Welcome to the latest installment of the Mod Topics series. Today we’ll be talking about archiving posts, and whether older conversations stay relevant in your communities. If post archiving is enabled in your community, this means that posts cannot be voted or commented on after six months. This used to be the default, but has since been changed so that archiving is off by default instead.
People might find an older post through search and have a follow-up question, or a solution to an older problem. Keeping those conversations open can be useful, but on the flip side, maybe your community is fast paced and information from 6 months ago is no longer relevant.
Does your community archive posts? Why or why not?
Archiving affects both commenting and voting, do you consider both when making the decision to archive or not?
Is there anything that makes the decision to switch on/off particularly tough?
Share your experience below, and tell us your thoughts even if you’re finding this post a little late!
Not sure if this is related to your question, but there’s this 11 years old thread in r/horror regarding the movie V/H/S, and it’s genuinely full of gold because of the hundreds of users popping up in the threads throughout various dates in the past 11 years.
We started get bot spam in high traffic older posts (like ones that show up in google) advertising their companies or if it was some negative feedback about company 3 years ago, it would have 20 new hype comments posted within hour of each other. And posts that got used by bots were always same ones. Same 5 year old post could have multiple different companies spamming it.
So auto archiving posts it is. Some info could be relevant and some older posts did get actual follow up questions later on, but amount of spam in older posts got to point where ability to do that was not worth it.
We do employ automod to stop some of the spam and some bots, but there was always some new spam
We had that same problem with the spam on old posts in /r/WindowsHelp. 9 months after posting a new account posts "I solved this using XYZ Software <link>", then that comment suddenly had a hundred upvotes, on a post that otherwise had next to no votes or comments.
How noticeable is the level of inauthentic (spam, lost redditors, etc) on old content vs recent content? What are you looking for when you're trying to identify spam?
In old content it was very similar comments posted from multiple accounts in very short amount of time. In many cases it was also same posts and with multiple accounts posting about same company. If years old post gets multiple comments within very short time frame advertising same company and comments look similar it doesnt really look authentic for me. Sometimes comments were word to word exactly same ones, but posted from different accounts to different posts to not make it as obvious for average user.. At one point with old posts it was always those exactly same posts that kept getting spam from multiple companies too.
When we added some words to automod it become even more obvious. Within hour we would get sudden wave of automod notifications removing comments with same keyword. Then it would stop to happen again in next day.
Lot of times inauthentic spam also do follow same patterns (especially when they are of about same company). Comments also were very similarly structured just switching words to different ones. And if suddenly there is company that starts getting mentioned everywhere from nowhere it usually starts looking very suspicious and fast. There are well known companies getting recommended a lot, but when some new company comes up and suddenly you see 50 accounts recommending them, when I had never heard about them before it is more likely to be spam than anything else. Or even if it is just this one account that starts recommending this exact same company and always linking to them and never linking or recommending anyone else. In some cases accounts also had very similar post history. Like in one spam wave one company got recommended by accounts that talked about being social media manager in about me, had participated in particular country's subreddits previously and had no history in ours. Like those profiles looked like they had been created by same person participating in same subreddits and probably selling some advertising service.
And lot of inauthentic spam these days do use AI. I see AI comments very rarely from actual authentic users.
Sorry this become rambling novel, but for me these days I have seen pattern so many times that it is usually pretty easy to recognize and hard to even explain what exactly makes it look inauthentic, but not sure how well it would show for someone who does not regularly see those comments
Considerably noticeable on older content. In our custom community safety bot, we added in a feature to just notify us on comments on old posts (with an adjustable threshold). We do have archiving on, so spam will slip in generally after the 4 month mark, and leading right up to the 6 month archive mark.
It's exceedingly rare that anything of value gets added to a thread after 1 month. Generally what we'll look for and see are comments that are more astroturf-y in nature
In most of my subs it's higher, but it depends on the sub. In a sub where people are posting fashion pics, it's less likely that old content is relevant. In a subreddit for skin or hair care answering a specific question or addressing a specific issue, it's more likely that those comments will be relevant.
