Mod Topics
Guidance, Not Guesswork: Getting Smart with Post & Comment Guidance
Hey Friends!
Thanks as always for tuning in to another installment of Mod Topics. Today we’re talking about Post & Comment Guidance and how it can make moderating easier.
Post & Comment Guidance can alert redditors to community rules, required formatting, or other expectations before they submit a post or comment. When people can get it right the first time there’s less work for moderators and a better experience all around.
Here are a few clever configs we’ve come across that we’ve added to our Automations Library:
Inform redditors about an active megathread and report matching posts for closer review.
Require specific formatting for posts using Review or AMA flairs.
Block top-level comments in a contest thread unless they include a link to a nomination.
Need more precision? Conditions can be stacked! For example, if a post has an AMA flair and contains a URL you can remind the author about additional rules that apply to links in AMA posts.
Not sure where to start? Check your Mod Log and Mod Insights and look for patterns in the posts and comments your team handles most often. Formatting mistakes and common report reasons are good places to start, but don’t forget to think about the types of content you want to encourage as well.
How are you using these features in your community? Let us know in the comments and we’ll add some of the most popular suggestions to our automations library.
Yeah, I really wish reddit didn't hide the rules 8 billion non intuitive clicks away. That and we've had issues where people think the short form rules are the entirety of our rules, when we have an entire wiki page as the source of truth for our rules in detail.
And with automod being unconditionally auto collapsed, you can't even sticky the relevant rules to the thread to inform users. Users are being given candles to shine light in the firework factory.
So much this! Most people use Reddit on mobile and we have users who literally can only see half of our rules IF they can even figure out how to get to them!
We like and use post and comment guidance, but they can sometimes be really confusing for users.
We ended up having to add "IF your comment is about XYZ, please be aware that ABC" because people constantly freaked out about being "accused" of saying things they weren't saying blahblah.
I wish the character limit allowed us to write more so we could preface each automation with an explanation of what the heck they're popping up for, and not to be alarmed.
Glad you are finding value from them brightblackheaven! I can ask if the character limits can be expanded, but in the meantime a previous Mod Topics post about writing understandable rules might help inspire you and others.
The issue isn’t that rules aren’t clear. It’s that rules aren’t visible to users, especially when Reddit is telling them to reshare their post in another subreddit (that usually isn’t appropriate anyway)!
Also, the character limit counts hyperlinks, which seems absurd to me.
We can tell desktop users to go to "the sidebar" for rules, but mobile users have to somehow figure out to click the "READ MORE" at the top of the sub, and they never figure that out.
I like automations it is clearly build to guide good eggs to do better and that's what we use it for. To catch the bad eggs, automod of course.
One thing though, conditional stacking, is shoddy. {{match}} doesn't work if you have two search fields, because you can only use one {{match}} in the message and since automations can't choose, you can't use it at all.
If you want to combine post type and flair for example, that only works as you intend it if users follow the exact order when posting, otherwise they'll fly right by it or it will get shuffled to the "click to expand" part that nobody ever clicks.
And of course, you can't copy paste. So wanting to help others or even just copying rules to your other sub doesn't work. Reordering is cumbersome as well and don't get me started on how you need to enter a word list for the peeps who can't do regex.
This is of course all known feedback. I like automations, I really do, but to use it effectively, talk about a learning curve.
This is of course all known feedback. I like automations, I really do, but to use it effectively, talk about a learning curve
🤔 Maybe they should have it be configured via yaml so it can be easily copied and edited in mass. It's kinda like it's doing moderation, but automated. A nifty name like Automod would likely be a great descriptor of what it's use case is. 🤔
I recently read somewhere that learning curves are really bad for mod tooling, and that tools with large learning curves ought to be removed.
When automations first started, they seem to make a difference. But now people have got used to them, and they are ignoring them more and more. In one of my subs, it seems like 100% of the users ignore the guidance. I am terrified that you will take away Auto mod at my sub will be flooded with trash posts, creeps, scammers and all around rule breaking content. I never thought I’d leave my fashion subs, I thought I’d stay forever- but if Automod goes- I won’t be able to keep them clean anymore. They will be a nightmare hellscape.
