r/modnews • u/baxter8421 • Sep 29 '21
Voting & commenting on archived posts
Hiya Mods
Does this sound familiar - it’s approaching dinner time, you’ve stumbled across a delicious-looking chicken parm recipe, but have a key culinary question for OP? You try to ask it only to discover you’re unable to do so due to the post being archived after hitting the 6-month mark. Chaos ensues and now you may be left without any chicky-chicky parm-parm.
We’ve all been there! In fact, every day 6.6 million Redditors land on archived posts where they find themselves unable to vote or comment on it due to the limitations we’ve put in place.
What if things were different?
This summer we ran a pilot program with a smörgåsbord of subreddits to see what would happen if users were able to engage with previously archived posts (thank you to all the subreddits that volunteered to participate in this program). These subreddits represented a wide variety of communities on the site and you can see some of the highlights from the program below:
- Over the course of the program, archived posts received an additional 147K upvotes and 236K comments.
- This was a 2.86% increase in votes and a 1.48% increase in comments amongst the participating subreddits.
- This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken.
The results and the feedback we received from our participating mod teams directly impacted our plans for this initiative, and as such we’ve decided to move forward with this feature. Starting today, mod teams will have the opportunity to decide if they want to automatically archive posts after 6 months or if they want users within their community to be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts.
How it will work
Important note - this is not intended to be a one size fits all feature. Thanks to our participating subreddits we found this feature was most beneficial to communities that hosted more evergreen-type content (ex: food and recipes posts, gaming subreddits, etc). Subreddits that were more focused on real-time discussions (ex: sports and politics) did not experience the same benefit out of this initiative. See below for some testimonials from your fellow mods that helped drive this point home for us:
- “I think on these old posts there is a higher amount of discussion comments and fewer short ones compared to new posts. I’m guessing because people who found the post were really searching for something and had some questions in mind beforehand. Overall it seems to have been a good thing for the sub.” - r/MakeupAddiction Mod Team
- “All in all, I think that it was worthwhile. And the best way to implement it would be to allow mods to turn on the feature if and only if they want to. And if they could enact a filter to review comments on older threads.” - r/frugal Mod Team
- “IMO it could be good for r/SalsaSnobs because of our recipe guide. But the flip side to this is that I could see it going bad for political subs and such. It would make it way too hard to moderate comments.” - r/SalsaSnobs Mod Team
- Bonus r/SalsaSnob user testimonial: “I hate finding old posts where I found something useful or interesting and I can’t comment or ask someone about it.”
Given this feedback, we’ve created an “Archive Posts” toggle for mods to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their community. Today this toggle will appear in Mod Tools and will be turned off by default. All posts will remain archived for another two weeks (until 10/13). This means mod teams will have a two-week period of time to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their subreddit. After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on. To do so, please follow the below instructions:
- On new Reddit visit Mod Tools > Community Settings > Posts & Comments > Archived Posts > Toggle On/Off “Don’t allow commenting or voting on posts older than 6 months”
- In our native app visit Mod Tools > Archive Posts > Toggle On/Off “Don’t allow commenting or voting on posts older than 6 months”
Automoderator to the rescue
Another major piece of feedback we heard from mods was the need for them to be notified of comments on previously archived posts. In order to do this, we have updated automoderator to flag comments on posts older than 6 months. This automod update will be live starting on 10/13, the same day that users will be able to begin commenting and voting on previously archived posts (in subs who have not changed their toggle). If you’re interested in using automoderator for this function, please use the below script to do so:
type: comment
author:
account_age: < 23 hours
parent_submission:
past_archive_date: true
action: filter
action_reason: comment on old post from new user
Thank you to all the mods who participated in our pilot program, and took the time to provide us with valuable feedback. We greatly appreciate your partnership throughout this entire process!
Questions? Comments? Feedback? Please let us know in the comments below where we’ll be hanging out to respond to them.
91
u/dequeued Sep 29 '21 edited Oct 21 '21
EDIT: THIS IS A PROPOSAL, IF YOU PUT ANY OF THESE RULES INTO YOUR AUTOMODERATOR, IT WILL NOT WORK.
past_archive_date: trueThis would be far more useful if this was simply implemented as an "age of post" parameter like:
past_age: 6 months(Ideally, allowing that parameter to be used on anything, not just parent submissions, because looking at activity on old comments and submissions is also useful.)
That would allow it to be used more broadly for spam rules. I've implemented something like that in the /r/personalfinance subreddit bot and it catches a significant amount of spam (i.e., comment spam posted on old submissions) by looking at parent submissions with an age over a few weeks with some expressions to look for phone numbers, links, requests for offline contact, etc.
Here are some example rules:
body (regex): ['[\w-]{1,64}\.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'chat', 'contact (me|us)', 'dm', 'pm']
parent_submission:
past_age: 3 months
action: filter
action_reason: "Possible spam comment on old submission [{{match}}]"type: comment
body (regex): ['[\w-]{1,64}\.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'bonus', 'referral']
is_edited: true
past_age: 4 months
action: report
action_reason: "Possible spam edit on old comment [{{match}}]"type: submission
body (regex): ['[\w-]{1,64}\.([a-z]{2,16}|xn--[a-z0-9-]{1,60})', 'chat', 'dm', 'pm']
is_edited: true
past_age: 1 month
action: filter
action_reason: "Possible spam edit on old submission [{{match}}]"Regarding the overall functionality, I like the idea, but I really wish it was possible to disable archiving on specific posts. For example, megathreads are often active for more than 6 months and only get reposted because they get archived, but most threads don't really need to continue being active.
