A quick recap for anyone who made it this far:

• In part one we focused on automods abilities to check sub users
• In part two we discussed some of the common ways we check the actual content in posts & comments
• In part three we described the most common actions that automod rules can take for us

We have used simple examples so far to explain what things do but now we will look at how these 3 things (user checks, content checks, actions) can and should work together.

The overarching question has not changed – what are the common themes with users or content in your community that automod can help your team to deal with?

 

Barriers to Entry

We have already talked about how to check users in broad terms, but now we explore how we might want to set up our automod so that a user might be able to interact with some content, but not all. The combinations are almost endless, but here are some examples of the kind of things you can do:

• Only users with positive sub karma can comment on posts with certain flairs
• Users with accounts less than one week old cannot make top-level replies on posts
• Users with negative karma who make posts have them filtered to the mod queue for review before going live
• Restrict uses posts or comments based on their user flair, or user flair class
• Allow or disallow specific website links based only for approved users

A quick note on automations (which are separate to automod) – while they don’t have the same level of useability as automod, they can still be extremely useful. Anything that can prevent a violation from being posted to start with is ALWAYS preferable to having something posted that gets removed. I highly recommend using automations to complement a good automod setup wherever possible. See HERE for more info on them.

Whitelists/Blacklists For Specific Users

Outside of using our many user checks sometimes we might need to target specific users using automod. This can be extremely handy. Think of it like the above barriers to entry, but instead of targeting users based on their account status we simply target users by their individual usernames.

As to why we would do this, there are a few great reasons to take this approach:

• If an automod rule is too broad and causes too many ‘false positives’ where mods end up reversing a lot of automoderator actions, then we are creating work not reducing it. Sometimes it is easier to target specific users.
• Some users might be great contributors generally, but terrible on specific topics or actions. So we might want to prevent a user/s from engaging on specific topics, or user flairs etc

Maybe on a news or regional subreddit you have users that contribute well to the community overall but tend to break a lot of sub rules on political posts. You may wish to have automod remove their content on political posts, but otherwise not restrict them.

On a gaming sub you may have in-game item trading as a sub post type. It is possible that specific users who prove incapable or unwilling to follow trading etiquette may need to be ‘blacklisted’ from engaging on trading submissions, but free to engage otherwise.

A word of warning on user blacklists though – they can be a tool prone to misuse. As mods we already get to determine the participation levels of users in our communities but using automod to silently censor or ‘shadowban’ specific users can heavily influence a communities experience.

Bonus Topic - Temporary Events

On the .01% chance that anyone got this far into reading an automod guide with no code, I will highlight one lesser known feature of automod – related to temporary events.

Temporary events are their own thing (see HERE if you are curious). Automod can also check whether your sub is in a ‘temporary event’ or not, and action accordingly. This opens up some interesting options for subs to effectively have automod rules that will only apply at specific times.

Imagine having ‘free for all Friday’ where the automod is less restrictive for 24 hours, or having certain post flairs only useable at certain times (lol). Basically we have the ability to have ‘time sensitive’ automod rules.

Closing Thoughts

It is my hope that in documenting my thoughts in these posts there will be a few redditors out there who are inspired to make some changes after reading this. I believe that a really well tuned automod can make life easier for mods - so that mod teams can spend more time building communities & less time administrating them. We don’t always have the best tools so it’s best to optimize the tools that we do have.

-            Tyler_Durdan_

In part one we introduced some basic principles for rules and discussed the different checks that we can do on the users themselves. For the second post we are going to discuss the many, many options we have to check the content of the post or comment. Im not going to cover every possibility – we will focus on the most used and most useful types of content checks.

Words/Phrase Checks

By far the most used content checks are checks that look for specific words, word combinations or any pattern of numbers/letters that you might want to target. Automod can even target emojis. We can check post titles, post bodies or comments for a specific word or phrase, and automod can take action based on finding that content. There are lots of possibilities with this type of check but here are some examples to demonstrate common uses:

Example 1 – set the post flair based on keywords:

• Checks – A user makes a post where the keywords ‘democrat’ or ‘republican’ are found
• Actions – Overwrite whichever post flair the user set with the ‘politics’ flair which is set by automod to restrict who can then reply to that post

Example 2 – Send the content to modqueue before it goes live if keywords are found

• Checks – a user makes a post OR comment where the phrase ‘you idiot’ is found
• Actions – stop the content from being public, send it to the mod queue to be approved or removed by mods before it goes public.

Post Or Comment Length Checks

The usefulness of these checks is largely sub-specific but we can have automod check the length of a post or comment and take action accordingly. This can be useful if you want to ensure certain posts types, or posts with specific flairs have the type of comments you intend. An example:

• Checks – A user makes a top-level comment on a post flaired ‘Serious replies only’ that is less that 50 characters
• Actions – remove the comment and send the user a message telling them that the comment was removed for being too short.

