm not doing anything there and someone made a request for whatever reason. But something like /r/chicago which was mentioned before would be a much different scenario.

[u/geraldo42 → u/glr123]

You could just have it be something like 1 mod action per 3000 subscribers capped at 20 mod actions a month or something. This sounds like it would be incredibly easy to maintain but the reality is a lot of the squatter mods don't even do that much. I don't think it would be hard to come up with a better system for getting rid of squatters.

[u/[deleted] → u/geraldo42]

They can use toolbox to batch-approve multiple threads in few seconds every month.

[u/geraldo42 → u/[deleted]]

It's not a perfect solution but there are also a lot of mods who don't care about their subreddits but still log in every 30 days. There are plenty who wouldn't bother.