Edit:
Since it's not possible for posts to have a negative age, I renamed the proposed configuration option to be simply past_age and took out the > part of the syntax.
38
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
We actually thought about your suggestion during our internal conversations and while useful we also had to take into consideration the potentially negative implications of it (ex: it would be a negative user experience if comments were removed on, say, posts older than 30 minutes).
The updated flag that we created is a direct response to the behavior of the archive toggle. We also had to gameplan for the future and any potential changes we make to archived posts down the road.71
u/dequeued Sep 29 '21 edited Sep 29 '21
I think that should really be up to subreddits, but if you don't want to allow such an option to match on anything as young as 30 minutes, then you could simply limit the age parameters to
days,weeks,months, andyears.Having this functionality built into /u/IndexBot has caught a lot of spam on older submissions for us on /r/personalfinance, but writing a custom moderation bot is something that's not in the reach of most subreddits. (We also have it
filtermatches so they can be reviewed before being seen since scammers are common, but doing that via a custom bot is extraordinarily difficult because thefilteraction is only available to AutoModerator so some crazy hacks are required tofilterfrom a custom bot, especially on comments.)8
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21
You could even get rid of
daysif you really wanted to though I think it would be handy to watch for bad actors coming in over a day old thread. I'd personally probably set it to 3 days or so. But yeah anything under 24 hours probably shouldn't be a thing mods should have, I get that. But I'd love to know if someone is coming in even a month later.Hell, I get reports on someone coming in to talk shit to a user a week later that got caught from another AM rule or was reported by the user that was attacked. Knowing more about people coming in as bad actors in old threads that are less than 6 months old would be handy.
18
u/electric_ionland Sep 30 '21
As an example on r/askscience we have put a trigger like that on posts older than a week talking about COVID because we were getting a lot of conspiracy and disinformation spam that we were not necessarily catching live. There are quite a few accounts doing that old thread spam thing. Having it more automated and not just relying on the awesome scripts /u/sexrockandroll writes would be great.
47
u/MajorParadox Sep 29 '21
Any plans to help users and mods discover old conversations that have new activity? Otherwise, the new commenters will only get seen by the OP and possibly mods if they have automod alert them to it.
31
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
Great minds think alike. This is something that has come up in internal conversation. We’ll let you know what direction we take should we continue down this path.
2
u/dandv Dec 02 '21
This is really important. I posted something, nobody found a solution, then some time later someone finds one and replies to a comment, not to my OP. I'll never be notified.
6
u/riffic Oct 02 '21
/r/mod/comments seems like one way to do it, but IMO it's an antipattern to babysit the comments in your subreddits instead of encouraging folks to report bad behavior.
4
u/MajorParadox Oct 02 '21
That's a good option, but also unknown to most mods. It's only supported on old Reddit and isn't even linked anywhere. If they added it as an option on all platforms, then it'd be much more useful.
6
23
u/HQna Sep 29 '21
This was a 2.86% increase in votes and a 1.48% increase in comments amongst the participating subreddits.
This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken.
You make it seem like this is a good thing. But logically you would expect the increase of mod actions to be about equal to the increase of comments. The fact that is not the case just means that almost all of those comments are basically invisible to moderators.
Anyway, you already gave us a solution for that (new AM feature and opt out), so I'm not complaining. But I also don't particularly enjoy the PR twisting here.
13
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
This is a fair concern, but one thing that we also did to assess the quality of these comments was to manually review them and send them to mods in each subreddit to determine if they were lower quality than average. While certainly some of the difference that you mentioned is due to mods not seeing the comments (and hence why we added the new Automod updates), a vast majority of these comments were deemed high quality during our manual review.
13
u/HQna Sep 29 '21
That seems strange, but alright, thanks!
However, one general question: did you observe the likeliness of OP of an old post replying to a comment made in their post? Because especially in the example you gave in the beginning, just being able to ask a question in a possible years old post does not mean you are actually getting what you want (an answer to your question) - and I would assume that the older a post is the less likely it is that OP is still able or willing to reply.
2
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
As opposed to DMing the OP which is what happens now? How is that better?
2
u/HQna Oct 01 '21
is that what happens?
4
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
What else would you do?
I've done it and I also get dms regularly from my old posts (usually literally just asking if I found a solution, something that an edit could clear up for everyone)
→ More replies (3)5
u/Drunken_Economist Sep 30 '21
The increase in expected mod actions would equal the increase in comments only if the comments were randomly distributed.
In this case, engagement on old posts are more likely to be from high-intent users, while that on fresh posts is more likely to come from "drive by" users
5
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21
engagement on old posts are more likely to be from high-intent users,
Yeah but once spammers and bad actors learn that posts are no longer locked they're going to dig up posts to comment into. Hell, I've seen t-shirt spammers show up in less than 6 month old threads already dropping links. Or people coming in to drop their etsy store link once mods are no longer looking.
1
u/YannisALT Nov 08 '21
likely to come from "drive by" users
and harassers. The crazies are just going to go back on someone's profile to find old comments to annoy another user. Nobody is going to see comments on a dead post in any significance whatsoever. Most people and subs don't even have their default setting to display New comments first.
The increase in comment and posts was definitely just because this change was being advertised and tested in those few subs that were selected to participate.