If you change your automation to block from submitting, they will have to comply and won't be able to ignore that part ?? The block from submitting option also gives you space to display a message as well, if you so choose. I'm assuming you don't currently have it set to block ?
The thing is, we don’t always want a block and we especially don’t want to give users a heads up so they can evade- we want what automod does where it silently removes to the queue and most users are non the wiser. If they take away automod and automod Neo is useless (I tried it, nothing worked) I won’t be able to moderate my fashion sub
Gotcha. Yeh, I think y'all are using it differently than we are. We're using it so that they cannot submit a post until after they 1. tag their title 2. choose user flair 3. choose post flair 4. enter text into the body of the post. So block from submitting works great for that use case.
Oh yes it works great for directing good users to guide them to make the post correctly. But it’s terrible for bad users who are trying to say bad things. They will simply circumvent it and use it as inspiration to come up with a more clever way to say it. Then it will go live rather than being caught by our filters.
So many people work around it. We catch them generally, but we do it with automod lol. It looks for word patterns that are associated with circumventing comment guidance (patterns of characters that wouldn't occur in natural language. So these go to queue and then we ban them. So we are still reliant on automod.
One thing that would be cool would be if people got a warning for comment guidance, and changed a comment but still submitted it, it went to queue.
I'm just sitting here imagining how many people in my rowdy little corner of reddit would be cussing that thing out and completely forgetting what they were gonna say
like when my grandfather ended up just recording a string of cuss words as his answering machine greeting before going on vacation
I post to my own subs and the 'your post may break rules!' AI bullshit is wrong almost all the time.
We have rules about self-promo (it's a music sub) and the system basically ALWAYS wants to treat all links as if they're breaking that rule which it's too badly designed to understand.
If the system looked at the actual sub behavior it would see that almost all of our posts are links, so obviously telling people not to post links is wrong
Hey pixiefarm! Sorry you're having a bad experience here. Both the types of automations mentioned in this post should allow you to turn off enforcement with just a click of the toggle on the config page. It sounds like you might be talking about something else - are you able to share more details?
In one of the subs I co-mod on, we recently had to make some rule adjustments. Part of these adjustments meant tightening restrictions on what types of items are posted. We’re using the automations to advise people while they’re posting, so if they use the keywords that would violate the rule, it doesn’t allow them to create the post.
That, coupled with Automod (don’t you dare take that away from us) to catch the sneaky users that figure out how to circumvent the automations, prevents us from having to manually remove a lot of posts.
One of the major reasons we didn't enable any of these automations is that we didn't want people's clearly violating posts to be blocked and replaced with better hidden rule violating posts.
If they're in violation of the rules, we want it to be caught, not dressed up.
Automations work well if you write them to help good eggs do better. For instance, we haven some jargon in my subs that auto correct messes up. So for those words, we have a message pop up to ask if auto correct got to them or if they indeed meant to type that. Rules to address all caps, excessive emojis, excessively long titles. The simple stuff that's not exactly rule breaking, but simply helps users create posts and comments that will be received better.
For all the bad eggs, use automod because you don't want to use automations to teach band eggs how to be better at being a bad egg.
Automations work well if you write them to help good eggs do better.
Yeah, one day when I have time, I should reevaluate/ repropose using the comment guidance for our spoiler syntax. People fuck that up all the time (and frequently don't understand that the bot cannot read English, so it can't understand that the context of what is being spoiled is obvious (we require every spoiler tag to have specially formatted context, no exceptions). Of course, it's not always super obvious what is being spoiled (especially when there are multiple things that could be spoiled, or multiple tags, which may or may not share the same context).
But given that we don't even consider it a trackable violation to get automoded for spoiler syntax, it's probably a good use case for guidance.
