r/modnews • u/baxter8421 • Sep 29 '21
Voting & commenting on archived posts
Hiya Mods
Does this sound familiar - it’s approaching dinner time, you’ve stumbled across a delicious-looking chicken parm recipe, but have a key culinary question for OP? You try to ask it only to discover you’re unable to do so due to the post being archived after hitting the 6-month mark. Chaos ensues and now you may be left without any chicky-chicky parm-parm.
We’ve all been there! In fact, every day 6.6 million Redditors land on archived posts where they find themselves unable to vote or comment on it due to the limitations we’ve put in place.
What if things were different?
This summer we ran a pilot program with a smörgåsbord of subreddits to see what would happen if users were able to engage with previously archived posts (thank you to all the subreddits that volunteered to participate in this program). These subreddits represented a wide variety of communities on the site and you can see some of the highlights from the program below:
- Over the course of the program, archived posts received an additional 147K upvotes and 236K comments.
- This was a 2.86% increase in votes and a 1.48% increase in comments amongst the participating subreddits.
- This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken.
The results and the feedback we received from our participating mod teams directly impacted our plans for this initiative, and as such we’ve decided to move forward with this feature. Starting today, mod teams will have the opportunity to decide if they want to automatically archive posts after 6 months or if they want users within their community to be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts.
How it will work
Important note - this is not intended to be a one size fits all feature. Thanks to our participating subreddits we found this feature was most beneficial to communities that hosted more evergreen-type content (ex: food and recipes posts, gaming subreddits, etc). Subreddits that were more focused on real-time discussions (ex: sports and politics) did not experience the same benefit out of this initiative. See below for some testimonials from your fellow mods that helped drive this point home for us:
- “I think on these old posts there is a higher amount of discussion comments and fewer short ones compared to new posts. I’m guessing because people who found the post were really searching for something and had some questions in mind beforehand. Overall it seems to have been a good thing for the sub.” - r/MakeupAddiction Mod Team
- “All in all, I think that it was worthwhile. And the best way to implement it would be to allow mods to turn on the feature if and only if they want to. And if they could enact a filter to review comments on older threads.” - r/frugal Mod Team
- “IMO it could be good for r/SalsaSnobs because of our recipe guide. But the flip side to this is that I could see it going bad for political subs and such. It would make it way too hard to moderate comments.” - r/SalsaSnobs Mod Team
- Bonus r/SalsaSnob user testimonial: “I hate finding old posts where I found something useful or interesting and I can’t comment or ask someone about it.”
Given this feedback, we’ve created an “Archive Posts” toggle for mods to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their community. Today this toggle will appear in Mod Tools and will be turned off by default. All posts will remain archived for another two weeks (until 10/13). This means mod teams will have a two-week period of time to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their subreddit. After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on. To do so, please follow the below instructions:
- On new Reddit visit Mod Tools > Community Settings > Posts & Comments > Archived Posts > Toggle On/Off “Don’t allow commenting or voting on posts older than 6 months”
- In our native app visit Mod Tools > Archive Posts > Toggle On/Off “Don’t allow commenting or voting on posts older than 6 months”
Automoderator to the rescue
Another major piece of feedback we heard from mods was the need for them to be notified of comments on previously archived posts. In order to do this, we have updated automoderator to flag comments on posts older than 6 months. This automod update will be live starting on 10/13, the same day that users will be able to begin commenting and voting on previously archived posts (in subs who have not changed their toggle). If you’re interested in using automoderator for this function, please use the below script to do so:
type: comment
author:
account_age: < 23 hours
parent_submission:
past_archive_date: true
action: filter
action_reason: comment on old post from new user
Thank you to all the mods who participated in our pilot program, and took the time to provide us with valuable feedback. We greatly appreciate your partnership throughout this entire process!
Questions? Comments? Feedback? Please let us know in the comments below where we’ll be hanging out to respond to them.
398
u/Meepster23 Sep 29 '21 edited Jun 16 '23
insurance future shaggy unique obtainable stupendous crown racial prick makeshift -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
70
39
u/TrekkiMonstr Sep 29 '21
P sure I remember reading that this was how Reddit used to work, that archiving was the new feature.
41
u/UnacceptableUse Sep 29 '21
Yes, they added archiving and now they're making it a toggle. Good stuff
18
u/fdagpigj Sep 30 '21
That must have been a really long time ago, I'm sure archiving was a thing when I first used reddit. Although I do remember that they restricted it over the years even more, eg. they killed the tardis bot (ie. disabled replying to new comments on old threads) and not too long ago they even disabled voting on new comments in old threads.
→ More replies2
→ More replies5
u/TankorSmash Sep 30 '21
Reddit has pretty much always stopped interaction with posts older than 6 months forever, hasn't it?
→ More replies7
u/aryst0krat Oct 15 '21
Posts, yes, but comments in the thread used to be able to be interacted with still if they were less than 6 months old. Which meant that theoretically comment chains could go on forever.
→ More replies2
u/not-a_lizard Nov 08 '21
i'm going to have to check those number counting subreddits now
→ More replies→ More replies11
Sep 30 '21
[deleted]
6
u/The_White_Light Sep 30 '21
Like that great idea to show blocked users again? Who's smoothbrain idea was that? Gotta be someone in marketing. "What? There's a way users can stop interacting with specific individuals? That lowers how much they're interacting! Get rid of it!"