Link/Website Checks

A lot of the time checks for websites or links are set up as word/phrase checks, but it is worth giving this kind of check its own callout. A lot like with crossposts you can take a whitelist or blacklist approach. You may even want to send all of a specific websites mentions and links to the mod queue for mod review. Alternatively you might be happy for the content to go live in the sub, but simply notify mods to check it by sending a modmail, or creating a report in the mod queue:

• Checks – a post or comment contains a link to facebook, or even just the word facebook
• Actions – Let the post or comment go live, but have automod report it to the mod queue so mods will see be alterted to the content and can review it

Crossposts Into Your Sub

I will first start off by saying that if you want to disallow all crossposts into your sub, you can do this simply by changing your sub settings without using automod.

Where automod comes in is where you can take a blacklist or whitelist approach to cross posts. This amounts to either:

• Whitelist Approach - Only allow crossposts from a list of approved subs
• Blacklist Approach – allow crossposts, except a list of disallowed subs
• Mod approval required – send all crossposts to the mod queue to be approved or removed before the crosspost goes live in your sub

User Report Checks

When sub content is reported by users for breaking rules, a report is generated which we see in the mod queue. Automod can check how many reports a post or comment has received and take action. There are a few handy ways to use this automod function – notably to remove content that receives excessive reports, or also to auto-approve reports on specific content. Here is an example of each approach:

• Checks – A comment receives its 5^(th) report for breaking rules
• Actions – Remove the comment from public view and send it to the modqueue for review. Mods can then either approve it to go public again, or remove it

Or you might have an issue with spurious users reporting mod content:

• Checks – a post or comment made by a moderator (including automod) is reported as breaking a sub rule
• Actions – approve the report automatically so that it does not need to be manually cleared by human mods

Other Common Content Checks

Here are some other content checks that automod can use that I have found useful and worth a mention:

Whether a post or comment has been edited or not

Automod will re-check any content that is edited by default, so users cannot ‘get around’ automod by editing in violations after the initial post or comment. There might be times where you might want to treat edited content differently though! The best example of how this can be useful is for subs that generate a welcome message on all posts. If the OP edits their post for some reason, we don’t want automod to generate another welcome message which would be unnecessary.

Whether a comment is a top-level comment or not (a reply to the OP)

This one is really sub dependent whether it is useful, but for subs that treat top-level comments differently automod can check this for us. For example you might have a sub rule that only users with positive sub karma can make top-level replies.

Whether a comment in a thread was made by the posts OP or not

You may want to treat OPs differently when they are commenting in their own threads – automod can check if a comment is being made by the OP. A great example of how useful this can be is that we can use automod give OP’s the ability to lock their own threads without needing moderator intervention!

Ignoring quoted text – we can tell automod to ignore any content that is in blockquotes

This is extremely useful for preventing duplication of mod tasks. An example - We have automod checking for the word ‘idiot’ in comments and reporting those comments to the mod queue. If another user then quotes the original text containing the word idiot in a reply we don’t want automod to re-report the quoted text. So we tell automod to ignore quoted text when checking for those violations.

That is it for part 2. Having focused on user checks & content checks we will now talk about automods ACTIONS in part 3.

I was motivated to write this because I am a big believer in the power of automod and I think many subs are not getting the most out of their setups. Most dialog on automod focuses on how to code the rules, but too little focus is put on why you might set up a rule in the first place.

You wont find any code in here. What I hope you do find is some thought-provoking content about getting more value from your automod setup.

Why Use Automod At All?

It is in the name really – we want to automate as much moderation as possible. Every rule that we put into our automod should make moderation better for the mod team. By better I mean easier & more efficient.

Before we start talking strategy though we need to better define the ‘auto’ part of automod.

What Are Automod ‘Rules’?

The automod page of each sub is just a whole bunch of individual ‘rules’ in a single page. At a simple level, each automod rule should be thought of as having two parts to it:

Checks – What conditions will cause the rule to trigger

Actions – What will automod do when the rule triggers

I am going to use this language as we go through because I think it is easier to understand the rules as written language before trying to add code. To provide an example of a common/simple automod rule written like this:

• Check – A user makes a post or comment using an account that is less than one day old
• If yes, then:
• Actions – Remove the content & send the user a message explaining why their post or comment was removed

Rules can get quite nuanced and complex but for the purpose of this guide I am going to focus on the two main areas – user moderation & content moderation.

Where To Start?

Knowing what automod can and can’t do is key. Note I am not talking about the code but knowing the abilities automod has - which are significant. To break up the volume of content a bit we will tackle this in sections. Let’s start with checks that focus on the users themselves.

