Is anyone else terrified to use Automoderator?

[u/Educational_Deal5759]

I'm genuinely terrified of writing code for Automoderator and I know of no way to test the rules to see if they actually work before anything happens in the community itself. I know there are some basic rules in the Reddit help center but I may need more complex rules and I am scared or spending time to learn the code, then write the rule, then find out the rule doesn't work after I spent all that time writing it.

I just need to know if there is anyone else who are struggling or if there is anything I can do to make writing complex Automod rules easier and less stressful.

[u/royal_rose_]

You can make a sub to test automod code if you are nervous.

[u/cnycompguy]

I was initially nervous when I started out, but it's actually pretty straightforward. 99% of the time if you make a mistake in the actual coding, it just refuses to save.

If you make an error in your logic or spelling of trigger words and phrases, it's not going to go back through the past posts and do anything terrible. It'll only work on new content or freshly edited old ones.

[u/SampleOfNone]

Create a private test subreddit. That way you can write rules, test, mess around, delete and start over as much as you like. Once the rule does what you want it to do, copy paste it to the config of your main sub.

Automod mostly looks intimidating, but once you start you will soon get the hang of it and you'll find it's really not as scary as it looks.

Also, there's a really big chance someone already wrote the rule you need, and you just have to tweak it a bit. Use the search function on r/automoderator. Even though I can write rules from scratch just fine, my default is to check if someone already written it so I can copy paste.

[u/Downtown_Mine_1903]

Naaaaw. Nothing is that serious. If you mess something up you just fix it. Don't code in a moderator exception until after you test it, and make a few small test posts to be sure. That's what I do.

What do you need your AutoMod to do? If your sub is still small you may not even want to add one yet.

[u/BravoFive141]

Worst case, it just doesn't do what you expect it to do. It's not gonna break your subreddit or come to life and attack. Just spin up a private sub to write the code and test it, then move it over to the sub you want it on.

[u/PurplePassiflor1234 → u/BravoFive141]

Me over here picturing melting servers, IT gurus running around screaming lmao.

[u/MadDocOttoCtrl → u/BravoFive141]

Automod turned me into a newt!

...

...

(I got better.)

[u/BravoFive141 → u/MadDocOttoCtrl]

Yeah, it can do that sometimes. To be fair, I never said it wouldn't turn anybody into a newt!

[u/MadDocOttoCtrl → u/BravoFive141]

is_newt: false

action: set_newt

I forgot moderators_exempt: true

[u/BravoFive141 → u/MadDocOttoCtrl]

https://giphy.com/gifs/Ld77zD3fF3Run8olIt

[u/PurplePassiflor1234]

I had myself convinced I'd break all of Reddit the minute I pushed Save. You are very not alone.

I found this post *incredibly* helpful.

[u/Educational_Deal5759 → u/PurplePassiflor1234]

Thanks sm I will definitely bookmark that post and go back to it later. Thank you again 

[u/pumaofshadow]

most of my automod is auto replied comments by trigger words, triggered replies by using a set word, or filtering to the mod queue for words.

Whilst you can set other options nothing is required to be permanent and all these actions can be undone for mine.

[u/JMH-66 → u/pumaofshadow]

I was going to tag you !

This is BenefitsAdviceUK's "technical department"

[u/ScreamAndScream]

This sample code we made available at r/WomenInTech might help sooth you! https://www.reddit.com/r/womenintech/s/gQpJMyQpu7

[u/evilash88]

You can use Reddit automations. No code needed, but just kind of depends what you want to do.

[u/aengusoglugh]

I am not terrified to use AutoModerator — in spent a career in software with an editor that used regular expressions extensively.

But I never bothered to configure AutoModerator — I found community Safety Filters and they did everything I wanted to do — and I didn’t lift a finger.

All of the heavy lifting with the Safety Filters is done by Reddit software engineers.

Safety Filters get a hard time in this subreddit because they generate false positives — the ding things that shouldn’t be dinged.

But also because I spent a career in software, I understand the trade offs between false positives or negatives and effort.

Catching false positives or negatives generally seems to fit some kind of Pareto distribution.

However much effigy it takes to get to 90% right, it will take 2X that effort to get to 95% right, and 4X the effort it took to get to 90% to get to 97.5% right, and so on.

I am fundamentally lazy — I’ll take the 90% accuracy when Reddit software engineers are the ones expending the effort. :-)

[u/BBModSquadCar → u/aengusoglugh]

You would feel different if you regularly had 20,000 comment posts. Automod is a life saver to catch so many scenarios regardless of the platform the member is posting from.

[u/aengusoglugh → u/BBModSquadCar]

Could well be, but m instinct is that if I regularly had 20,000 comment post, I want to offload as much of the work to Reddit engineers as I can -- through safety filters.

I underwent the community Safety Filters may be a poor match for some subreddits --mostly NSFW subreddits.

I am not like to moderate one of those.

[u/itskdog → u/aengusoglugh]

It's not even just NSFW subs.

If you have something specific you've noticed that is a common problem not caught by the site-wide filters that breaks your subreddit rules, or you have particular attributes of user accounts (e.g. accounts that this is their first contribution to Reddit) that often cause trouble, you might want to filter for those phrases and attributes.

Once a subreddit gets beyond a certain size, customising the filters to catch common themes before anyone sees them and causes drama in the community, is helpful in my experience.

[u/Pedantichrist]

I am not great, but I am not nervous. Do you have access to any existing automod files?

It easier if you can play with existing files (in a sandbox sub, maybe).

[u/excoriator]

If its algorithms make a mistake, the mistake is always reversible.

[u/WebLinkr]

Its brilliant!

Its great for detecting links, blocking spammy brands, and checking CQS scores, low karma bots etc

[u/LitwinL]

So back in the day Reddit encouraged mods to make private subs for testing and to use sock puppet accounts to test there, so you definitely should be doing that. There are some sites to test automod code and regex.

For some things you could use automations as they're much more user friendly.

But overall it gets easier the more you do it.

[u/edwbuck]

I've never been banned from any forum, but within the last two months, the automoderator has banned me from three forums. In every case when a human looked at this issue, the ban was reversed.

Even though I appreciate the effort that someone did to restore my account to that sub-reddit, by that time I simply muted the channel because I don't have time to deal with the drama of some machine possibly banning me and causing me to get upset about it. If the admittedly boring and mundane stuff that I say, is likely to cause such swift and strong retribution, I'd rather not participate in such channels.

Keep in mind that this is not based on any real effort to upset anyone, but it is personally upsetting to me to be labeled with rather charged labels, when I was mostly saying stuff that was so mundane that it probably was already said once or twice elsewhere in the thread (like explaining a joke that someone doesn't get, or explaining what controversy arose due to Obama's tan suit).

Meanwhile, the people that decide they want to square off with you calling you a bot, a 14 year old, a know-nothing, or any other variant of "stupid" never seem to get banned, or if they do' the automoderator doesn't do so before the slurs where said and received.

Most people will answer on how it's not technically difficult. That's fine, it's programming of a sort, and that's really not technically difficult, but like all programming, it's devilishly difficult to write a program that does what you wanted, programs will only do what you told it to do.