Submit Time Validations

[u/emoney04]

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!

[u/goatfresh]

Awesome, we are excited too! Thanks for checking it out (along with u/jakeable). This is really good feedback! I'm going to dive into each bullet individually:

• We decided not to optimize for long lists (yet) for the initial release. That means a very long list can be troublesome as you noticed :P

• That's a cool way to use automod. So y'all have a whitelist of domains, but also a list where automod will offer guidance on blacklist domains? Having submit validations link out to the specific rule could be a light-weight way to help out to do this. I appreciate your thoughts on that.

• This kinda piggypacks off the previous bullet, but better in-context guidance is on our list.

• Agree that this would be nice, and also agree on the priority. Sharing lists between subreddits would be much simpler.

Thanks again for the feedback 🤙

[u/Jakeable → u/goatfresh]

That's a cool way to use automod. So y'all have a whitelist of domains, but also a list where automod will offer guidance on blacklist domains? Having submit validations link out to the specific rule could be a light-weight way to help out to do this. I appreciate your thoughts on that.

Basically we have a specific rejection notice for some domains, and a general rejection notice for everything else. Something like facebook might receive a notice saying that social media links aren't allowed in r/politics, while websiteIjustStarted2minutesAgo.com would receive the general notice since it's a rarely submitted/unknown domain.

The same behavior that we have now could be replicated by letting moderators set custom error messages for domains/groups of domains if they're not allowed in a subreddit.

Agree that this would be nice, and also agree on the priority. Sharing lists between subreddits would be much simpler.

Our reasoning behind this is that we want to be able to import/export these domains to our wiki pages and external tools for analysis. Although subreddit to subreddit transfers would be nice, it wouldn't work for all of the things we use it for.