## Section 1 - User Checks

As a mod team you should consider what kinds of moderation you can automate for the accounts participating in your sub. It is very common to see subs place restrictions on accounts that are new, or enforce karma requirements for example.

Lets touch on some of the most common things that we ask automod to check with sub users and how they might be useful (or not).

Account Age Checks

When we talk about account age we mostly think of new accounts. IME most large subs use automod to prevent or restrict newer accounts from posting/commenting so this is the most common example we come across. There are other ways we can use the account age check though.

If your sub has a challenge with hibernated accounts (accounts that are older but inactive) you can combine account age with other checks. Lets look at an example rule:

• Checks – a user makes a post or comment using an account that is more than 3 months old, but has less than 10 total karma
• Actions – filter the post or comment and send it to the mod queue for review before it goes live

This rule will send a lot of low or no activity account posts/comment to the queue - so could generate a lot of queue traffic in some subs. This means you would only want to use this rule if the sub had a significant problem with hibernated accounts. You could also use different settings to make it trigger less like extending the age check to ‘more than one year old’ etc.

Karma Checks

Karma checks can be incredibly useful if used in a thoughtful and deliberate way. Automod gives us some great customization options for karma:

Total karma – an accounts total Reddit karma. We can also check total post karma or total comment karma independently

Sub karma – an accounts karma in YOUR SUB. This can also be made specific to post or comment sub karma

Total account karma is the most used karma check I have seen and it’s the most universally useful. We can also check for negative karma ( we can set check thresholds as low as -99). Typically accounts with very negative karma are assumed or expected to be more likely to break rules etc so it is common to have automod filter out or remove content from accounts like this.

For subs where your subject matter might be polarising (politics etc) having karma checks can have the effect of censoring accounts that have unpopular opinions. That approach could be good for minimising sub disruption but could also limit the diversity of content so it comes down to what environment the sub wants to have.

 Sub-specific karma is a very good and underutilised tool IMO. Well established accounts can have huge amounts of total reddit karma, but be disruptive in your specific subreddit. Automod being able to check a users sub-specific karma can be a great way to target users otherwise might pass all of your broader checks. For example:

Checks – A user makes a post or comment that has less than -50 total sub karma

Actions – Send the mod team a modmail alerting the mod team to review that user account

Of course the above rule will trigger EVERY time that account posts or comments which could actually create mod work (not the good kind of work). So how could we change our approach?

We could change the action to just remove the content; or

We could use other automod features to prevent constant retriggers.

Post karma or comment karma rules can be useful for specific subs where an accounts post or comment karma might influence whether you want automod to act. For example you might only allow posts from users with positive post karma – or remove posts from users who have negative comment karma in your sub.

CQS (Contributor Quality Score) Checks

Every Reddit account has a CQS score, which can improve or decline over time. Reddit does not publish much detail about how the scores are calculated – this is by design so that it is harder for people to try and manipulate. You can read more about CQS HERE. Reddit considers your CQS score to be the ‘quality’ of your account, not to be confused with Karma. Karma is a measurement of how much people agree with your content in the areas you post in, but account quality is different. Think about things such as – being banned from subs, being muted, having a high ratio of manually removed comments. An account with lots of these infractions will be more likely to have a lower CQS score.

A word of caution on CQS – it appears that accounts using VPNs and privacy-oriented browsers can find themselves with lower CQS scores even if they are otherwise not violating rules so using CQS to check users might be a terrible idea in a community that values online privacy!

I have found CQS to be great in combination with account age & karma checks at catching hibernated or ‘sleeper’ accounts. Rules like:

Checks – An account tries to post or comment that is more than 6 months old but has a CQS score of ‘low’ or ‘lowest’

Action – remove the content and send the user a modmail telling them their account quality is too low to use the sub

Account ‘Status’ Checks

Automod can check a user for several attributes to make our checks smarter:

• Mods – Automod can check if the user is a mod of your sub
• Approved users – automod can treat approved users differently to others
• OP’s – for comments, automod can check if the commenter is the OP (or not)
• Flair – Automod can check (or change) a users flair
• Account name – Automod can check the accounts name, or even look for words within the name ( for example ‘throwaway’) and act based on the account name/s.

User Checks – Summary

So with all of the above we already have a huge amount of customization for checking users. The idea is not to use them all - but to understand which ones might be used to best help your mod team. What kinds of users cause the most disruption in your sub and what are some of the attributes those accounts have in common? Does your sub have user flairs? Are they cosmetic, or can they be used to give automod additional info to check?

User flairs could be a topic all on their own but being able to categorize users in your community by user flair can be extremely useful.

For part 2 we will explore content checks with a similar approach.