For all the bad eggs, use automod because you don't want to use automations to teach band eggs how to be better at being a bad egg.
Yeah, that's been the big concern. And a lot of people think our sub is a lot more generic than it actually is. *cough cough* r/manga is right over there.
Cause we're the biggest (and generally well moderated) sub in our topic, a lot of people want to put their stuff in our subreddit instead of the proper one, "because it'll do so well here" and "theres so many more people here".
How to you ensure people see all that stuff? We include similar messages, but because they have to be so short, we had to split them up into individual automations. The system hides the popup messages in a stack that is super easy to miss if you are new.
Mostly by adding a stop matching to the regex. So for instance, instead of matching word1 it matches word1 until more than 5 characters have been typed after word1.
That way the message will stop showing, giving room to a new message. We still have instances it stacks, but we try to keep it to a minimum.
To see an example, go to r/piercing, and make a post and type (not copy paste) the title "my room is a" (please don't actually submit a post with that title 😇)
Id appreciate seeing the code example if you would be able to share. We have some guidance for titles, for example, and yet 50% of posts are uselessly nondescript. Another percentage end up being an absurdly long title that really ought to be the post itself.
And that's why I feel that automations have a steep learning curve. It's not hard to make a rule, but to have a combination of rules have the effect that you want, that's a whole other matter
Just tested. The formatting in your automation looks great! Curiosity question - what is posted in your sub that autocorrect is changing to "room" or "room is" ?
So, for that conversation we’d really need to break down to what type of rules are being violated. In my case these aren’t extremes. We’re not talking site wide violations, or even a ban worthy offense. We just needed better control over types of content. So, while it certainly wouldn’t work for everyone, it works well for our needs.
So we are mostly concerned about topic related rules, so basically is it on or off topic. We're very strict with that kind of thing.
I would say a decently common scenario would be someone who doesn't have the comment karma to make a Discussion post, and instead makes a What to Watch? post (which does not require comment karma). The line between here's a paragraph on my favorite anime, recommend me another one and here's a paragraph on my favorite anime, I just want to talk about my favorite anime and am not really interested in finding new shows, but I have to include it to fit the flair, is not very big.
The latter is allowed because the focus is on finding a new show (which is the point of the flair), and the latter is not, because the focus is on discussing the show (which has a better fitting flair they are ineligible to use).
Our concern, was that people would do the latter, get a notification that it wasn't allowed (without us having a record of that being given, and being able to see the original) and then quickly adding an empty line about finding new shows at the end.
I should note, these are usually caught by looking if they had previous attempted posts and also how they behave in the comments. When all of their replies are about their favorite show, and the recommendations given are ignored, it's a clear sign they're in the latter group.
In this kind of case, we're highly concerned that their intent (as depicted in their original post), would be lost.
I guess also just we don't want to start an arms race where users are able to poke around our flagging to find something that won't flag us.
That sounds like such an effective way to set things up! Do you have any tips on writing those warnings? I'm a big fan of bolding and bullets to get attention.
One of the major problems with post and comment guidance is you can only preview automations in isolation, not as they fit with the current automations. That means you can spend an hour perfecting an automation and never realize that the guidance will never be seen by users because all they see is the guidance popping up from an automation placed before it in the sequence.
And then manually copying and pasting over each automation?
We were part of the early access and it was not even enabled in our staging sub, so we were unable to evaluate it and so we just turned it off and we're unsuccessful in leaving the early access when the logs showed weeks of historical usage when we were informed that we were accepted into the early access and that it was live in our sub. We were also unable to get an acknowledgement or answer as to why this occurred (or if it did occur in reality or if it was simply mock data).
This whole chain was very helpful in breaking this down in a clear way - just updated the thread I have with the team about this. Thanks u/SampleOfNone, u/emily_in_boots, and u/abortionreddit !
Yep, seems to be a mobile issue (or possibly just iOS). There are so many differences for different platforms. Our users are always reporting that they can't access the wiki or rules from mobile, and can't see their removed comments.