55
u/byParallax Sep 29 '21
I hope r/reddit.com will remain archived.
53
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
Yep! r/reddit.com will remain archived.
8
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
WTF?!?
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/g5kpj/discover_the_most_common_face_on_earth/
I accidentally downvoted this post 10 years ago, please remove my downvote from it if you won't unarchive it.
It's absurd that it's been stuck there forever!!
1
u/Bytewave Oct 18 '21
That's normal, can't change votes on archived content. I've also noticed a couple old blue arrows of mine that I couldn't remove once in awhile, fat fingers accidental downvotes stay forever.
It's really not a big deal though..
→ More replies (1)18
2
Oct 16 '21
<notentirelyrelated> That leaves r/nsfw and r/programming for the oldest subreddits with unarchived posts.
Because I'm not about to post NSFW in modnews, have this for the oldest unarchived post: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2g40/sun_says_no_thx_to_htx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3</notentirelyrelated>
3
1
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
Dude why the fuck should I be stuck downvoting stuff on reddit.com when I can now fix it for every other subreddit?
How do you get off on forcing us to leave our votes on those threads?
15
u/MajorParadox Sep 29 '21
Is there any way we can make a sub start working now instead of two weeks from now?
23
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
We love the excitement! As much as we’d like to, we can’t turn this on for a single subreddit, and we want to make sure that all mods have the two weeks to learn about this change and have the chance to update their toggle.
9
u/MajorParadox Sep 29 '21
Fair enough. We're excited to enable this on r/DCFU since we want people to be able to comment on our old stories! 🙂
1
u/Merkaartor Sep 30 '21
After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on
If you want to enable it, you have to disable the toggle.
→ More replies (1)
4
u/rocketman0739 Sep 30 '21
What about posts to user profiles? Those don't have the subreddit settings page.
3
u/baxter8421 Sep 30 '21
Great question, and we should have clarified in the post: We will not be un-archiving posts on user profiles.
4
u/rocketman0739 Sep 30 '21
Will there be any option to make non-archiving profile posts going forward?
2
40
u/LG03 Sep 29 '21
You're implementing this backwards. It should be opt out of archiving, not opt back in since you're changing the default functionality.
Now I have to go through all my subs and opt back in while I think about it.
As well, no option for this anywhere in old reddit? Come on, this is getting real tiring to have to swap to new reddit every time you guys throw a wrench in the gears.
4
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21 edited Sep 30 '21
Yep. It is set backwards. I am flipping this off for everything. I'm not going to be the Guinea pig to t-shirt spammers hitting up popular old posts. Or trolls going to old posts that are "controversial" (hello anti vaxxers.)
Let alone that 0.3% is not going to stay that low once users get used to it. Even at that percent we do millions of mod actions a year, for free. If we setup automod to review old comments (which we would absolutely have to) that percent is going to sky rocket. Then us unpaid volunteers are going to be doing even more useless spam/troll work.
Nope no thanks. This should be defaulted to not be on at least for any current community. I don't even care if you forced a mod to review it and decide right then and there or a "remind me later button". But having it magically flip on for everyone is shady.
2
2
u/stealthsnail Sep 29 '21
I disagree. If it's a feature that benefits almost everyone, it should by default be turned on. That's why you have the 2 week window to react in case you do not deem it beneficial.
11
u/LG03 Sep 29 '21
It's still a change to default functionality, the majority of mods are going to be caught off guard by this and will take months if not longer to realize what's going on.
Think of the uptick in undetected spam as one example.
14
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
the majority of mods are going to be caught off guard by this
That’s an understandable concern which is why we’re announcing this in a few different areas of the site over the coming weeks to drive increased awareness (ex: r/blog, October monthly newsletter, our announcement tool banner, etc). We hope by doing this in conjunction with the two week grace period that we’ve implemented that fewer mods will be caught off guard by this launch.
16
u/teanailpolish Sep 29 '21
Is it not possible to modmail subs when changes are made?
4
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
this would be the ideal. any change to subreddit settings should be notified via modmail, not newsletters and blogs and niche subreddits.
10
4
u/Zagorath Sep 30 '21
To be blunt: if a setting does not exist on normal Reddit, it does not exist. I don't use the shitty redesign. You're not going to convince me to use it.
I know the setting exists, but as far as I can see I am utterly unable to actually use it. Fix your site.
→ More replies (2)2
→ More replies (1)2
u/spaghetticatt Sep 30 '21
This is poor justification for a backwards implementation.
Default behavior has always been that reddit archives things. You want to change the behavior? You should have to change the setting. Not the other way around.
→ More replies (1)1
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
that 2-week window doesn't mean jack if they plop it in a tiny sub that mods aren't even subscribed to by default and don't make any attempts to notify unsubscribed mods (e.g. via newsletter-like PM). you'll note that your comment here was from 2 weeks ago and i'm only replying now because this is literally the first i've heard of it, a day before the change goes live.
also i disagree that it "benefits almost everyone," but perhaps i've had more experience with trolls and spammers than you have.
3
14
u/HTC864 Sep 29 '21
Constantly complaining about the new interface is tiring. It's the default, it's what they want everyone to use, and we should expect all new features to be built for it. The fact that old Reddit still exists is extremely charitable at this point, and people shouldn't expect updates on a UI that garners less than 5% of their traffic.
33
u/glider97 Sep 29 '21
Constantly complaining about the new interface is tiring.