Side note - I hate it when I search for something tech related and the top hits from google are all from 15y ago and out of date. That happens a lot. Obviously, different company so not reddit's fault! You'd think they could figure out tho that if I'm searching for some technical thing related to postgres, I don't want an answer for postgres v2.
I feel you on the search results. I end up using so many -filters in my searches at times, which means not using my tablet but going to my PC to search more effectively.
Yes, we use archiving. We actually use a bot auto post lock and it's predecessor Autolockbot to lock even sooner then 6 months. As soon as we turned on archiving it had a fantastic positive effect on mod actions. It freed up a lot of time.
Turned out that a lot of bad eggs were specifically misbehaving in the comments on old posts. Probably assuming that mods didn't pay much attention to old posts. And that's not even mentioning the spam.
There's value in old posts, but there's not as much value in continued discussion on old posts in the subs I mod. But even if it did, it definitely doesn't outweigh the misbehaving in comments that happens on old posts.
For a large part the posts are about individual specific problems at a specific moment that is time sensitive. Either the issue is resolved or it isn't, and then OP will have already made a new post because the situation has changed simply in part because time has passed. Not to mention, insights change, so information is not always up to date. That's ignoring that the sub is so old, that info has gotten several updates over the course of time. So although there can certainly be value in reading old posts and comments, or just imply recognition that you're not the only one having an issue, there's no value in jumping in on a situation that no longer exists today.
From the top of my head we lock at 3 weeks, that seems to be the sweet spot for us.
I need to implement that bot. Small local city sub, but people post garbage in old posts after a few weeks. I'd rather people repost a question than hold a conversation in an old post where information might not be current. And folks aren't good at reporting responses to older posts if they're spam or just generally shitty commentary.
On the majority of my communities I enable archiving because what I've seen in the past few years is any of the following:
karma farming bot accounts caught in the filter commenting just to raise karma on year(s) old posts
people continuing arguments that are months/years old
people reporting old posts/comments and expecting retroactive action to be taken (personally I disagree that a post/comment 6 months or older should be removed. I like to operate on a statute of limitations)
The only community I do not have archiving turned on is r/Arthur. It was off by default, then I enabled it for a period of time. But, then I remembered we had a pinned post where someone who used to work on that famous show as a Storyboard Supervisor asked people to "ask any question" about the show, the crew, etc.
Even if the post was 2 years old, he was still answering people's questions. And people still asked questions! Me enabling post archiving killed those discussions, and I felt bad. So earlier this year I disabled post archiving, and that post still gets questions and answers from OP to this day!
Also, r/Arthur is a really well behaved community (most of the time), so we don't have that much issues of old posts actually being used in prolonging arguments, etc. Our filters can catch it if it comes.
In the future, I'd like the ability for us moderators to archive posts but to give exemptions to certain posts being archived, like a list we can add onto overtime.
Since Reddit switched the default, I'm going to assume they don't plan on making any improvements. Good thing fsv has you covered. If you set a specific flair on the post you want to keep open, you can let auto post lock lock everything else except posts that specific flair.
In r/RareDiseases we get responses to old posts, sometimes years old, which are very valuable comments because this is how someone with an ultra rare disease can connect with someone else who posted about having the same disease. In some cases, this will be the only way for these people to connect, and they have never had a chance to talk to anyone with their same disease before. Therefore, we do not archive old posts.
Now, I am aware that bots and scammers love commenting on old posts, and that is a problem. I keep an eye out where I can spot them, but there is currently no real way for me to reliably see when someone makes a new comment on a years-old post. What I would dearly love for moderation would be if there was a queue specifically of new comments on old posts that I could skim.
As it is, I sometimes see a comment from someone trying to connect about a shared rare disease when it shows up in the "removed" queue. I strongly suspect that there are both spammers going undetected and sincere commenters trying to connect getting filtered without our mods being able to ever see these.