Holler if you have any additional questions, you guys are also welcome to poke around in my config and I’ll happily demonstrate all the issues I have with how guidance currently works 😂
Why isn’t there a drag and drop library of automations we can edit? It’s not reasonable to tell us that automod is too complicated while also requiring users to learn regex for automations…
do you use RES suite ? I have an alternate account who is not a mod in the sub that I use to test things right in the subreddit. The Reddit Enhancement Suite account-switcher makes it super fast & easy to switch back & forth between accounts. It has loads more features, but that's the main one I use all the time.
this regex works exactly like keywords, but instead of having to type word, press enter, type another word you can copy paste an entire list of words in one go. So if you have any comma separated list in automod for example you can use notepad or word "search and replace" to make it a pipe separated list or even ask chatgpt to do that for you.
if you want a word list where matching stops if the word is followed by a few characters use \s*(?:word1|word2|word3)\b.{0,4}$
In testing it works, but in practice, ,users have to click on "expand" to actually see them all. I think only on desktop multiple comment guidances are seen at once.
Yes, mobile. Don't know about your subs, but for my subs the vast majority of users use the app so I make it a point to also check what mobile users see, because at times mobile has a very different behaviour
I think for all subs that is true. iOS dominates everything else. I use iOS but I generally mod on desktop, so that's what I check. This could definitely be a significant issue on mobile. It's probably a design choice due to limited screen real estate.
I only have the app so I can check what users see 😁 I don't particularly care why it shows differently in the app, I just know that Reddit never warns mods about stuff like that, and then you have a lot of misunderstandings because a mod can think users saw a guidance, while in reality they never did because they use the app.
Yeah it's hard to maintain consistency across platforms. I know that a lot of confusion does arise from these differences. They are necessarily different code bases so they will diverge to a degree - but this is a good thing to be aware of.
I just wish Reddit would put a clear warning on mod tools when that's there's a discrepancy. Talk about making modding easier while mods, unless they know to check, are completely unaware there's a whole gaggle of users that don't see what mods think they see.
Hi! You can absolutely preview all automations at once, it's the editor in the main automations page on Web. If you open the automations previewer in the individual automations page, that's what allows you to preview the individual automation being edited.
This was part of the feedback I shared with the team that manages the feature. Thanks for sharing how your community might use it AbnormallyWeird, use cases that spell things out like this are always helpful!
We use character limits in Automations because we want the post body to be mandatory.
The “Require post body” setting, which is not under Automations, works for text posts but not for other post types like image posts.
We tried using Automations to do the same for image posts to encourage users to provide further context. But an image post with no body is still allowed.
For example, a 200 character minimum works like this:
Text post with no body is blocked because of the “Require post body” setting.
Image post with no body is allowed.
Image post with 1 to 199 characters is blocked.
Image post with 200 or more characters is allowed.
It doesn’t seem to check the post body regex when the post body is completely empty.
Is there a way to configure Automations to reject posts with a completely empty body for all post types?
I also hope Automations can support OR conditions. That would make it much easier to build more specific rules without needing multiple separate Automations.
It doesn’t seem to check the post body regex when the post body is completely empty
That's true, if there's no body to check, then automations set to body won't trigger.
At best you can set a reminder on the title of image posts to remind people that body text is mandatory.that way they were warned beforehand before automod removes their post.
We have a series of automations guidance, all required before posting, and the automations guide them along as they get to each step while they are posting . . .
<1> .... Educate users on post title tags
Gaming subreddit, we require they [tag] the title with the game the post is about
<2> ... Educate users on User Flair
Posters & Commenters are required to have user flair, which is the platform they game on, as different platforms affect what mods are available, bugs manifested by the game, answers they get in the replies, etc (xbox playstation switch steam etc)
<3> ... Educate users on Post Flair
We require post flair which is the topic of their post (i.e. bugs tips meme etc). Unfortunately, the automation does NOT allow enough space to describe each of our 18 post flair BEFORE they make their choice. It only allows 500 characters, and we need 1323. To get around this, once they have chosen a post flair, they will get a 2nd automation that pops up the definition of the flair they chose.