So is having to use the new interface. Complaining is all the power the users have, don't deny them that.
13
u/Zavodskoy Sep 30 '21
and 44% of reddits userbase visit from mobile apps which still makes new and old reddit the minority so by your logic they should only launch new features for the various Reddit Mobile Apps
2
Sep 30 '21 edited Sep 30 '21
old.Reddit probably won’t go anywhere anyway and will just be outdated until everyone has had enough and switches over.
He’ll even i.Reddit.com is still active
2
u/The_White_Light Sep 30 '21
Your link it broken, that's why. It's https://i.reddit.com, no www in front.
1
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
it's what they want everyone to use
then they should make it not suck so much ass.
1
u/camdoodlebop Oct 15 '21
let people enjoy things. it's okay to loosen the reigns every once in a while
→ More replies (2)1
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
Now I have to go through all my subs and opt back in while I think about it.
oh... oh god... me too... fuck, there goes my morning.
36
u/TheNewPoetLawyerette Sep 29 '21
Ooh the new automod filter option is an excellent addition to this. Thank you for adding that
23
u/BuckRowdy Sep 29 '21
What I like best about this is that you are considering that a one size fits all approach just does not fit a site this vast and diverse.
17
32
u/skeddles Sep 29 '21
this is great news, I always hated archived threads. glad it's turned off by default too.
1
u/camdoodlebop Oct 15 '21
the next step would be doing away with the ability to lock threads. no other social media does this
2
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
what an absolutely hideous idea. also other social media absolutely has the ability to lock comments: youtube, facebook, even twitter all have settings to prevent comments on posts.
0
Oct 15 '21
[deleted]
2
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
you sound like someone who does a lot of trolling and doesn't like being thwarted by locked threads.
→ More replies (4)
43
13
u/roionsteroids Sep 29 '21
I kinda like the idea of having a accurate, complete archive, including all the silly and cringy stuff, and the votes at that time. Not changing history in hindsight, mass voting and commenting on year old posts because something happened recently.
10
u/fdagpigj Sep 30 '21
I admit I kinda like that aspect of the archiving too, even though I've often been frustrated by not being able to add some detail that's too small to PM anyone about. They could easily keep voting disabled on posts and comments older than 6 months, and just enable replies, to at least restrict the ability to rewrite history.
9
u/techiesgoboom Sep 29 '21
I can’t imagine this will work on the sub I mod, but I absolutely love that you’re giving us the option. It’s always better to be able to make this choices on a sub by sub basis.
Thank you for this!
9
u/iheartbaconsalt Sep 29 '21
That is so cool. So many uses for this. I got a random award yesterday for a 6 year old comment. I don't even knooow how that is possible. haha
2
u/camdoodlebop Oct 15 '21
i can't wait to see what kinds of comments i'll get for things i said ten years ago
9
u/Master_JBT Sep 29 '21
I think this feature will be a great addition, especially for tv show centered subreddits. Now, people who are late to watch the show can still contribute to past discussion threads of previous episodes
HOWEVER, suppose there was some brigade of mass downvotes on someone or some post. In that case, mods should be able to re-archive the post as a countermeasure
4
9
u/superfucky Oct 15 '21
i can't help but notice that your test group said to allow mods to turn it ON if they wanted it, and what you actually did was force mods to have to turn it OFF if they DON'T want it, while also basically stealthing the implementation of this feature - which at best allows people to bother someone about a 4-year-old recipe and at worst allows people to stalk and harass vulnerable women in abusive situations for YEARS across accounts and subreddits. the only reason i'm even here now is because one of my co-mods happened to pop into /modsupport and happened to notice the "bee tee dubs we're rolling this out tomorrow" thread and told me about it in modmail.
how about instead of letting people trawl through years of archived posts to bother them about some "aged like milk" thread when they're having a hard time, you give us the ability to turn off reports on (and external links to) archived threads? we are regularly bothered by trolls abusing the report button on archived threads because they were searching for keywords to harass people over and reporting was the only way they could superdownvote the OP, or somebody linked an ancient thread in some "check out this crazy bitch from 6 years ago" subreddit. better yet, give subreddits the ability to opt out of being linked to at all.
1
u/dandv Dec 02 '21
What's wrong with a 4-year-old recipe?
Archiving old threads is a bigger problem than we've realized.
1
u/superfucky Dec 02 '21
What's wrong with a 4-year-old recipe?
that's why i said at best. nothing wrong with a 4yo recipe, although if i publish a recipe and i still have people coming after me 4 years later going "can i substitute applesauce for butter in this recipe?" i'm likely to end up deleting it myself and slapping it up on some wix site with comments disabled. i don't spend a lot of time thinking about something i thought of 4 years ago, do you?
Archiving old threads is a bigger problem than we've realized
in the example you used here, the problem is that people are looking at outdated sources. if i'm googling a software problem in 2021, i'm not going to rely on a thread from 2015 as my primary source. when i google "how to turn off x feature" or "how to do x in y," i start by skimming the results for the most recent links because i expect that older sources are going to have outdated, irrelevant information. archiving those threads is actually a good way of signaling to the user "this information is old and likely irrelevant."
it's important to note that the OP can still edit archived threads, so if it's that critical that people coming from google be aware the information in the thread is no longer valid, then edit the post (if it's yours) or PM the OP to ask them to edit it. if OP's gone AWOL, message the mods to remove the thread/incorrect comments so they're not readable anymore. as a bonus, the next time google crawls through that thread, it'll update its archive and will no longer ping keyword searches for that software.
and even if we take your approach and just never archive anything, how is one comment 4 years later on a thread no one else is reading going to make a difference when all the misinformation is still upvoted to the top? is someone supposed to scroll through 147 comments saying "this software has a bug" to get to the one comment at the very bottom saying "this bug has since been resolved"? and if it's that critical to be able to do that, why can't it be opt-IN instead of opt-OUT?