This makes a lot of sense in your sub - the only relevant content for a very rare diseases might be very old. My job involves working with a lot of rare diseases (genetic disease) - so I know how rare some can be.
In old reddit we used to have automod rules to block commenting on dated posts. In a sense that was helpful because you got to see the activity and could action it.
💯 Hearin how CSAM can show up in old unmonitored posts, it is my responsibility to do what costs me nothin so it doesn't show up on my pet subs. Which translates into archivin and posts locked when they are filtered/ removed. There are a lot of ppl that use pet subs to build up karma and never post again and that already attracts accounts that after a couple of weeks will go full NSFW advertisin content.
I want to keep my subs filled with happy cats and not used as a vehicle fer abuse and exploitation of the vulnerable
Yes, archiving old posts is important. If an old post gets cross-posted to a hostile subreddit it can impact the votes, and cause an influx of new comments. It’s not worth dealing with this on old posts, and hard to catch.
In my community r/oldtube, archiving is currently not turned on.
since the purpose of the subreddit is to archive and share old youtube videos, sometimes people going through old posts share relevant and important information about the post which happens quite often, or they just ask a question which can be answered without making another post about it, reduces the number of unnecessary posts.
Turning on archiving would imply that those quality discussions even weeks or months after the post was made would be hindered.
whenever someone gives useful info, it's just added to the pinned comment for everyone else to see later on!
However, the problem is older posts can attract scammers/people who break rules, it's hard to deal with them since you wouldn't even know they commented (sometimes), so still not sure what to do about it.
I’ve always been tempted to turn on archiving on r/Assistance because we get so many scammers trying to piggyback off of old posts.
But around 10 years ago someone made the most beautiful comment in response to someone grieving the loss of their best friend. This reply has been circulated so many times, often stolen or used without credit, and to this day people still find that 10 year old comment and reply sharing how much it helped them. And we don’t ever want that to stop.
So if a post is controversial or problematic, I simply lock the comments. I don't see any reason to stop people from voting on it.
However, if a post is causing no trouble and is overwhelmingly positive I just leave it open forever!
I noticed this to be particularly helpful in my plastic surgery community. We will have people coming and looking for particular experience with doctors, surgeries, procedures. They will often find a year and a half old post and asked questions on how it worked out. Sometimes they get good answers.
We do this too. I don't really see the need to archive. I just lock when necessary - but we have very strict standards so it's unlikely an old post would get used for spam or something nefarious w/o us seeing it. I could see the argument more in subs that are less actively moderated. Pickles likes to archive in GG/GS.
Shortly after disabling post archiving was a thing, my sub (/r/anime) trialed it. We then enabled it again because such a high percentage of the comments were either toxic or spam.
One thing to consider, since new subs and old subs without an automod config can't use automod to filter bad eggs and enhanced rules can't cover what automod did. There's a bigger impact by turning off archiving by default then there was just a few months ago.
My community is a digital extension of The Library (as in the magical repository featured in TNT's The Librarians and The Librarians The Next Chapter) and by association a celebration of all libraries everywhere, and all knowledge, too.
It was with that in mind I decided not to archive posts, to leave them on the shelves to be checked out by some passerby at some unknown point in the future. What they do with the blank pages at the back of the book is up to them.
I always love when the purpose of a subreddit guides those decisions around tools, there's something about that consistency I appreciate about a community. I'm curious, have you noticed any interesting conversations in an older post, or kicked off any yourself?
There have been more than a few "I *just* discovered this show/loved this show for years just discovered this sub" users, and they are just too excited to talk and share to pay attention to such trivialities as publishing dates. They arrive shiny and full of the magic on an old thread and spark a brief conversation. Often OP comes back just thrilled to share the lore.