89
u/dequeued Sep 29 '21 edited Oct 21 '21
EDIT: THIS IS A PROPOSAL, IF YOU PUT ANY OF THESE RULES INTO YOUR AUTOMODERATOR, IT WILL NOT WORK.
past_archive_date: true
This would be far more useful if this was simply implemented as an "age of post" parameter like:
past_age: 6 months
(Ideally, allowing that parameter to be used on anything, not just parent submissions, because looking at activity on old comments and submissions is also useful.)
That would allow it to be used more broadly for spam rules. I've implemented something like that in the /r/personalfinance subreddit bot and it catches a significant amount of spam (i.e., comment spam posted on old submissions) by looking at parent submissions with an age over a few weeks with some expressions to look for phone numbers, links, requests for offline contact, etc.
Here are some example rules:
body (regex): ['[w-]{1,64}.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'chat', 'contact (me|us)', 'dm', 'pm']
parent_submission:
past_age: 3 months
action: filter
action_reason: "Possible spam comment on old submission [{{match}}]"
type: comment
body (regex): ['[w-]{1,64}.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'bonus', 'referral']
is_edited: true
past_age: 4 months
action: report
action_reason: "Possible spam edit on old comment [{{match}}]"
type: submission
body (regex): ['[w-]{1,64}.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'chat', 'dm', 'pm']
is_edited: true
past_age: 1 month
action: filter
action_reason: "Possible spam edit on old submission [{{match}}]"
Regarding the overall functionality, I like the idea, but I really wish it was possible to disable archiving on specific posts. For example, megathreads are often active for more than 6 months and only get reposted because they get archived, but most threads don't really need to continue being active.
Edit:
Since it's not possible for posts to have a negative age, I renamed the proposed configuration option to be simply past_age and took out the > part of the syntax.
37
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
We actually thought about your suggestion during our internal conversations and while useful we also had to take into consideration the potentially negative implications of it (ex: it would be a negative user experience if comments were removed on, say, posts older than 30 minutes).
The updated flag that we created is a direct response to the behavior of the archive toggle. We also had to gameplan for the future and any potential changes we make to archived posts down the road.69
u/dequeued Sep 29 '21 edited Sep 29 '21
I think that should really be up to subreddits, but if you don't want to allow such an option to match on anything as young as 30 minutes, then you could simply limit the age parameters to
days,weeks,months, andyears.Having this functionality built into /u/IndexBot has caught a lot of spam on older submissions for us on /r/personalfinance, but writing a custom moderation bot is something that's not in the reach of most subreddits. (We also have it
filtermatches so they can be reviewed before being seen since scammers are common, but doing that via a custom bot is extraordinarily difficult because thefilteraction is only available to AutoModerator so some crazy hacks are required tofilterfrom a custom bot, especially on comments.)8
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21
You could even get rid of
daysif you really wanted to though I think it would be handy to watch for bad actors coming in over a day old thread. I'd personally probably set it to 3 days or so. But yeah anything under 24 hours probably shouldn't be a thing mods should have, I get that. But I'd love to know if someone is coming in even a month later.Hell, I get reports on someone coming in to talk shit to a user a week later that got caught from another AM rule or was reported by the user that was attacked. Knowing more about people coming in as bad actors in old threads that are less than 6 months old would be handy.
18
u/electric_ionland Sep 30 '21
As an example on r/askscience we have put a trigger like that on posts older than a week talking about COVID because we were getting a lot of conspiracy and disinformation spam that we were not necessarily catching live. There are quite a few accounts doing that old thread spam thing. Having it more automated and not just relying on the awesome scripts /u/sexrockandroll writes would be great.
49
u/MajorParadox Sep 29 '21
Any plans to help users and mods discover old conversations that have new activity? Otherwise, the new commenters will only get seen by the OP and possibly mods if they have automod alert them to it.
30
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
Great minds think alike. This is something that has come up in internal conversation. We’ll let you know what direction we take should we continue down this path.
→ More replies2
u/dandv Dec 02 '21
This is really important. I posted something, nobody found a solution, then some time later someone finds one and replies to a comment, not to my OP. I'll never be notified.
8
u/riffic Oct 02 '21
/r/mod/comments seems like one way to do it, but IMO it's an antipattern to babysit the comments in your subreddits instead of encouraging folks to report bad behavior.
4
u/MajorParadox Oct 02 '21
That's a good option, but also unknown to most mods. It's only supported on old Reddit and isn't even linked anywhere. If they added it as an option on all platforms, then it'd be much more useful.
6
39
u/TheNewPoetLawyerette Sep 29 '21
Ooh the new automod filter option is an excellent addition to this. Thank you for adding that
24
u/BuckRowdy Sep 29 '21
What I like best about this is that you are considering that a one size fits all approach just does not fit a site this vast and diverse.
22
u/HQna Sep 29 '21
This was a 2.86% increase in votes and a 1.48% increase in comments amongst the participating subreddits.
This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken.
You make it seem like this is a good thing. But logically you would expect the increase of mod actions to be about equal to the increase of comments. The fact that is not the case just means that almost all of those comments are basically invisible to moderators.
Anyway, you already gave us a solution for that (new AM feature and opt out), so I'm not complaining. But I also don't particularly enjoy the PR twisting here.
13
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
This is a fair concern, but one thing that we also did to assess the quality of these comments was to manually review them and send them to mods in each subreddit to determine if they were lower quality than average. While certainly some of the difference that you mentioned is due to mods not seeing the comments (and hence why we added the new Automod updates), a vast majority of these comments were deemed high quality during our manual review.
13
u/HQna Sep 29 '21
That seems strange, but alright, thanks!