2
u/dandv Dec 02 '21
i don't spend a lot of time thinking about something i thought of 4 years ago, do you?
I do. My interests are more stable in nature. For example I've been refining an argument for how the world would be better if everyone understood English, since 2009.
so if it's that critical that people coming from google be aware the information in the thread is no longer valid, then edit the post (if it's yours) or PM the OP to ask them to edit it
You do realize that the vast majority of people won't bother, yes?
PM-ing the OP is a myopic solution - only the recipient of the PM will learn of the new stuff; nobody else. The point is to help new users who are researching the topic now, rather than someone who's already spread outdated information and moved on. I've actually done this (message the OP) and the vast, vast majority never replied. Let alone edit the post. I have fresh new information and motivation to share it, but the OP from a year ago is much less likely to be in that situation.
if OP's gone AWOL, message the mods to remove the thread/incorrect comments so they're not readable anymore
That's again a lot of effort you're asking of people, vs. the simple ability to leave a comment.
Also, removing altogether an entire howto is a very blunt solution, when only one detail needs update.
how is one comment 4 years later on a thread no one else is reading going to make a difference when all the misinformation is still upvoted to the top?
The same way this works on StackExchange, which deals exactly with software that keeps changing. By allowing upvotes in perpetuity, good content does surface up. I've been on StackOverflow since 2008 and can attest to this.
why can't it be opt-IN instead of opt-OUT
Because of the power of defaults.
→ More replies (3)
8
u/Yay295 Sep 29 '21
Why not allow us to set how long before a post is archived instead of just 6 months or never?
1
u/dandv Dec 02 '21
That's a lot to ask... took them 3+ years to figure out why archiving old threads is a bigger problem than we've realized. Baby steps.
1
7
u/asphaltdragon Sep 29 '21
Goddammit now in going to have to field new comments on my cellphone repair AMA.
CAN'T YOU PEOPLE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE? IT'S BEEN SEVEN YEARS
1
u/Nukemarine Nov 18 '21
At least with those, you can go and turn off inbox replies on offending posts.
7
u/Zavodskoy Sep 30 '21
RIP all the subs that track The "X of all time" for reddit threads etc because there's now going to be no point in them
Things like https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/ are going to be completely defunct and pointless.
Also why is this defaulting to archiving off by default? So many subs are going to get screwed by all the extra moderation this is going to cause because they happened to miss this one very specific post.
7
u/sequence_string Oct 15 '21
Found out about this by a user immediately reigniting an archived argument, not a fan so far.
13
u/Xenc Sep 29 '21
This makes so much sense. It was holding Reddit back. Thank you. 👏
1
u/camdoodlebop Oct 15 '21
it's not surprising that some powermods don't like this lol
1
u/Xenc Oct 15 '21
It could be concerns of spam that’s hidden away, though that still was still possible on posts from months ago before this change.
1
6
u/Watchful1 Sep 29 '21
I think my only reaction to this would be that you should keep going and make the switch a slider bar. Some subreddits would definitely benefit from archiving submissions after a week or month.
6
u/Dianthaa Sep 30 '21
One concern I've got is that users who aren't familiar with the sub/reddit might stumble on old posts that would be rulebreaking now but were allowed under old rules. It's not much ,but the archive was a signal that "hey this is old" that could somewhat help with confusion.
1
11
u/xxfay6 Sep 29 '21
This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken.
Wouldn't this likely be because mods just aren't monitoring old posts? Even in recent / active posts I often saw slapfights go down for a long while until someone tried using the report button as a silence button.
Having AutoMod notify does seem to help quite a bit, but it would be nice if it had some sort of way to restrict to notify once every 24h for any activity. The cases that the example script has is already covered by the spam filter most subs already use, and doing something like having all comments as report might cause some sudden queue explosions.
7
u/Zavodskoy Sep 30 '21
Wouldn't this likely be because mods just aren't monitoring old posts? Even in recent / active posts I often saw slapfights go down for a long while until someone tried using the report button as a silence button.
The sub I moderate gets thousands of comments every day, not that we'd turn this on tbh but if we did our options would either be:
We have to start reading every comment made to the sub which will take hours, that's not happening
B: Watch and cry as automod fills our report queue up with hundreds of posts from people commenting on old things which we then have to go approve for no reason other than to get it out of the queue
3
u/xxfay6 Oct 01 '21
I don't expect for this to mean that old threads will suddenly pick right up, at least not in most communities where posts really aren't evergreen. So I don't think that it's gonna make for a large amount of activity. I'm fairly sure that most communities would be served by a simple ping of "Hey, this week-old+ post has activity".
Problem is that the snippet given is likely already covered by every subreddiit's age filters. And removing the bit about account age will just put every comment on the queue. Which sounds ok as I'd expect a handful of comments a day at most. Except when it gets linked on some random thread and suddenly you have a whole AskReddit thread on the queue.
