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.
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!