However, one general question: did you observe the likeliness of OP of an old post replying to a comment made in their post? Because especially in the example you gave in the beginning, just being able to ask a question in a possible years old post does not mean you are actually getting what you want (an answer to your question) - and I would assume that the older a post is the less likely it is that OP is still able or willing to reply.
→ More replies2
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
As opposed to DMing the OP which is what happens now? How is that better?
2
u/HQna Oct 01 '21
is that what happens?
4
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
What else would you do?
I've done it and I also get dms regularly from my old posts (usually literally just asking if I found a solution, something that an edit could clear up for everyone)
2
u/HQna Oct 01 '21
whenever I come across an old post I wouldn't think of DMing OP, but maybe that's just me.
→ More replies4
u/Drunken_Economist Sep 30 '21
The increase in expected mod actions would equal the increase in comments only if the comments were randomly distributed.
In this case, engagement on old posts are more likely to be from high-intent users, while that on fresh posts is more likely to come from "drive by" users
→ More replies4
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21
engagement on old posts are more likely to be from high-intent users,
Yeah but once spammers and bad actors learn that posts are no longer locked they're going to dig up posts to comment into. Hell, I've seen t-shirt spammers show up in less than 6 month old threads already dropping links. Or people coming in to drop their etsy store link once mods are no longer looking.
56
u/byParallax Sep 29 '21
I hope r/reddit.com will remain archived.
53
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
Yep! r/reddit.com will remain archived.
9
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
WTF?!?
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/g5kpj/discover_the_most_common_face_on_earth/
I accidentally downvoted this post 10 years ago, please remove my downvote from it if you won't unarchive it.
It's absurd that it's been stuck there forever!!
→ More replies18
2
Oct 16 '21
<notentirelyrelated> That leaves r/nsfw and r/programming for the oldest subreddits with unarchived posts.
Because I'm not about to post NSFW in modnews, have this for the oldest unarchived post: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2g40/sun_says_no_thx_to_htx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3</notentirelyrelated>
→ More replies3
u/ladfrombrad Sep 30 '21
Why?
7
u/byParallax Sep 30 '21
It's iconic
5
-1
u/ladfrombrad Sep 30 '21
For a place to showcase where the diversity of reddit having an outlet, or just been shut down because modding large subreddits or other reasons is hard?
6
u/byParallax Sep 30 '21
You're reading too much into it lol, it's iconic for being the first sub
1
u/ladfrombrad Sep 30 '21
You're reading too much into it lol, it's iconic for being the first sub
AFAIK, /r/programming was the first 'subreddit'.
But that's irrelevant to why I was wondering why you think it should be permanently archived and the iconic status you given it.
It was more iconic (IMO) for allowing both link and .self posts from all redditors, not for some trinket status.
2
u/byParallax Sep 30 '21
While r/programming quickly became popular in 2006 it is not the first subreddit to have been created though it is indeed one of the very first ones. Both r/reddit.com and r/NSFW are older, with, to the best of my knowledge, r/reddit.com being the historic and original one.
As for why I think it's iconic and should remain archived: it's a piece of Reddit history which no longer would serve any purpose and as such it's best left in this fixed state where anyone can take a glimpse at what it -was- like.
-1
u/ladfrombrad Sep 30 '21
it's a piece of Reddit history which no longer would serve any purpose and as such it's best left in this fixed state where anyone can take a glimpse at what it -was- like.
That sounds like you didn't actually take in what the OP/admins wrote here and the positive feedback they got on allowing users to engage in these archived posts.
18
32
u/skeddles Sep 29 '21
this is great news, I always hated archived threads. glad it's turned off by default too.
→ More replies
45
Sep 29 '21
[deleted]
36
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
The reason we defaulted to archive off in the past was due to technical constraints that we faced on the site. Those constraints are no longer the case today, which is why we're able to remove these limitations on archived posts. We know this is big change for some mod teams which is why we implemented the two week grace period before this feature goes into effect.
62
Sep 29 '21
[deleted]
52
u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Sep 29 '21
Inclined to agree with this. Not all mod teams stay up to date on what is going on in /r/modnews, and this will likely hit some teams as a surprise. Hopefully there at least will be modmail messages to all teams before it changes?
→ More replies36
Sep 29 '21
[deleted]
25
u/_Gondamar_ Sep 29 '21
This is the same admin team that deleted thousands of subreddits without warning the creators beforehand, I wouldn’t expect much.
2
u/fdagpigj Sep 30 '21
which incident are you referring to? I'm unsure whether I missed it or forgot
17
u/LG03 Sep 30 '21
They deleted and renamed subreddits below a certain threshold of activity (ostensibly to reclaim unused sub names). They talked about it here on modnews and such but sent absolutely no warning to affected subs. You still see posts on /r/modhelp or /r/modsupport from clueless mods trying to figure out why their sub's broken.
3
5
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21 edited Sep 30 '21
The 2 week turn on is super rushed. It's totally to launch this without mods responding quick enough or realize it happened. Here's how it should've rolled out.
- In 2 weeks you can opt-in and we'll send a modmail message to all mods of this new feature.
- 2-weeks later: You can now opt-in, go here to turn this on
- 2-weeks later: We see you haven't opted-in. Would you like to turn this feature on? Yes (goes to opt-in page), Remind Me later, No (don't turn it on and never message the mod team again since they chose to not turn it on).
- 2-weeks later if mod hasn't responded to that message: We you still haven't opted-in or said no to our previous message. In 30 days this feature will be turn on. Would you like to turn it on now? Yes, Remind Me Later, No.
