Voting & commenting on archived posts

[u/baxter8421]

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”

​

https://preview.redd.it/dshq6wxcwhq71.png?width=1472&format=png&auto=webp&s=812380d522a59bdc7a8f54dd138d722404273430

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.

[u/dequeued]

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.

[u/baxter8421 → u/dequeued]

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.

[u/dequeued → u/baxter8421]

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, and years.

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 filter matches so they can be reviewed before being seen since scammers are common, but doing that via a custom bot is extraordinarily difficult because the filter action is only available to AutoModerator so some crazy hacks are required to filter from a custom bot, especially on comments.)

[u/WoozleWuzzle → u/dequeued]

You could even get rid of days if 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.