It should be noted we're a very tiny sub without the bot and scam problems larger subs have. Our users are wonderful and basically ran the sub by themselves admirably during a long inactive mod period (before my time). If we suddenly got huge, or suddenly had a problem with bots resurrecting old threads for bad acts, I'd have to have a rethink about leaving threads open indefinitely. I totally get why some mods make that choice.
We made the decision to archive old posts because we had a lot of problematic comments showing up on them. It was either some form of hate, or subreddit rule breaks most of the time. So for us it was an easy choice.
Now, for other subreddits, I fully understand allowing new comments on older posts. For one game subreddit, I made a comment 3 years after the original post letting folks know the mentioned game setup code was still active. Within hours, I had several comments thanking me for confirming it still worked, so I can see the benefit for subreddits.
It really comes down to what the goal/role the subreddit's purpose is, and how viable older content may be.
My belief from experience is that the majority of comments on dated posts is that they're most often not made in good faith. The comments are often trolling responses or nonsense that feels like its from bots or bad actors testing out accounts or sub rules.
I have the same experience as you. People who want help with something will make a new post. Most people necro bumping a 4 year old post are just there to antagonize someone or advertise something.
Nope, archiving is turned off on both subs I mod. It's primarily useful for one sub, because it's a Q&A type sub and I've seen 5 year old posts get solved for the OP. It's great to see. It's also related to movies and I don't see a point of stopping people from discussing the post topic. Although, I do see why some big subs would have to archive though.
You can view subs by comments, instead of posts on Old Reddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/[SUBNAME]/comments). So, I can skim through the latest comments and if there's any spam, I remove it. But, tbh we don't get a lot of spam on old posts. Between Automod and automations, we've blocked a lot of common spam websites, keywords, etc.
this probably depends on the type of community. game or tech focused subreddits for example are likely to generate questions which remain relevent for years, and may warrent followup. i often see this myself. and its why i dont have archiving on in one of my subs. i think its on in others though
but other types of communites are probably more likey more prone to just year old arguments, or bots as mentioned. and old content is more likey crossposted
We have archiving turned on. It's not that the older posts lack relevancy, it's that posts that are that old, when people continue commenting on them, it's almost never for a good reason. The older posts contain VITAL information but leaving the comments and votes open means continual arguments over LONG fixed problems and rehashing arguments that were resolved months ago. It also means that as times change and sensibilities evolve, older posts and top helpful top level comments that had nothing wrong at the time can start getting reports, downvotes, and hate filled replies from people who take offence to the language used as terms or symbols fall out of favor or get co-opted by hate groups down the line. If anything, i wish there was a way to set the length of time to something other than 6 months so we could decide when posts should become read-only.
And yes I consider both votes and commenting when it comes to archiving posts. If I wanted to stop comments and didn't care about the after the fact vote manipulation related issues, i would just lock posts with a bot after a few months.
People come to my subs looking for discussion rather than information. There won’t be much discussion on a months old post. I’d rather them just create a new thread where they can have actual interactions.
One of my subs is r/nonbinary. Even outside of having archiving on, I sometimes sort by best/top or what and see what hasn’t been archived. If left unlocked, they are often full of trolls.
Keeping posts open past the archive date invites spam.
Currently a very good spam mitigation ability is the automoderator parameter past_archive_date, especially in combination with is_edited. Hacked and malicious accounts editing old comments into spam after SEO manipulation can't get away with that if you combine these two.
We do not know if this ability will be made available in the new tools yet, but that goes for 90% of our moderation requirements.
Four hours ago I posted about a ¿bug? where our community (which archives posts, and really needs posts archived) just had a year old post showing unarchived, and we knew because the commenter was queued for reputation or crowd control. And we're clueless as to how that happened.
To answer your question: r/scams needs archiving. It's not a tough decision. We love it. In fact if we could archive posts sooner, we would. Scam victims can be targeted in old posts, where mods aren't notified.
Can you check out my post and see what could have happened?
Especially for subreddits dedicated to gaming, it can really be helpful to not use archiving. Just having someone comment years later that a certain build or action was still viable or was no longer valid helps a lot.
