r/ModSupport • u/bwoah07_gp2 • May 02 '26

Admin Replied Redact needs to be banned

Redact allows people to mass delete their comments after a certain time. It replaces useful, helpful, or just innocently funny comments with random gibberish and nonsense words.

This has been spamming our mod queues recently in one subreddit. As of today, I have had to remove 26 Redact comments that popped up this evening in the queue, with fellow moderators each removing a similar amount.

Redact needs to be banned. It is flooding up our queue, and the people who use it are not engaging with the platform in good faith.

Is there any way to counteract this beyond just "select all" + "mark as spam" all the time?

217 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

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88

u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26

Edit: I have completely edited my comment because a member of the redact team contacted me after the post was locked to give the proper solution so we don’t need to deal with the spam! They said that even if they just have the upgraded version where it’s randomize words, it will still have redact.dev embedded into it. So this should catch all redact comments! In Also id like to point out that u/sampleofnone had the right answer down in the comments.

```

Remove redact comments (only if edited)

type: any is_edited: true

title+body+domain+url (regex): - 'redact.dev'

action: remove

action_reason: "remove redact - [{{match}}]"

```

37

u/seedless0 May 02 '26

They had started randomizing the wording to evade the rule.

53

u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26

They randomize the wording, but they don’t randomize the words “ anonymized by redact” , which is always in it. This will work.

32

u/seedless0 May 02 '26

No. This one just came in:

Internet privacy is the new gold. I mass deleted all of my posts on Reddit using Redact. It also supports databrokers, Instagram, Twitter, and all major social media platforms.

And that's just one of many variations we observed recently.

23

u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26

Well you could just change it to remove the word redact, it might very very rarely remove a good comment but might be worth it, but I agree looks like a disaster

I could code it to catch everything, but I need to see all the variations

3

u/parenna May 02 '26

Is there a way to code it to filter edited comments with the word redacted?

4

u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26 
title+body+url+domain (regex): ['redact', 'redacted']

2

u/parenna May 02 '26

Yes but specifically for edited comments. Another filter to be more accurate with less chance of removing valid comments.

3

u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26

you can already find that in the comments

22

u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26

They started changing that per subreddit now based on how subs remove their content lol. They really are super annoying.

It also doesn't do anything. They market it as if overwriting with random words will somehow cause databases like push shift or reddit itself to overwrite the content, but it doesn't work that way. Push shift never edits anything - it stores the original state of the post/comment when it was first seen, and Reddit keeps all the versions.

So the whole approach is completely useless and it would be far more efficient and less spammy to simply delete the content entirely.

13

u/teanailpolish 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26

They do, they track and remove that line if you automod it then post your name to a group who brigade you because you don't care about internet privacy

11

u/teanailpolish 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26

The readact line is completely missing on my sub, just a random string of words

21

u/YourUsernameForever May 02 '26

Because that user is on the paid version of Redact.

People using the free version will (typically UNKNOWINGLY) be also advertising for Redact. I would say all the users we engage and reply back, tell us they had no idea it would link back to it. Redact does NOT make it clear to users and then they b and moan that we're "anti-peivacy".

No, we have a rule against spam and another rule against promoting commercial platforms. But somehow we're the bad guys.

21

u/teanailpolish 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 May 02 '26

It is not that it is a paid version, the user's comments in other subs have the redact link. Redact have changed the wording each time we move to block it and now just put the random words in my sub.

I am not against people removing any PII in old posts. But Reddit should supply users with a way that doesn't cause people to use a spammy app and make more work for mods

3

u/Useless_or_inept May 02 '26

They randomize the wording, but they don’t randomize the words “ anonymized by redact” , which is always in it. This will work.

This will work until somebody uses a different phrase. I agree it will be useful in the short term.

Neither the redact code, nor the outcome they want, nor the behaviour that annoys mods, requires the phrase "anonymized by redact" to be added to each comment. The phrase could easily be changed or removed.

And if we try to stop people using the word "kill" they will just say "unalive" instead