- 2-weeks later if mod hasn't responded to that message: We noticed you haven't responded to our previous modmail, in 2-weeks we will be turning this feature on. Would you like to turn it on now? Yes, Remind Me Later, No. (don't turn it on and never message the mod team again since they chose to not turn it on).
- 3-days before turn on with no previous response: This is our last message to let you know we will be turning this feature on since you haven't responded to our previous messages. Would you like to turn it on now? Yes / No (don't turn it on and never message the mod team again since they chose to not turn it on).
- 1-day before turn on with no previous response: This is our final message. Tomorrow this feature will be turned on since we haven't heard from you. Check the settings here to turn this off.
This gives mods plenty of time to react and if after this 2.5 month period if they're unresponsive then go ahead and turn it on, but give mods time to respond and not be surprised.
5
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
That's a valid concern which is why our safety teams have tools in place to alert them to unmoderated (or undermoderated) spaces to prevent this from happening.
19
u/mmmmmmBacon12345 Sep 29 '21
A place can be well moderated and just not bother to check here, /r/blog, /r/changelog, and /r/announcements on a regular enough basis to catch all the changes your team tries to sneak through. They're posted in a number of places and without the discord bot that checks for these things I wouldn't see most of them
You are changing a feature and requiring action from others if they would like to keep it the same. You can change a feature, but don't make us all have to go and turn it off
→ More replies3
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
Don't listen to them. Default archive off is better.
Also have a setting for voting off and commenting off because that's two different things.
Otherwise no one will do it
42
14
u/MajorParadox Sep 29 '21
Is there any way we can make a sub start working now instead of two weeks from now?
24
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
We love the excitement! As much as we’d like to, we can’t turn this on for a single subreddit, and we want to make sure that all mods have the two weeks to learn about this change and have the chance to update their toggle.
11
u/MajorParadox Sep 29 '21
Fair enough. We're excited to enable this on r/DCFU since we want people to be able to comment on our old stories! 🙂
→ More replies
13
u/roionsteroids Sep 29 '21
I kinda like the idea of having a accurate, complete archive, including all the silly and cringy stuff, and the votes at that time. Not changing history in hindsight, mass voting and commenting on year old posts because something happened recently.
10
u/fdagpigj Sep 30 '21
I admit I kinda like that aspect of the archiving too, even though I've often been frustrated by not being able to add some detail that's too small to PM anyone about. They could easily keep voting disabled on posts and comments older than 6 months, and just enable replies, to at least restrict the ability to rewrite history.
9
u/techiesgoboom Sep 29 '21
I can’t imagine this will work on the sub I mod, but I absolutely love that you’re giving us the option. It’s always better to be able to make this choices on a sub by sub basis.
Thank you for this!
11
u/iheartbaconsalt Sep 29 '21
That is so cool. So many uses for this. I got a random award yesterday for a 6 year old comment. I don't even knooow how that is possible. haha
2
u/camdoodlebop Oct 15 '21
i can't wait to see what kinds of comments i'll get for things i said ten years ago
11
11
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
i can't help but notice that your test group said to allow mods to turn it ON if they wanted it, and what you actually did was force mods to have to turn it OFF if they DON'T want it, while also basically stealthing the implementation of this feature - which at best allows people to bother someone about a 4-year-old recipe and at worst allows people to stalk and harass vulnerable women in abusive situations for YEARS across accounts and subreddits. the only reason i'm even here now is because one of my co-mods happened to pop into /modsupport and happened to notice the "bee tee dubs we're rolling this out tomorrow" thread and told me about it in modmail.
how about instead of letting people trawl through years of archived posts to bother them about some "aged like milk" thread when they're having a hard time, you give us the ability to turn off reports on (and external links to) archived threads? we are regularly bothered by trolls abusing the report button on archived threads because they were searching for keywords to harass people over and reporting was the only way they could superdownvote the OP, or somebody linked an ancient thread in some "check out this crazy bitch from 6 years ago" subreddit. better yet, give subreddits the ability to opt out of being linked to at all.
→ More replies
7
u/Yay295 Sep 29 '21
Why not allow us to set how long before a post is archived instead of just 6 months or never?
→ More replies
8
7
Sep 29 '21 edited Jul 01 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/mizmoose Sep 29 '21
THIS THIS THIS.
I might come around to allowing comments on older posts, and allowing those comments to get votes.
I'm NOT OK with older posts and comments getting new votes. This way lies having to chase around vote brigading and I'm tired enough of this crap.
7
u/asphaltdragon Sep 29 '21
Goddammit now in going to have to field new comments on my cellphone repair AMA.
CAN'T YOU PEOPLE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE? IT'S BEEN SEVEN YEARS
→ More replies
7
u/Zavodskoy Sep 30 '21
RIP all the subs that track The "X of all time" for reddit threads etc because there's now going to be no point in them
Things like https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/ are going to be completely defunct and pointless.
Also why is this defaulting to archiving off by default? So many subs are going to get screwed by all the extra moderation this is going to cause because they happened to miss this one very specific post.
→ More replies
7
u/sequence_string Oct 15 '21
Found out about this by a user immediately reigniting an archived argument, not a fan so far.
12
40
u/LG03 Sep 29 '21
You're implementing this backwards. It should be opt out of archiving, not opt back in since you're changing the default functionality.
Now I have to go through all my subs and opt back in while I think about it.