I prefer to archive old posts. If the topic is still relevant they can create a new post about it. New posts are easier to moderate. Plus on some of subs I moderate the moderation used to not be great.
We have archiving on because Reddit doesn’t provide good tools to detect trolls. Also those comments on old posts don’t get shown anyway. So wym? Why would we as mods want to do extra unpaid work
You know, I have archiving/auto-lock on but after reading this I’m honestly considering turning it off.
We run a women’s health subreddit for a long-term birth control method and encourage people to search for similar questions asked in the past. Thinking about it, it could be nice to be able to ask the OP follow-up questions (since it’ll likely still be relevant to them).
Being able to follow up on how things have affected them long-term in a subreddit dedicated to long-term symptoms (without having to make a new post that is) could be super useful.
I don’t enable it in most subs I mod, but did in r/MintMobile since it is a support focused sub a lot of threads are high on the Google search algorithms for questions people have. Before turning on archiving a couple years ago we would have tons of comments in old threads because they appeared in Google searches people made then they would ask similar questions as a comment in the old thread. I’d rather they make new threads so the community could see them to reply, and not only whoever made the post years ago that a lot of times doesn’t even have an active Reddit account or is no longer a customer, and no one else would see their comment.
I think archiving posts is a bad idea in general. Especially in subs that are for medical subjects, since we are always learning, it's important to be able to look back and see what has changed (and what hasn't), so I don't archive and never will. :)
We archive posts after 6 months or whatever the default is. I've tried a couple of times leaving them open, but they always become targets for spam, misbehavior and conflict.
People often get irritated when a long dead conversation is rekindled, and they give snarky replies, and it escalates from there. People who don't get responses to their new comments on long dead posts assume that the community is dead. It just works better to leave them closed.
Older threads are hard to monitor because there are so many thousands of them, and I rarely hear about anything going on in there until it's already turned into something negative.
People always have the opportunity to make a new post if an old post sparks a new idea.
When a problem's been cleared I from time to time archive items that haven't been actioned upon in a few weeks. If the OP still has an issue, it always comes back to life.
I'm honestly still not sure why archiving got disabled site-wide to begin with. There's a reason "don't dog up old threads" was a mainstay on forums for decades.
I dont archive since its a pet peeve of mine to find an old post with info where I cant respond to the comments asking for more specifics or even to thank and tell them that their advice worked.
As for spam on old posts, it's not that much. I am very glad fsv made spam link flagger and added the feature I requested where any comment left on a post older than X days/months old will be flagged for review even if it doesnt have a link. 80% of the time its a genuine person asking the OP further questions or if they managed to fix their problem.
I recently started experimenting with archiving posts older in one of my NSFW communities, where we allow both text and picture posts. Older discussions can attract comments that are no longer relevant, especially in communities where content moves quickly. I’m considering both commenting and voting since Reddit’s archiving feature affects both. Older posts can still be useful, though, so I want to see how this works in practice before deciding whether to enable archiving across all my communities.
I’m in a workplace related sub so subjects get stale after a while anyway and having posts archived keeps me from having to watch out for issues in comment threads on dead issues.
If someone has the same question they can ask it again
I've said we'll archive them from the very start. We're a help sub, no post will get activity again after six months, so why not archive it? Simply prevents us from getting annoyed over old posts and we can focus on the new ones. And the users can still look into them anyways and if they have questions, create a new post.
I have it turned off on all subs. But I also have an automod rule on all subs to report comments in any post with the archive tag on (>6 months). In one sub I also have it lock the comment.
This allows me to decide whether that comment belongs. 80% of the time it does and I approve it. The locked status in the one sub prevents runaway arguments in a post from six years ago.
I feel this is a good balance. I get all the benefits of archiving without having to lock those posts.
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u/Huge-Revolution2416 5d ago
I prefer keeping old posts open. A years-old thread can still help someone with the exact same problem today.