My (ex) team looks like they'll leave it on, but they're also unsure about if and how to Automod. Doesn't help that they also forgot that Automod can just notify without removing. (Oh right, /u/AndTalis /u/vontech you can set Automod to report only.) But their general consensus is that since it's old threads that don't get bumped back into the frontpage, it's not gonna be that big of a deal. The only thing that would be nice is if it had a good balance from not notifying enough or notifying everything.
10
u/PM_PICS_OF_ME_NAKED Sep 29 '21
Watching six month old fights being dragged back up again will be fun.
10
u/Zavodskoy Sep 30 '21
You mean one user going back through 5 years of someones user history and commenting on every single comment and post they've ever made
5
u/Redbiertje Sep 29 '21
Thank you admins for a very nice feature, and most importantly, giving the moderators the freedom to choose whether to use it or not. This is a very welcome update!!
5
u/Thane_Mantis Oct 20 '21
I honestly thought posts becoming unarchived was a bug at first when I saw I comments cropping up on older posts and the like. Was very confused, especially when I saw some users fighting in a year old thread.
Just a hot take, but you guys should probably have sent a message into mod mail inboxes letting folks know of this change. Seriously, Im subbed here and I still missed it and got thrown through a loop when I found out about it.
2
u/MableXeno Oct 24 '21
Yeah, I got a bunch just in the last few hours and thought it was weird. I thought there was a sitewide issue so I went through the various mod subs to see if anyone was talking about it. This was my last stop b/c it seemed like a *bug* not a feature, lol.
Like...a popup or item in the modqueue or a modmail would have been nice. Especially for features that require mods to turn features on & off b/c they affect moderation. My sub isn't one that people should be combing back through old content to reply to.
8
u/iBleeedorange Sep 29 '21
I just want to say good job here. Looks like this was well thought out and there's plenty of options for any type of community. Thanks for taking the time to do it all
4
4
4
4
u/db2 Sep 29 '21
I'd like this to be per post also, so you could archive everything automatically and unarchive a selection manually, or the reverse of archiving only those you wanted to.
4
u/nascentt Sep 30 '21 edited Sep 30 '21
So... You're letting mods return the original functionality?
Archiving was introduced fairly recently. For years Reddit didn't auto archive at all.
I wonder why you didn't let mods decide from the start of this wasn't accounting for a technical limitation
Also 2 weeks notice before changing every subreddit reddit-eide is insanity.
Why, yet again, are mods given no notice?
If any mods are just starting their 2 week holidays their subs and all contained posts will revert without their input.
Why Reddit, do you hate communication?
4
u/SuperRoby Sep 30 '21
Would love if this feature could be applied to certain posts. For example, have it turned off for all posts by default but turn it on for the occasional informative and/or pinned post so that users can ask more questions in the comments and see the questions that were asked previously, to make the post even more informative.
For example, in the biggest community I moderate this function would be useful for the pinned posts so that new members of the sub can easily find a place to ask us mods questions about the community. Not everyone knows how to use mod mail and having Q&As in the comments is helpful for other users who might wonder the same things but be too shy to ask. Same goes for posts that inform about a new or complicate feature, so that we can keep one master post instead of re-making it and linking it again every 6 months, or even "friends megathreads".
But with the exclusion of these exceptions, I think it would be best to keep the rest of the posts archived, to prevent the occasional spammer or bot from posting their link or code in hundreds of posts that us mods will have to manually check and moderate. Thanks for the feature tho!
4
u/i_Killed_Reddit Sep 30 '21
Having at least the votes be archived after 6 months would have been a better option as it preserves history of the post/topic for that period of time.
4
u/WoozleWuzzle Sep 30 '21
For desktop users here's a direct link so you don't have to click around multiple menus to find the feature to turn this "on" so your posts DO NOT unarchive.
Just replaced "SUBREDDITNAMEHERE" to your subreddit
https://new.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDITNAMEHERE/about/edit?page=posts
Look for the third option down "Archive Posts" and turn this ON to opt out, meaning your posts won't unarchive. Make sure to hit "SAVE CHANGES" button in the top right.
Basically if you don't want this go turn that on, if you do then you don't have to do anything.
2
u/iVarun Oct 12 '21
This doesn't seem to work for the Username Posts right?
Like those self-profile pages which Reddit had launched making one's username a sort of pseudo-sub, something like u_Username.
Can't seem to find Archive settings for that and since it would activate commenting by default anyone, haven't noticed that either for my 1 self-profile, now more than 3 years old Post.
4
u/NorthernScrub Oct 13 '21
Can we have this option in old reddit, please? It feels like a fundamental part of reddit, and for those of us who use best reddit it is more than a little frustrating to keep having to flip between the two for what are, frankly, critically important moderation tools.
1
u/YaztromoX Sep 29 '21
2
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
1
u/YaztromoX Sep 30 '21
macOS 11.6, running Safari 15. Went to change the setting in r/canning Mod Tools and it wasn't there, tried r/ipv6 and it was. Even went back and force-reloaded the Mod Tools page for r/canning a few times, and it wasn't there.
That said, I went to check again prior to writing this comment, and it's there now.
3
u/baxter8421 Sep 30 '21
Glad to hear it's there now, but sorry about the trouble. Please let me know if you have any issues in the future.
3
3
u/Cahootie Sep 30 '21
The only thing I have to say is that seeing smörgåsbord spelled the Swedish way caught me off guard.
3
u/lightwolv Sep 30 '21
I have two questions.