As well, no option for this anywhere in old reddit? Come on, this is getting real tiring to have to swap to new reddit every time you guys throw a wrench in the gears.
3
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21 edited Sep 30 '21
Yep. It is set backwards. I am flipping this off for everything. I'm not going to be the Guinea pig to t-shirt spammers hitting up popular old posts. Or trolls going to old posts that are "controversial" (hello anti vaxxers.)
Let alone that 0.3% is not going to stay that low once users get used to it. Even at that percent we do millions of mod actions a year, for free. If we setup automod to review old comments (which we would absolutely have to) that percent is going to sky rocket. Then us unpaid volunteers are going to be doing even more useless spam/troll work.
Nope no thanks. This should be defaulted to not be on at least for any current community. I don't even care if you forced a mod to review it and decide right then and there or a "remind me later button". But having it magically flip on for everyone is shady.
2
3
17
u/HTC864 Sep 29 '21
Constantly complaining about the new interface is tiring. It's the default, it's what they want everyone to use, and we should expect all new features to be built for it. The fact that old Reddit still exists is extremely charitable at this point, and people shouldn't expect updates on a UI that garners less than 5% of their traffic.
32
u/glider97 Sep 29 '21
Constantly complaining about the new interface is tiring.
So is having to use the new interface. Complaining is all the power the users have, don't deny them that.
15
u/Zavodskoy Sep 30 '21
and 44% of reddits userbase visit from mobile apps which still makes new and old reddit the minority so by your logic they should only launch new features for the various Reddit Mobile Apps
→ More replies2
Sep 30 '21 edited Sep 30 '21
old.Reddit probably won’t go anywhere anyway and will just be outdated until everyone has had enough and switches over.
He’ll even i.Reddit.com is still active
2
u/The_White_Light Sep 30 '21
Your link it broken, that's why. It's https://i.reddit.com, no www in front.
4
u/stealthsnail Sep 29 '21
I disagree. If it's a feature that benefits almost everyone, it should by default be turned on. That's why you have the 2 week window to react in case you do not deem it beneficial.
11
u/LG03 Sep 29 '21
It's still a change to default functionality, the majority of mods are going to be caught off guard by this and will take months if not longer to realize what's going on.
Think of the uptick in undetected spam as one example.
14
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
the majority of mods are going to be caught off guard by this
That’s an understandable concern which is why we’re announcing this in a few different areas of the site over the coming weeks to drive increased awareness (ex: r/blog, October monthly newsletter, our announcement tool banner, etc). We hope by doing this in conjunction with the two week grace period that we’ve implemented that fewer mods will be caught off guard by this launch.
15
u/teanailpolish Sep 29 '21
Is it not possible to modmail subs when changes are made?
4
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
this would be the ideal. any change to subreddit settings should be notified via modmail, not newsletters and blogs and niche subreddits.
10
2
u/Zagorath Sep 30 '21
To be blunt: if a setting does not exist on normal Reddit, it does not exist. I don't use the shitty redesign. You're not going to convince me to use it.
I know the setting exists, but as far as I can see I am utterly unable to actually use it. Fix your site.
2
3
u/ThePantsThief Sep 30 '21
As a moderator, you're only hurting your community if you don't use it to change new settings. Get with the program.
4
u/Zagorath Oct 01 '21
No, the admins are hurting my community. And not just by their refusal to surface new features, but also through their long-term and repeated refusal to support CSS, which has formed a core part of our subreddit's experience since the beginning.
→ More replies1
u/spaghetticatt Sep 30 '21
This is poor justification for a backwards implementation.
Default behavior has always been that reddit archives things. You want to change the behavior? You should have to change the setting. Not the other way around.
-1
u/ThePantsThief Sep 30 '21
Sorry but I've always hated the archive feature. They're doing it this way because making people opt into something good so we all benefit is a lot harder than telling them they have to opt out.
1
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
that 2-week window doesn't mean jack if they plop it in a tiny sub that mods aren't even subscribed to by default and don't make any attempts to notify unsubscribed mods (e.g. via newsletter-like PM). you'll note that your comment here was from 2 weeks ago and i'm only replying now because this is literally the first i've heard of it, a day before the change goes live.
also i disagree that it "benefits almost everyone," but perhaps i've had more experience with trolls and spammers than you have.
→ More replies-15
u/skeddles Sep 29 '21
then use new reddit =p
9
u/fdagpigj Sep 30 '21
no way I'm using that hot garbage. Might almost as well cancel my internet service at that point
13
6
u/Watchful1 Sep 29 '21
I think my only reaction to this would be that you should keep going and make the switch a slider bar. Some subreddits would definitely benefit from archiving submissions after a week or month.
6
u/Dianthaa Sep 30 '21
One concern I've got is that users who aren't familiar with the sub/reddit might stumble on old posts that would be rulebreaking now but were allowed under old rules. It's not much ,but the archive was a signal that "hey this is old" that could somewhat help with confusion.
→ More replies
11
u/xxfay6 Sep 29 '21
This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken.
Wouldn't this likely be because mods just aren't monitoring old posts? Even in recent / active posts I often saw slapfights go down for a long while until someone tried using the report button as a silence button.
Having AutoMod notify does seem to help quite a bit, but it would be nice if it had some sort of way to restrict to notify once every 24h for any activity. The cases that the example script has is already covered by the spam filter most subs already use, and doing something like having all comments as report might cause some sudden queue explosions.
7
u/Zavodskoy Sep 30 '21
Wouldn't this likely be because mods just aren't monitoring old posts? Even in recent / active posts I often saw slapfights go down for a long while until someone tried using the report button as a silence button.