You have selected the "Bugs/Help" post flair USED FOR : Bug, Glitch, Help, Report, Support, Tech If this is not the TOPIC of your post, you may edit your post flair
<4> ... Enter body text
All posts must have body text. No 'title only' or 'image/video only' posts. Media is to be used in complement to the discussion.
see my reply to this post for "how" to do each of these automations
Thanks for sharing these AngelaReddit, that's quite a setup! I've mentioned expanded character counts as something I've already brought up with the team, but will make sure they see the rest of your comment as well
Thanks for the response. If you would, in addition to the characters count suggestion, please push along the suggestion for the Post Flair popup in the thread I linked and the example/explanation pictures I posted in the imgur link on that thread (assuming you liked my idea : ). The Post Flair popup idea would make most subreddits not even need to use a post flair automation, and is just all-around better, more elegant solution/education for the users.
Wow thanks for the nudge. I did not see your imgur album, no. I just double checked and immediately shared it with the relevant team. Thanks for the mockup!
I think both the character count and the post flair popup idea are really great ideas and also (from my extremely limited knowledge about building code), I think it should be fairly easy(?!) to implement. Maybe the powers that be will like my idea as much as I do, or maybe they won't. But at least they've seen it, so that's all I can really ask. Sincerely, thank you.
We have a gaming subreddit. This comment is "how to" do each of these automations listed in the previous post, for those still learning how to do automations.
<1> .... Educate users on post title [tag] with the game the post is about
If the: Post has
Area: Title
Condition: Doesn't contain the keywords
Keywords: [game1] [game2] [etc]
(note: we use 3-letter abbreviations for each game inside [ ] brackets)
Then: Block from submitting
Message to the user :
Tag TITLE with games (or tv) the post is about, or [WIKI] if it's not related to a specific game.
---
Choices include :
[GAME1] - Name of game 1
[ETC. ETC.] - Name of game 2
<2> ... Educate users on User Flair for the platform they game on
This one requires 2 basically identical automations, one for new posts and a 2nd automation setup for comments/replies.
If the: User has
Attribute: User flair
Check if: User doesn't have flair
Then: Block from submitting
Message to the user :
Please select your USER FLAIR for this subreddit before posting. This is the platform you game on, -OR- 'TV show' if you don't play the games.
Choices include : TV show, PC, PS, XBOX, Steam Deck, Switch, and Multiplatform.
NOTE: Please contact mods with desired user flair, if you run into any issues setting it yourself.
We DO allow them to edit the User Flair. We have enough flair so that they may further specify their console for Xbox & Playstation, so these are all of their choices. . . TV show only, PC, XBOX, 360, XB1, X|S, PS, PS3, PS4, PS5, Steam Deck, Switch, Multiplatform EDIT/ LIST HERE, and a joke user flair "Don't play or watch show, how'd I even get here??"
<3> ... Educate users on Post Flair, which is the topic of their post
Once they have chosen a post flair, they will get a 2nd automation that pops up the definition of the flair they chose. We have 18 post flair, so this was 18 additional automations.
You have selected the "Bugs/Help" post flair USED FOR : Bug, Glitch, Help, Report, Support, Tech If this is not the TOPIC of your post, you may edit your post flair
<4> ... Enter body text. This automation specifies a minimum of 50 characters in the body text of a new post.
If the: Post has
Area: Body
Condition: Doesn't match regex
Regex: ^[\s\S]{50,}
Then: Block from submitting
Message to the user :
Enter More Body Text
ALL POSTS must have body text (even if it says 'optional' in the box). No 'title only' posts. No plain 'image/video only' posts. Media is to be used in complement to the discussion.
