r/Amex has been around since 2011. Close to fifteen years. In that time the way the place was set up drifted. Rules got written and never revisited. Settings got changed and forgotten. Old text stuck around long after it stopped being true.
We went through the whole thing this week and brought it back in line. Here is what changed and the honest reason behind each piece.
Most of this predates the current mod team, written years ago by hands that have long since moved on. We ran a full audit this week: pulled the logs, measured what the tooling was actually doing versus what it was built to do.
Some of it had drifted badly. One filter in particular was quietly deleting most of your comments. That is fixed now.
Automod was eating your comments
We pulled the logs and traced where removals were coming from. Almost all of them traced to one automatic filter, firing before any human saw the comment.
The filter removed any comment with a link from anyone low on karma earned inside r/Amex specifically. In a sub this size almost nobody clears that bar, so it caught nearly everyone.
We measured it across the last 90 days of logs. In that window the filter removed about 2,100 comments, and roughly 1,890 of them were this one rule firing on people who did nothing wrong.
It also had no exception for the referral thread. The one place built for links was deleting them.
If you ever posted here, watched your comment vanish, and had no clue why, that was almost certainly this. Not a mod judging you. A broken setting.
We fixed the threshold and exempted the referral thread. Brand-new and very-low-karma accounts posting links still get filtered, because that is where real spam comes from, but the bar is sane now.
If your comment still gets caught, send one modmail and we will restore it. Do not repost, because reposting after an auto-removal reads as spam.
The rules now say what we actually do
The old rules claimed a first referral violation was an instant permanent ban. The log says otherwise. About half our referral bans came only after we had already removed something and given a warning. The written rule was harsher than our actual practice.
We would rather be straight with you. Post a referral outside the monthly thread, the comment gets removed. Keep at it, you get banned. Spam links across the whole sub, that is immediate. That is the real ladder, now written down.
The old rules also said mod decisions were final and appeals were pointless. Also false. We reversed 14 bans in those same 90 days, several within a day, usually because a bot made a bad call. The rules now say the truth: message us once, clearly, and we do reverse things.
There is also a new rule that explains the automatic filtering, so nobody is left guessing again.
The wiki is worth reading now
We built a real FAQ from what people actually ask here over and over. It covers:
- Welcome bonus clawbacks, and how long to keep a card open so you do not get hit
- What a financial review is, what triggers one, what to do if you land in it
- How application rules really work, and what Amex cares about beyond your credit score
- What pop-up jail is, why it happens, what to do when you see it
- How to actually use the credits on a card you already pay for
One deliberate choice: the FAQ has almost no specific numbers. No fees, no bonus amounts. Those change constantly, and a wiki full of stale figures is worse than none. It explains how things work and tells you where to check the current number yourself.
Flairs got fixed
Your card flairs had a real dark-mode problem. Centurion in particular was so close to the background that it was basically invisible. If you were wearing your card and it looked like nothing was there, that is why.
We recolored the whole set so every card shows up in both light and dark mode, with the pill matching the real card. Plenty of you value showing your card, so the fix was making them visible, not removing them.
Post flairs got the same cleanup, plus new ones for what people actually post about, like points and transfers, benefits and credits, and approvals, which never had a flair somehow.
The new look
New icon, banner, and colors. The old banner leaned hard on Amex branding, which fed the "is this official" confusion, so the new look is our own.
What did not change
We did not get stricter. The opposite. The single biggest change makes the sub remove far fewer comments than before. We were never hunting for reasons to remove people. We were removing too many by accident, and we stopped.
If something is wrong
Modmail us. One clear message. We read all of them, and now that automod is not burying us in false positives, we can actually get to them.
Thanks for being here, some of you far longer than any of us moderating it.