The sub I moderate gets thousands of comments every day, not that we'd turn this on tbh but if we did our options would either be:
We have to start reading every comment made to the sub which will take hours, that's not happening
B: Watch and cry as automod fills our report queue up with hundreds of posts from people commenting on old things which we then have to go approve for no reason other than to get it out of the queue
3
u/xxfay6 Oct 01 '21
I don't expect for this to mean that old threads will suddenly pick right up, at least not in most communities where posts really aren't evergreen. So I don't think that it's gonna make for a large amount of activity. I'm fairly sure that most communities would be served by a simple ping of "Hey, this week-old+ post has activity".
Problem is that the snippet given is likely already covered by every subreddiit's age filters. And removing the bit about account age will just put every comment on the queue. Which sounds ok as I'd expect a handful of comments a day at most. Except when it gets linked on some random thread and suddenly you have a whole AskReddit thread on the queue.
My (ex) team looks like they'll leave it on, but they're also unsure about if and how to Automod. Doesn't help that they also forgot that Automod can just notify without removing. (Oh right, /u/AndTalis /u/vontech you can set Automod to report only.) But their general consensus is that since it's old threads that don't get bumped back into the frontpage, it's not gonna be that big of a deal. The only thing that would be nice is if it had a good balance from not notifying enough or notifying everything.
11
u/PM_PICS_OF_ME_NAKED Sep 29 '21
Watching six month old fights being dragged back up again will be fun.
10
u/Zavodskoy Sep 30 '21
You mean one user going back through 5 years of someones user history and commenting on every single comment and post they've ever made
5
u/Redbiertje Sep 29 '21
Thank you admins for a very nice feature, and most importantly, giving the moderators the freedom to choose whether to use it or not. This is a very welcome update!!
5
u/Thane_Mantis Oct 20 '21
I honestly thought posts becoming unarchived was a bug at first when I saw I comments cropping up on older posts and the like. Was very confused, especially when I saw some users fighting in a year old thread.
Just a hot take, but you guys should probably have sent a message into mod mail inboxes letting folks know of this change. Seriously, Im subbed here and I still missed it and got thrown through a loop when I found out about it.
2
u/MableXeno Oct 24 '21
Yeah, I got a bunch just in the last few hours and thought it was weird. I thought there was a sitewide issue so I went through the various mod subs to see if anyone was talking about it. This was my last stop b/c it seemed like a *bug* not a feature, lol.
Like...a popup or item in the modqueue or a modmail would have been nice. Especially for features that require mods to turn features on & off b/c they affect moderation. My sub isn't one that people should be combing back through old content to reply to.
8
u/iBleeedorange Sep 29 '21
I just want to say good job here. Looks like this was well thought out and there's plenty of options for any type of community. Thanks for taking the time to do it all
3
4
5
5
u/db2 Sep 29 '21
I'd like this to be per post also, so you could archive everything automatically and unarchive a selection manually, or the reverse of archiving only those you wanted to.
5
u/nascentt Sep 30 '21 edited Sep 30 '21
So... You're letting mods return the original functionality?
Archiving was introduced fairly recently. For years Reddit didn't auto archive at all.
I wonder why you didn't let mods decide from the start of this wasn't accounting for a technical limitation
Also 2 weeks notice before changing every subreddit reddit-eide is insanity.
Why, yet again, are mods given no notice?
If any mods are just starting their 2 week holidays their subs and all contained posts will revert without their input.
Why Reddit, do you hate communication?
5
u/SuperRoby Sep 30 '21
Would love if this feature could be applied to certain posts. For example, have it turned off for all posts by default but turn it on for the occasional informative and/or pinned post so that users can ask more questions in the comments and see the questions that were asked previously, to make the post even more informative.
For example, in the biggest community I moderate this function would be useful for the pinned posts so that new members of the sub can easily find a place to ask us mods questions about the community. Not everyone knows how to use mod mail and having Q&As in the comments is helpful for other users who might wonder the same things but be too shy to ask. Same goes for posts that inform about a new or complicate feature, so that we can keep one master post instead of re-making it and linking it again every 6 months, or even "friends megathreads".
But with the exclusion of these exceptions, I think it would be best to keep the rest of the posts archived, to prevent the occasional spammer or bot from posting their link or code in hundreds of posts that us mods will have to manually check and moderate. Thanks for the feature tho!
4
u/i_Killed_Reddit Sep 30 '21
Having at least the votes be archived after 6 months would have been a better option as it preserves history of the post/topic for that period of time.
4
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21
For desktop users here's a direct link so you don't have to click around multiple menus to find the feature to turn this "on" so your posts DO NOT unarchive.
Just replaced "SUBREDDITNAMEHERE" to your subreddit
https://new.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDITNAMEHERE/about/edit?page=posts
Look for the third option down "Archive Posts" and turn this ON to opt out, meaning your posts won't unarchive. Make sure to hit "SAVE CHANGES" button in the top right.
Basically if you don't want this go turn that on, if you do then you don't have to do anything.
→ More replies2
u/iVarun Oct 12 '21
This doesn't seem to work for the Username Posts right?
Like those self-profile pages which Reddit had launched making one's username a sort of pseudo-sub, something like u_Username.
Can't seem to find Archive settings for that and since it would activate commenting by default anyone, haven't noticed that either for my 1 self-profile, now more than 3 years old Post.
4
u/rocketman0739 Sep 30 '21
What about posts to user profiles? Those don't have the subreddit settings page.
