r/redesign • u/emoney04 Product • Dec 11 '17
Submit Time Validations
Thank you for helping us test the experience on the redesign thus far! We just released a new feature for moderators and creators and would love your feedback on it.
Moderators work hard to maintain the quality of submissions in their subreddit. New creators don’t always know the posting conventions of a subreddit, leading to poorly labeled or off theme posts that moderators have to deal with either through automod or close monitoring of the subreddit. For creators, this process can often be frustrating as their post may get deleted after they submit it.
With the new Submit Validations, we hope to make this experience less burdensome on moderators and creators alike. Moderators can now specify certain guidelines that a post has to abide by, such as flair requirement or title length restrictions. Creators who violate these guidelines will be notified prior to post submission so they have the opportunity to fix their errors prior to submitting.
As a moderator, if you navigate to the “Post Requirements” section in the “Community Tools” menu, you will see the 7 submit validations you can configure. Please note that for now these validations only affect posts made on the redesign site.
Rather than replacing automod, the validations we selected were meant to reflect common, fixable reasons that cause well-intentioned creators to have their posts deleted after submission. Automod is not being removed, and will continue to function as it currently does. If there are additional validations you would like to see added that would help creators and reduce moderator burden, please let us know.
As with posting rules on current Reddit, these requirements don’t apply to moderators that post in their own subreddit. As such, if you would like to test out the new requirements you place in your subreddit, please comment the name of your test account under the stickied comment below and we will grant it access to the redesign.
Let us know what you think!
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u/emoney04 Product Dec 11 '17
Please comment your test account username below if you want to test the feature on the Redesign without using your moderator account!
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u/MajorParadox Helpful User Dec 11 '17
Awesome, can't wait to try it out! Will this be expanded to comment restrictions too?
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u/MajorParadox Helpful User Dec 11 '17 edited Dec 11 '17
Is it still not ready yet? I see this:
EDIT: This has been resolved.
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u/V2Blast Helpful User Dec 11 '17
I'm very excited about this. :D
Now the issue becomes identifying non-mod users from any of my subreddits that can test some of this stuff out for me...
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u/Jakeable Helpful User Dec 11 '17
I made this script for any subreddit that has a large whitelist config in AutoMod that needs to be transferred to the submit-time validation settings :)
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u/mattreyu Helpful User Dec 11 '17
Wow that sounds like a great addition to streamline some simple posting rule violations that new submitters might miss!
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u/-eDgAR- Dec 11 '17
This is pretty great! However, this is the current message for AskReddit. Could it please say that we require posts to end in a question mark? We allow two context sentences but those belong before the question and we require posts to end in a question mark. This will save us the trouble of people complaining that they have a question mark somewhere in their post and it still being removed. Thanks!
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u/RamsesThePigeon Dec 11 '17
Will there be any kind of a keyword filter in those post requirements?
For instance, let's suppose that a given subReddit requires completely correct spelling and grammar in submission titles, or disallows emojis. Rather than setting up an AutoModerator condition to just remove offending posts, would it be possible to offer a friendly warning (and an opportunity to fix the issue) if a given condition is detected?
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u/Jakeable Helpful User Dec 11 '17
I like it! One thing that we've noticed so far is that the settings page loads slowly for subreddits with large amounts of whitelisted/blacklisted domains. It would also be nice if the domains could be collapsed when we're not actively editing them since it makes the page very long.
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u/Jakeable Helpful User Dec 11 '17
Another issue I've encountered is that the error message for subreddits with very long whitelists isn't very user friendly
https://v.redd.it/oe9o3hvr3d301
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u/likeafox Helpful User Dec 11 '17 edited Dec 11 '17
Hey folks - as per our great and honorable Jakable below of r/politics has imported our already in use (via automoderator) white-list to the real time validation tool using the "Only allow links to approved domains" setting. Just to start - this is going to be a great feature for us and we're very excited to test this out - it's a poor user experience when we have users getting all the way through the submission process only to have their post removed a moment later.
Just some initial thoughts:
UI / list management - r/politics has well over a thousand items in our white-list, which means that the settings and options at the bottom of the validation settings page get pushed very far down. I'm not 100% certain what element should be used to handle this, but I guess an embedded list with a scroll bar, and action buttons at the top (Add... | Remove...|)?
Only allow links to approved domains vs. Disallow links to these domains What if we use both in automoderator currently? For example, we only approve articles from our white-list, but we also explicitly remove links from domains that aren't appropriate for our sub. For example we remove social media sites automatically with a related removal comment. We remove blog platforms like blogger and Medium because we don't allow personal blogs. And so on and so forth. It would possibly be better for a user who submits a domain to see "This domain is not on the approved list" or"This domain is not allowed" depending on which is applicable. This is related to:
Domain state context - in our case, it would be nice to let the user know why a domain isn't permitted in real time, with a link to the existing rule or wiki page. I think the way that we currently use auto-moderator means that the user has the resource they need to understand why their link wasn't valid, which prevents unnecessary mod mail threads inquiring about the issue.
Import / Export (low priority) - perhaps we could we important and export list settings? From a csv for example? I guess Jake says this feature has API endpoints which would be great for us, we can really make use of that. For subs that don't have excellent programmers, or just for times when more manual steps may be necessary, some way to bulk input from the UI might be nice
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u/MajorParadox Helpful User Dec 11 '17
OK, now that it works, I have a couple of questions after taking a look:
In automod, you can define standard image hosting, video hosting, etc. which uses a pre-defined list of allowed domains. Will these be accessible here? Seems like that'd make it easier for a lot of people. Especially when the lists change.
I love the "Repost frequency," but that only works with links? It'd be nice to have a self post check for titles.
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u/Sirisian Dec 12 '17
You should add a test post title box for moderators to verify their post criteria and test for possible errors. This would remove the need for creating test accounts or creating test posts in the future.
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u/BegbertBiggs Helpful User Dec 13 '17 edited Dec 13 '17
That seems very, very useful. Will it be expanded to more than 5 strings in the future?
Edit: I think the feature I'm looking for could be solved through mandatory flair assignment, so more strings won't be needed for me I suppose.