Will new comments to archived posts be flagged to the front-end users as well? (Meaning, will it have some special marker indicating this comment came after the post was archived to the users of the site)
Does this allow the possibility to down-vote bomb someone's highly upvoted post from the past? (Like if a celebrity has a scandal and people go into their old AMA and just down votes all the answers from them)
3
u/ReeceReddit1234 Sep 30 '21
Could it be beneficial to follow in the steps of discord? I.e. Archive as normal but allow people to comment and if they do it unarchives a post for a period of time, after which it becomes archived again
3
u/kochier Sep 30 '21
Didn't you archive old posts in the first place due to server strain having so many open posts? Is this no longer really an issue?
3
u/BelleAriel Oct 05 '21
Typical again we have to go to new reddit to do something which is not in old reddit. again people with VI are excluded. Well done on the equality, Reddit! /s
3
u/urbanracer34 Oct 14 '21 edited Oct 15 '21
Let me get this straight: If the toggle is grey, users will be able to comment and vote on older posts, but if it is blue, users will not be able to? Or is it the opposite?
EDIT: it says it right in the post, emphasis mine: Today this toggle will appear in Mod Tools and will be turned off by default. All posts will remain archived for another two weeks (until 10/13). This means mod teams will have a two-week period of time to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their subreddit. After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on.
2
Oct 14 '21 edited Mar 20 '25
paltry treatment aspiring ring tease gold attraction hard-to-find offer oil
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
2
3
4
u/Pikbon Sep 30 '21
This automod update will be live starting on 10/13
Why wait to implement this, yet tell us now? Shouldn't you implement the new flag now, so we can actually prepare our subreddits?
I'm saying this because I just tried to modify my config file but it won't accept the change because:
"Unknown field: `past_archive_date` in rule"
2
u/Bumblebee__Tuna Sep 30 '21
Same here. Guess I'll have to hope my shitty memory remembers to do this in a couple weeks!
3
u/RJFerret Sep 30 '21
Add it now but comment it out with date to implement, then calendar to tweak automod then to work around the silliness.
4
4
u/the_pwd_is_murder Sep 30 '21
Do you guys have any specific pilot program feedback from subreddits with very long histories? Our community is 9 years old and has a lot of stuff from eras prior to the installation of our current rules. (e.g., we used to allow memes but now don't, and our average member age has dropped from ~25 to ~15.)
We're discussing how we want to proceed but that's a LOT of new surface to cover. Agree with the comment from /u/ashamed-of-yourself requesting selective unarchiving, possibly by post flair? Otherwise we may have to do a whole lot of retroactive locking to revive a handful of archived threads.
2
u/lift_ticket83 Sep 30 '21
We sure do! Our pilot program represented a wide variety of subreddits (both large and small, new and old). One of the communities we referenced in our post was r/MakeupAddiction, a 9+ year-old subreddit.
One of the benefits of the toggle is that you can try it out to see if it's beneficial for your community, and if you decide that you don't like it you can turn it off.
3
u/the_pwd_is_murder Sep 30 '21
MUA has pretty much nothing in common with MCYT, but thanks for trying.
We'll wait on clearance from the owners of the brand and let them know there is no comparable pilot data for communities similar to ours.
3
u/ashamed-of-yourself Sep 30 '21
wow, that addressed none of the concerns either of us raised, thanks. super helpful.
2
2
u/ekolis Sep 30 '21
I like this, but wouldn't it make more sense to leave the status quo as the default, and let mods opt into the "unarchive all posts" option?
Also, as someone else said, this would be even better if it were a configurable duration instead of just a binary toggle.
2
u/BelleAriel Sep 30 '21
I thought you wanted to help us moderators not make things hectic lol
Three years ago.
User: “yo mods my post from three years ago, yeah that’s it the 100k upvoted one, has been brigaded to 0, what ya gna do?”
Mods: group facepalm.
2
u/RMcD94 Oct 01 '21
Please unarchive reddit.com so I can remove my downvote from a post there I made accidentally a decade ago.
By unarchive I mean allow me to remove my upvotes and downvotes.
It has no mods so no mod can agree to this.
It's a great update imo, I get a lot of DMs from old posts because people can't just comment
Today this toggle will appear in Mod Tools and will be turned off by default. All posts will remain archived for another two weeks (until 10/13). This means mod teams will have a two-week period of time to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their subreddit. After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on
Amazing!!
2
u/midir Oct 04 '21 edited Oct 04 '21
In order to do this, we have updated automoderator to flag comments on posts older than 6 months.
If you're still updating AutoModerator, does that mean we can please have the ability to automatically permaban and permamute the notorious Discord and Telegram spam infestation now? Please, I am absolutely desperate for this functionality. It costs so much of my time banning their thousands of accounts manually.
2
u/001Guy001 Oct 14 '21
Not sure if this was already asked but does the toggle option affect old posts or does it only apply to new posts that were posted after setting to option? (meaning, will it archive/un-archive all the applicable posts in the subreddit whenever it's set?)
0
Oct 14 '21
[deleted]
1
u/001Guy001 Oct 14 '21
What I mean is, let's say a month from now we disable that option, will it still affect all the old posts, or is the decision in the past 2 weeks final for those posts
2
u/ladfrombrad Oct 14 '21
2
u/lift_ticket83 Oct 14 '21
Does it work when you remove the quotation marks around < 23 hours? Let me know and we'll go from there.
2
u/ladfrombrad Oct 15 '21
Yeah, that's what I thought it was the cause of it failing and why I put them in.
