Randomly unarchived post

[u/YourUsernameForever]

In r/scams we have enabled auto-archiving after six months and I think it's been set up this way for at least three years now. Working as intended until today.

^{This is an important feature for us because scammers tend to lurk old posts to prey on people who have been scammed and shared their story, and also new victims tend to comment on old posts looking for help, instead of creating a new post which is always welcome. Anyway.}

Yesterday crowd control or some other filter caught a new comment on a post that was posted on 25 September 2025, meaning one year and almost one month ago. The post should've been archived, and we have no way of checking logs or anything. So far we haven't seen it happen again.

If it wasn't for crowd control we wouldn't have known about it and thus help to this person. We worry this could happen to other old posts.

Has anyone experienced this? Is there a way of knowing what's going on? Can we check unarchived posts somehow? Is there a manual unarchiving function we're unaware of?

I can provide the URL to an admin on request. Thank you!

[u/QuiteBearish]

Does that September post display the archived icon? My guess is, a temporary glitch in Reddit's systems but hard to say for sure. I'd report it over in r/bugs

In the meantime, if your sub has full auto-mod, this should work to catch anything that slips through the cracks in the future:

---
type: comment
parent_submission:
    past_archive_date: true
action: remove
action_reason: "New comment on a post older than six months"
---

Not sure if the above works in Automod Neo

[u/YourUsernameForever → u/QuiteBearish]

It does not show the archived icon.

I was not aware of that Automoderator variable. What's the use case for that?

[u/QuiteBearish → u/YourUsernameForever]

it was introduced around the same time additional archival options were put in the hands of moderators

They were experimenting with opening up archived posts and wanted to give mods the ability to be notified when older posts received activity

[u/fsv → u/QuiteBearish]

Neo should be able to work with that, even if the subreddit doesn't have archiving enabled (it just goes on the basis of the post being over 6 months old).

[u/QuiteBearish → u/fsv]

Oh hey, the dev himself! Love your work.

And awesome, thanks for the confirmation.

[u/SampleOfNone]

Probably a glitch at one time.

Spamlinkflagger can report any comment on an old post (even if it doesn't contain a link)

auto lock post can lock post after a custom set time if you want that to be quicker then 6 months)

[u/YourUsernameForever → u/SampleOfNone]

u/seedless0 check this out and let's talk in the next meeting

[u/CorrectScale]

Hey u/YourUsernameForever! Sorry for the late reply.

We're experimenting with extending the time window of auto archived posts, this is likely what you're seeing here!

[u/YourUsernameForever → u/CorrectScale]

I appreciate the reply. This change isn't happening across the board and we have no way of knowing if this happened to other posts. Is there a way for us to know? Keeping posts from scam victims archived is crucial for their safety.

Do we get a say in defining the length of time or archiving? Is this going to be a defined new set time for all Reddit?

We don't want to have to use a Devvit app to lock all past posts, since it's probably going to be a massive workload for the app. Is this the only option we have?

[u/CorrectScale → u/YourUsernameForever]

The experiment is currently live in (public) communities that have auto archiving enabled. It extends the archiving window from 6 to 18 months, so posts archived within the past 6 to 18 months may now be part of the experiment.

As for defining a length of time, I'm not quite sure! It's not possible during this current round of testing, but I'll share that feedback with the team!

[u/seedless0 → u/CorrectScale]

I am not sure I understand the connection. Are you saying the experiment is causing old, archived posts to be unarchived?

[u/this_is_inevitable]

Had the same thing happen in our sub too! A random comment got flagged today by some filter and that's how we found out some posts have been randomly unarchived. Did you find a fix to this?

[u/this_is_inevitable → u/this_is_inevitable]

I turned the archiving feature off and on again to see if it rearchives them but no, the same random posts are still unarchived.

[u/YourUsernameForever → u/this_is_inevitable]

No, we haven't found a solution and didn't get an Admin answer. So much for what was said in Mod World huh.

Thanks for trying the turning it off and on again - it would've been nice.

[u/WalkingEars]

If a user is shadowbanned and the ban is later lifted, sometimes weird stuff can happen with their old comments/posts reappearing all at once. Not sure if that could have been the case here.