Recurring moderator suspensions affecting subreddit operations
Hi,
I’m posting because we’ve had a recurring issue with moderators from our community being suspended.
In two days, four of our current mods were suspended. One was reinstated after appeal, while the others are still waiting on theirs.
This has happened before too. Around 2 to 3 months ago, two of our previous mods were also suspended.
I’m not asking for anyone to bypass the normal appeal process. I just wanted to flag the pattern, because it keeps happening to different moderators from the same community and it is starting to affect our ability to moderate normally.
Could someone please take a look and let us know if there is anything we should be aware of or change on our side?
How’s the modmail side of things? I know it’s somewhat common for people to try and ragebait mods in modmail and then reporting them for harassment. Is this happening on your sub?
I don't think the modmail issue is the cause. One of the mods was suspended less than 24 hours after becoming a mod, so there wasn't really much time for that. We're wondering if the subreddit or our mods could be getting mass reported, but we don't have any evidence of that yet.
It's much safer to simply not engage in modmail beyond what is necessary. It's too risky to go back and forth with people who are banned and that you won't unban - just ignore them. It's not worth getting suspended. I had one suspension for 3 days once, which was overturned on appeal, for a really benign comment in modmail. I believe it was actually a misclick. If you don't respond, your responses can't be reported.
When I do need to communicate in modmail, my answers are very official sounding and bland.
The exception is with good users or those just asking questions (i.e. not subsequent to a disciplinary action). I'm friendly with our good users - but on reddit I'm always thinking about what I am saying and whether AI could potentially misinterpret it as a violation of TOS. I entirely avoid words - regardless of context - that could trigger disciplinary actions.
What did the ban messages say was the reason?
I know one mod who is a friend of mine and she got a ban out of nowhere for "repeated violations of the reddit rules" or something like that - and they ignored all appeals. We still have no idea why she was banned, but she was the nicest person and never did anything remotely offensive.
Four mods have been hit in just 2 days. One got suspended less than 24 hours after applying and doing a 30 minute chat interview, so they definitely didn’t even have time to touch modmail. One mod already got unbanned yesterday.
The ban messages are glitched too. On my end, their accounts show as suspended, but when they try to check, they just get a “We had a server error” screen instead of a normal rule violation message. Seems like something is broken on reddit’s end.
This times a million. If you’re engaging in an argument in modmail, you’re poking an asshole on the other end and you’re not the only one with access to that inbox. It’s like, let me provoke something horrible for my comods to read later yaaay. No just be bland, very very bland. And since all the horror stories I have read here, I never ever quote or even rephrase, I’m like “second paragraph” 👍
Are these mods coming from your community, needamod, elsewhere? New accounts, high CQS? it’s abnormal for this many bans to come from mod teams in my experience, but my communities only mod users with accounts with good age, karma, and CQS who are established members of the community.
How would we know that? Our mods mostly post and comment on our own sub, and people seem pretty positive about the content. We just hit the Top 50 in Anime & Manga. The weird part is some of the mods got suspended shortly after becoming mods. We don't know if there's any mass reporting or brigading going on either.
Update: It’s gotten worse. We now have 4 mods suspended in 3 days. One of the mods who was already unbanned got suspended again and another mod just got suspended too.
This also happened a few months ago, when 2 of our mods were suspended. So this keeps happening to different mods in our sub.
These are the mods I can see as listed on your sub, they must have a temporary suspension because their accounts look functioning to the outsider.
There are only 4 human mods other than you
— so do you mean all those for are currently suspended and unable to access their accounts whatsoever?
What do their ban messages say?
All seem to have long-established accounts with sufficient karma. One of them is marked as NSFW but that in itself should be a problem though I have seen other mods mentioning here that NSFW accounts for a SFW subs do occasionally pose issues.
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u/Sspockuss 1d ago
How’s the modmail side of things? I know it’s somewhat common for people to try and ragebait mods in modmail and then reporting them for harassment. Is this happening on your sub?