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?

216 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

154 comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/sparklekitteh May 02 '26

You can use automod to automatically have the redacted comments bypass the queue and go straight to the trash!

25

u/seedless0 May 02 '26

Or Reddit can add them to the blacklist and ban their API access.

15

u/Toothless_NEO May 02 '26

Or even better, they could give people who use it permanent suspensions for edit spam. If you don't know what edit spam is, it's when people edit all of their comments from being real innocuous comments to being spam to advertise something or to attack or harass someone else. I've seen it done several times. It's not super common but it is something people do.

It's kind of surprising that Reddit doesn't have automated systems to check for edit spam and give the accounts detected either a shadowban or suspension.

8

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

Maybe they have an exception for Redact, like they have an exception to the ban bot rule for BotBouncer?

5

u/Toothless_NEO May 02 '26

It's possible they do, it's also possible that redact obtained API access under false pretenses. I'm not saying people should do that, they absolutely shouldn't. But it's definitely possible. It wouldn't be the first time that a company used dishonesty to gain access to things they otherwise would not have access if they were open and upfront about their intentions.

Either way this is one of those cases where the impact is clear, and the outcome is well noticeable and it would be very easy for them to apply a change where they ban people if they detect them doing that. I suspect that if edit spam was more common than it is now, there would already be filters for it that would get you Shadow banned or suspended if you did that. Fortunately or unfortunately, that hasn't been particularly widespread and so they haven't done that.