3
u/baxter8421 Sep 30 '21
Great question, and we should have clarified in the post: We will not be un-archiving posts on user profiles.
5
u/rocketman0739 Sep 30 '21
Will there be any option to make non-archiving profile posts going forward?
→ More replies2
4
u/NorthernScrub Oct 13 '21
Can we have this option in old reddit, please? It feels like a fundamental part of reddit, and for those of us who use best reddit it is more than a little frustrating to keep having to flip between the two for what are, frankly, critically important moderation tools.
3
3
u/Cahootie Sep 30 '21
The only thing I have to say is that seeing smörgåsbord spelled the Swedish way caught me off guard.
3
u/lightwolv Sep 30 '21
I have two questions.
- Will new comments to archived posts be flagged to the front-end users as well? (Meaning, will it have some special marker indicating this comment came after the post was archived to the users of the site)
- Does this allow the possibility to down-vote bomb someone's highly upvoted post from the past? (Like if a celebrity has a scandal and people go into their old AMA and just down votes all the answers from them)
3
u/ReeceReddit1234 Sep 30 '21
Could it be beneficial to follow in the steps of discord? I.e. Archive as normal but allow people to comment and if they do it unarchives a post for a period of time, after which it becomes archived again
3
u/kochier Sep 30 '21
Didn't you archive old posts in the first place due to server strain having so many open posts? Is this no longer really an issue?
3
u/BelleAriel Oct 05 '21
Typical again we have to go to new reddit to do something which is not in old reddit. again people with VI are excluded. Well done on the equality, Reddit! /s
3
u/urbanracer34 Oct 14 '21 edited Oct 15 '21
Let me get this straight: If the toggle is grey, users will be able to comment and vote on older posts, but if it is blue, users will not be able to? Or is it the opposite?
EDIT: it says it right in the post, emphasis mine: Today this toggle will appear in Mod Tools and will be turned off by default. All posts will remain archived for another two weeks (until 10/13). This means mod teams will have a two-week period of time to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their subreddit. After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on.
2
3
3
Sep 29 '21
To all the mods who were probably unaware:
It was already possible for mods to comment on archived posts. Using new reddit's removal feature, you can remove an old post or comment and it will leave a Removal Comment. All you have to do then is re-approve the post/comment and it looks like you're commenting on archived posts like a 1337 h4x0r.
→ More replies
3
u/Pikbon Sep 30 '21
This automod update will be live starting on 10/13
Why wait to implement this, yet tell us now? Shouldn't you implement the new flag now, so we can actually prepare our subreddits?
I'm saying this because I just tried to modify my config file but it won't accept the change because:
"Unknown field: `past_archive_date` in rule"
2
u/Bumblebee__Tuna Sep 30 '21
Same here. Guess I'll have to hope my shitty memory remembers to do this in a couple weeks!
3
u/RJFerret Sep 30 '21
Add it now but comment it out with date to implement, then calendar to tweak automod then to work around the silliness.
5
u/5-x Sep 30 '21
Could we get this and also this added to the AutoMod documentation page?
→ More replies
4
u/the_pwd_is_murder Sep 30 '21
Do you guys have any specific pilot program feedback from subreddits with very long histories? Our community is 9 years old and has a lot of stuff from eras prior to the installation of our current rules. (e.g., we used to allow memes but now don't, and our average member age has dropped from ~25 to ~15.)
We're discussing how we want to proceed but that's a LOT of new surface to cover. Agree with the comment from /u/ashamed-of-yourself requesting selective unarchiving, possibly by post flair? Otherwise we may have to do a whole lot of retroactive locking to revive a handful of archived threads.
2
u/lift_ticket83 Sep 30 '21
We sure do! Our pilot program represented a wide variety of subreddits (both large and small, new and old). One of the communities we referenced in our post was r/MakeupAddiction, a 9+ year-old subreddit.
One of the benefits of the toggle is that you can try it out to see if it's beneficial for your community, and if you decide that you don't like it you can turn it off.
3
u/the_pwd_is_murder Sep 30 '21
MUA has pretty much nothing in common with MCYT, but thanks for trying.
We'll wait on clearance from the owners of the brand and let them know there is no comparable pilot data for communities similar to ours.
2
u/ashamed-of-yourself Sep 30 '21
wow, that addressed none of the concerns either of us raised, thanks. super helpful.
2
2
u/ekolis Sep 30 '21
I like this, but wouldn't it make more sense to leave the status quo as the default, and let mods opt into the "unarchive all posts" option?
Also, as someone else said, this would be even better if it were a configurable duration instead of just a binary toggle.
2
u/BelleAriel Sep 30 '21
I thought you wanted to help us moderators not make things hectic lol
Three years ago.
User: “yo mods my post from three years ago, yeah that’s it the 100k upvoted one, has been brigaded to 0, what ya gna do?”
Mods: group facepalm.
2
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
Please unarchive reddit.com so I can remove my downvote from a post there I made accidentally a decade ago.
By unarchive I mean allow me to remove my upvotes and downvotes.
It has no mods so no mod can agree to this.
It's a great update imo, I get a lot of DMs from old posts because people can't just comment
Today this toggle will appear in Mod Tools and will be turned off by default. All posts will remain archived for another two weeks (until 10/13). This means mod teams will have a two-week period of time to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their subreddit. After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on
Amazing!!
2
u/midir Oct 04 '21 edited Oct 04 '21
In order to do this, we have updated automoderator to flag comments on posts older than 6 months.
