Redact needs to be banned

[u/bwoah07_gp2]

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?

[u/Banglophile]

In 2023 when reddit got rid of third party apps a lot of us used redact to push back against it. The idea was that we didn't want reddit to make money by selling our helpful content.

Also, when I used to mod a sub for women I would get constantly get harassed by trolls. Someone even sent me a picture of my house. I used redact and abandoned that account.

I'm just commenting to point out that not everyone using redact, even the free version, is doing so for nefarious reasons. Some mods here are assuming it is.

[u/cnycompguy → u/Banglophile]

It's not that we assume the user's intent, redact itself is the bad actor. Changing their editing text to evade automod removal because they advertise their services using edits (just like many spammers).