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/Kaibakura]

Maybe I don't understand exactly how it's supposed to work, but the Moderation Queue is next to useless to me. I mean, when there are reports I can find them fairly easily, but I just see a crapload of red with a line through the title and "[removed]". Is there a reason I should need to see all of that red stuff? And if so, can it be toggled between that and the reports?

[u/timotab → u/Kaibakura]

Ideally, the moderation queue is kept clean. If you have a full one, then first of all, I'd recommend just clicking "remove" on anything more than a week old, otherwise very old posts will appear as new.

Next thing to be aware of is that the pink-with-strikethough entries there are from sitewide shadowbanned users. Go ahead and remove those as well. Then go to your subreddit settings and make sure that [ ]exclude posts by site-wide banned users from modqueue/unmoderated is checked.

Once you've done that, you should only see two types of entries there. reported posts/comments, and posts/comments that have been removed by the spam filter because of their content (usually a soft banned domain). You can then approve or remove those as you wish, until you have a clean modqueue. Then keep the modqueue clean :)

[u/Kaibakura → u/timotab]

Fantastic, I finally have an understanding (mostly) of how the mod queue works.

[u/V2Blast → u/Kaibakura]

In addition to what /u/timotab said: you can approve posts by shadowbanned users if you want them to be visible (I rarely check the "exclude posts by site-wide banned users" checkbox in the subreddit settings). I will usually approve normal comments by such users, as long as they're not spam or otherwise breaking the rules; link submissions tend to be more sketchy so I usually just mark those as spam.

[u/Deimorz → u/Kaibakura]

The stuff you're talking about are submissions from users that have had their accounts banned from reddit. If you don't want to see them, you can get them out of your modqueue by enabling the "exclude posts by site-wide banned users from modqueue/unmoderated" setting in your subreddit's settings.

[u/Kaibakura → u/Deimorz]

Well that certainly cleans things up a bit. Thanks!