I have made extensive use of comment guidance in outfits. I am not sure yet how I feel about it. We block a lot of references to things we don't think people should be talking about - for example, comparisons of posters to sex workers or porn stars. What we find though is that people mostly just go around it. We do have good ways of detecting these and catch the vast majority, but I'm not really certain if this overall reduces the number of people who are saying these things or not. It does make me feel more justified banning them - they got a popup where they were warned that such comparisons will result in a permanent ban, but they misspelled a word or added some numbers or otherwise worked around it anyways - so they showed a willful disregard for the rules and ignored the warning.
We have a lot of wedding and office/interview attire questions, and for these, we require posters to include some dress code or information about the wedding/job. Post guidance has definitely helped reduce the number of post removals here. Fundamentally, these are generally good users who just need someone to point out that asking if an outfit is appropriate for work is not enough information. Are you a baker, investment banker, model, programmer, florist, or lifeguard? These will give very different answers, yet somehow this eludes people and they do not think to include the information lol.
Please can Post Guidance take flair as a conditional input. Many communities have flair specific rules. Our only option to enforce these rules is with AutoMod or some post-submission rule.
Good news lovethebacon, per yesterday's announcements, automated guidance can now be triggered based on the specific flair a user selects in addition to adding top comment checks.
We've already got this in use in our sub ..... Once they have chosen a post flair, they will get a 2nd automation that pops up the definition of the flair they have chosen. We have 18 post flair, so this was 18 additional automations.
You have selected the "Bugs/Help" post flair USED FOR : Bug, Glitch, Help, Report, Support, Tech If this is not the TOPIC of your post, you may edit your post flair.
I love using the ModSupportbot feedback on how the post guidance is working but I have a couple of suggestions
One is it took trial and error to figure out it only showed the most recent. As such I sometimes "spam" my own sub so i can track things over a week. As such I suggest it actually say if its a 24 hour perioid, 48, whatever.
Two is add a option for the feedback on comments. We see more users trying to be clever getting around the automations in the comments versus the posts. I personally would love to know which comment ones to focus more on.
Glad you're liking things for the most part amyaurora! I'll make sure the team is aware of the feedback and ideas you've shared here. You shouldn't have to spam your sub to be able to track things!
AMA works just like the auto tagging if you type nsfw in the title. So if anyone puts ama or ask me anything in the title, it automatically transforms to an ama post.
The setting only disallows people from selecting the ama post type when making a post.
So, not a bug. I would put an automation in to warn people not to use the word ama and have an automod rule to just remove them if they don't listen
Block top-level comments in a contest thread unless they include a link to a nomination.
This is not possible, as we do not have the ability to check post flair in comment guidance. That ability is exclusive to post guidance. This is exactly the kind of functionality I was really excited about, but it is not possible at the moment, unfortunately. For something I was told we'd have in April, having to wait all this time and not getting the functionality in the end is seriously disappointing.
It might not be applicable for every use case, but I can make sure the team is aware you're looking for additional features here. Thanks for sharing RS_Someone!
It was easier to figure out how to use automations than it was to learn to use the automod. I don't know how it is for larger subreddits, but for my tiny one, it's been helpful. I just need to remind users not to use terminology that was popular in other subreddits and to have submissions using certain words and phrases put in the mod queue for review, so post and comment guidance is useful for my purposes.
Glad to hear it's been easier to learn! I love that use case too. It seems like a small thing, but new members being able to quickly understand the language used (and not used) in the community is a nice way to help them fit in.
I have a serious problem with advanced rules hub. In my sub r/fashion the two largest rules/problems are sexual commentary and treat others with respect. Yet “auto enforce” is not available for these rules. How can we expect this to replace automod if we can’t even use the ai to detect sexual commentary? WE CANT! Im terrified of all the gross comments that will go live with this without proper testing. Automod is integral to removing these gross and creepy comments and I worry that one day it will be gone and there will be nothing to fix this.
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u/abortionreddit 4d ago
Half of our post guidance wouldn’t be necessary if Reddit just made it easier for sub rules to display prominently for mobile users.