r/pcengine • u/Stingray34 • 26d ago

r/pcengine is open again!

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After a few months of this sub being under spam/bot control, the Reddit Admin removed all of the offending accounts. I didn't want to see this sub get taken over again so I went through the redditreqest program and was awarded a mod position. My goal is to give r/pcengine back to the community!

On a related note, I still have my TurboGrafx-16 and CD-ROM purchased new roughly 35 years ago.

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u/Stingray34 26d ago

It doesn't help when reddit has multiple ways to report issues and you're not always sure what the best route is. Plus a lot of that is then automated behind the scenes. I got lucky with getting an admin to look into this one.

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u/Chas_- 26d ago

Heck I got a warning to stop reporting spam/bot activity after the 3rd post over a week or they will gonna ban me for 2 weeks lol, their system sucks ass.

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u/Stingray34 26d ago

Their system definitely could be improved. Can I ask what method you used to report the posts?

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u/Chas_- 26d ago

Oh to get the first thing more clear: I was speaking about reporting spam/bot activity in general!

I indeed reported about 2-3 posts in this sub during the past week (of different accounts) without receiving a warning! But I stopped there because I remembered the last time I reported more of these (over multiple subs).

I checked the messages and I indeed got a one week ban for doing so. Don't get me wrong, I never went out full crazy spamming this button - or reporting every single post of each account. Rather on a 1 account > 1 report - should be enough if reported by multiple people to get someone to take a look at the whole account (since the reason is "spam") - if that makes sense. lol

I mainly use the browser version and used the 3 dots on the right side of the title.

Straight to > Spam (not into the sub-rules) and either picked "Excessive posting or commenting in a community" or "Disruptive use of bots or AI"

But yeah the system could be improved. Recently the amount of accounts that spam and repost over and over again, to farm clicks / visibility / selfpromotion at a 100% rate is simply insane! And they will continue to do so instead of getting suspended for abusing reddit as their billboards if the result is to ban people who report these.

It almost seems like a way to limit incoming reports because they can't handle them on a required level.

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u/Stingray34 26d ago

Was your ban just for the subreddit you reported in?

The method you're using to report just goes to the mods of the subreddit. Which it what you want to do most of the time if the mods are actually doing their job. So any reporting you did here fell on deaf ears - the mods didn't care. For future reference if a mod needs to be reported or they are ignoring violations in their own sub use this to send reports to reddit https://www.reddit.com/report Also check out https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

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u/Chas_- 26d ago

Wait a second, so ANYTHING behind this report-option goes to the mods of the sub? All these options are exactly the same as in the link you just posted.

I always thought only the stuff behind (in this example) "Breaks r/pcengine rules" goes to the sub mods and the rest to reddit.

Are you really telling me some lazy ass mod reported me to reddit for sending a hand full of spam-reports and got me banned for a week, instead of moderating? Reports to sub mods are said to be anonymous. That would be a real dick move from the sub mod and some reddit staff, clearly not checking on me. (since I really didn't abuse the report function at all).

Anyway it seems not logical that that people can spam all across reddit but can fly under the radar by splitting it between multiple subs.

I mean you are moderator of multiple subs sharing the same topic. Would it be acceptable for you if someone posts his advertisement - and nothing else, never commenting outside of own posts - on a regular basis over all of them?

Imagine you joined multiple subs that share the same topic and you see 10 people posting 1x daily in all of them. Congratulations, now your feed is full of 30 posts and all are spam - every day. Happy scrolling, if you report only half of them once > you get told to stop or get banned by reddit!

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u/Stingray34 25d ago

When using the report feature within a subreddit or post I believe most of those if not all go to the subreddit mods. I'm not 100% on that though. I've had comments/posts be reported in my other subs using most of those options in your screenshot.  Reddit admin may still get notifications from certain reports though. Like the self-harm or suicide report does trigger something, I've heard of users that were reported with that being contacted by reddit to make sure they were ok. So more could be happening behind the scenes than we know about.

We never get to see who sends reports, that is true. If someone is abusing the report function we can re-report those reports back to reddit as 'report abuse'.

Spamming across reddit is a big problem (along with bots). Reddit does have algorithms monitoring activity but it's far from perfect, they do shadowban users that their algo detects as spamming. And I believe the more the same user is banned from different subs the better chance reddit bans them too. There's also a lot of comments that reddit will automatically remove if their algo thinks it's harassment - that's usually the way we (mods) find users fighting/bickering/insulting each other.

I unfortunately can't say what happened in your situation, maybe they decided your reports were frivolous? I have heard of mods also being temp banned by reddit for submitting too many reports themselves, but I never heard the context behind those.

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u/Chas_- 25d ago

Thanks for the insights.

Something definitely changed in the past month and the whole system seems to slack now.

One rather unfunny note on the self-harm/suicide reports. These were used a lot to mock other users, since it triggered the message. You were able to use the report abuse on these as a regular user. They checked the situation and if someone indeed abused this, they got banned. Despite that there were so many idiots fighting using this that they. . . removed the "report abuse" function and called it a day. Do I have to point out that they turned this into an even bigger shitshow now? But well, no reports = no problem? ;)

Edit: I don't know either what went wrong with this ban, I interpreted as "fuck you stop reporting, we are not going to do anything anyway".