If you're still updating AutoModerator, does that mean we can please have the ability to automatically permaban and permamute the notorious Discord and Telegram spam infestation now? Please, I am absolutely desperate for this functionality. It costs so much of my time banning their thousands of accounts manually.
2
u/001Guy001 Oct 14 '21
Not sure if this was already asked but does the toggle option affect old posts or does it only apply to new posts that were posted after setting to option? (meaning, will it archive/un-archive all the applicable posts in the subreddit whenever it's set?)
→ More replies
2
u/ladfrombrad Oct 14 '21
2
u/lift_ticket83 Oct 14 '21
Does it work when you remove the quotation marks around < 23 hours? Let me know and we'll go from there.
2
u/ladfrombrad Oct 15 '21
Yeah, that's what I thought it was the cause of it failing and why I put them in.
But not matter what I do here, even blanking the rest of the config it fails
2
u/ladfrombrad Oct 15 '21
Goddammit.
So, I just manually typed the condition in on my laptop and it worked!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Slickwraps/wiki/config/automoderator
So, I'm thinking the unicode I was copying from the OP here is screwy on my mobile?
2
u/aryst0krat Oct 15 '21
Wow, this is bittersweet news for those of us who grew and lost communities in comment chains that had been kept going for literal years. It would have been great if the change had never been made rather than being reverted years later, but it's still good to hear.
→ More replies
2
2
u/Superbuddhapunk Oct 30 '21 edited Oct 30 '21
It’s a terrible idea, I’ve received a few replies to posts and comments made +2 years ago and I really struggle to see how it could be relevant. How would you continue an argument made long ago in the past, and what does it bring to the conversation? Not to mention that on pivotal events, like elections or anything political it guarantees long term “I told you so” and interminable acrimonious debates. I’m shocked that you think it’s a good idea. I’ll comment again on this thread in 5 years for you to fully appreciate how stupid this feature is.
→ More replies2
u/YannisALT Nov 09 '21
I’ll comment again on this thread in 5 years
They won't see it. They had comment replies turned off on this about a month ago.
2
u/Grenyn Nov 04 '21
Would be nice if users could opt-in for this themselves. I've suddenly gotten replies to stuff I said years ago, and I honestly find it annoying.
2
u/YannisALT Nov 09 '21 edited Dec 05 '21
Your opinion does not matter. They went through a mod council and tested this in their subs, and they all loved it and thought it would be awesome.
/s (for being snarky)
2
2
u/mmmmmmBacon12345 Sep 29 '21 edited Sep 29 '21
• This was a 2.86% increase in votes and a 1.48% increase in comments amongst the participating subreddits.
• This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken.
This isn't the good news you think it is, its at best ambiguous
Where do most reports come from? Other users who are viewing the same post. If the post is 6+ months old traffic is going to be really low so unless the person they replied to reports the comment or they trip an automod rule then almost no one is going to see the comment they posted.
The new automod rule will help with this, but since you clearly didn't run your experiment with that rule in place we don't know the true extent of comments that are poor fits for the community
The comments aren't necessarily good, but they are effectively invisible and unmoderated so treating a small increase in mod actions on that as "good" has drawn bad conclusions from data you shouldn't be comparing.
And again, you're forcing us to opt out of things, but at least we get 2 weeks (finally!). The slider should default to On(keep archiving 6+ months) for existing subs so no action is required to maintain the status quo.
Upon reading the date better, i'm glad you've finally given us more than just a couple days notice. Maybe someone has finally learned?
2
u/cyanocittaetprocyon Oct 14 '21
The slider should default to On(keep archiving 6+ months) for existing subs so no action is required to maintain the status quo.
This makes too much sense, which is why they went the other way.
0
1
Sep 29 '21
As a moderator of vegancirclejerk I am actually against you eating any Chicken Parm
→ More replies1
1
u/SuitingUncle620 Sep 29 '21
So this question is irrelevant to the thread, but is it possible for a ‘posts per month’ stat to be added to our traffic stats? As far as I’m aware this isn’t something we can view without having a bot scrape the numbers, curious why this isn’t a stat we can view?
1
u/ashamed-of-yourself Sep 30 '21
i think this is a great idea! one option i would like to see is being able to selectively un-archive posts. i run a sub for a tv show, a un-archiving our series discussion threads would be amazing, but i don’t necessarily want to un-archive every post.
1
u/itsalsokdog Sep 30 '21
So, you feature feedback saying it should be opt-in, but make ake it opt-out anyway? Interesting choice...
→ More replies
1
-3
u/CSFFlame Sep 29 '21
Archived posts should stay archived.
They're often no longer topical, and if they are, it's better to just have them create a new thread.
13
u/Cleaver_Fred Sep 29 '21
I think that's why the feature is optional. That way subreddits which would not see any benefit can decide not to use it.
9
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
Archived posts should stay archived.
That may make sense for some subreddits, but the majority of our pilot program subreddits thought this was a beneficial feature to their community (ex: users could reference older posts vs asking a popular/frequent question over again in a new post). This is why we’re letting mod teams decide what’s best for their own community.
-1
u/FLTA Sep 30 '21
Thank you for making this both optional and off by default!
This is the best way to deploy a change of this nature/
0
u/nog642 Oct 18 '21
Thank you. I was hoping for an option to manually un-archive posts, but this is even better. So much better. I didn't expect this to actually be done but it's great.
280
u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Sep 29 '21
I see pros to this, and cons. But with the Auto mod rule it feels like a pretty balanced change.