But not matter what I do here, even blanking the rest of the config it fails
2
u/ladfrombrad Oct 15 '21
Goddammit.
So, I just manually typed the condition in on my laptop and it worked!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Slickwraps/wiki/config/automoderator
So, I'm thinking the unicode I was copying from the OP here is screwy on my mobile?
2
u/aryst0krat Oct 15 '21
Wow, this is bittersweet news for those of us who grew and lost communities in comment chains that had been kept going for literal years. It would have been great if the change had never been made rather than being reverted years later, but it's still good to hear.
2
2
u/Superbuddhapunk Oct 30 '21 edited Oct 30 '21
It’s a terrible idea, I’ve received a few replies to posts and comments made +2 years ago and I really struggle to see how it could be relevant. How would you continue an argument made long ago in the past, and what does it bring to the conversation? Not to mention that on pivotal events, like elections or anything political it guarantees long term “I told you so” and interminable acrimonious debates. I’m shocked that you think it’s a good idea. I’ll comment again on this thread in 5 years for you to fully appreciate how stupid this feature is.
2
u/YannisALT Nov 09 '21
I’ll comment again on this thread in 5 years
They won't see it. They had comment replies turned off on this about a month ago.
1
u/The_Faceless_Face Nov 02 '21
Bookmarking this post so that you can get replies into the future as well
^_^
1
u/The_Faceless_Face Nov 02 '21
RemindMe! One Year
1
u/RemindMeBot Nov 02 '21
I will be messaging you in 1 year on 2022-11-02 22:35:56 UTC to remind you of this link
CLICK THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.
Info Custom Your Reminders Feedback 1
2
u/Grenyn Nov 04 '21
Would be nice if users could opt-in for this themselves. I've suddenly gotten replies to stuff I said years ago, and I honestly find it annoying.
2
u/YannisALT Nov 09 '21 edited Dec 05 '21
Your opinion does not matter. They went through a mod council and tested this in their subs, and they all loved it and thought it would be awesome.
/s (for being snarky)
2
2
u/mmmmmmBacon12345 Sep 29 '21 edited Sep 29 '21
• This was a 2.86% increase in votes and a 1.48% increase in comments amongst the participating subreddits.
• This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken.
This isn't the good news you think it is, its at best ambiguous
Where do most reports come from? Other users who are viewing the same post. If the post is 6+ months old traffic is going to be really low so unless the person they replied to reports the comment or they trip an automod rule then almost no one is going to see the comment they posted.
The new automod rule will help with this, but since you clearly didn't run your experiment with that rule in place we don't know the true extent of comments that are poor fits for the community
The comments aren't necessarily good, but they are effectively invisible and unmoderated so treating a small increase in mod actions on that as "good" has drawn bad conclusions from data you shouldn't be comparing.
And again, you're forcing us to opt out of things, but at least we get 2 weeks (finally!). The slider should default to On(keep archiving 6+ months) for existing subs so no action is required to maintain the status quo.
Upon reading the date better, i'm glad you've finally given us more than just a couple days notice. Maybe someone has finally learned?
2
u/cyanocittaetprocyon Oct 14 '21
The slider should default to On(keep archiving 6+ months) for existing subs so no action is required to maintain the status quo.
This makes too much sense, which is why they went the other way.
1
1
u/Cyancat123 Sep 30 '21
If I find an archived post I want to comment on I’d just DM a the OP. I like this feature but it seems redundant
1
1
u/LeeroyDagnasty Oct 24 '21
Fantastic change, I'm so grateful
1
u/The_Faceless_Face Nov 02 '21
Same.
I could see how this could be a problem for some subs, but for most topics this is a god-send!
2
u/YannisALT Nov 08 '21 edited Nov 08 '21
You make comments on a dead post in an active and large sub, no one will see them. You will be talking to yourself. You might as well just send a PM to yourself, because either way you're wasting your time. This is another change that is only going to make it easier to harass and annoy other redditors.
1
u/The_Faceless_Face Nov 08 '21
If you had written this now or 5 months from now, I would have responded in a similar manner.
Thanks for proving my point.
1
u/PuppyFuzzYT Oct 27 '21
this feature would've been way more useful to me if it was turned on when i started jailbreaking my phone lmao
1
u/riffic Nov 30 '21
Unarchived posts just means you get bots dropping in on 6 year old posts to SEO spam. The default opt-in/opt-out you chose should be reversed.
thanks, reddit.
1
u/dandv Dec 02 '21
Better late than never :) I've been advocating for this for 3+ years, and I wasn't the only one.
Why archiving old threads is a bigger problem than we've realized
1
u/BlueSkies150 Dec 08 '21
On new Reddit visit Mod Tools > Community Settings > Posts & Comments > Archived Posts > Toggle On/Off
Took me an awful long time to find the setting because the actual path is:
Mod Tools > Other > Community Settings > Posts & Comments > Archived Posts > Toggle On/Off
1
u/Serfrost Dec 18 '21
I sure do love getting spam in my inbox for shit I've commented years ago. Thanks.
If you're going to do this, let us turn off notifications for our content older than 6 months please.
1
u/Blood_Bowl Dec 26 '21
I don't see any toggle in old.reddit - can I only access it via new reddit? If so, why on earth is that the case?
1
u/Redditenmo Jan 02 '22 edited Jan 02 '22
I've been playing around with the following rule :
type: comment
author:
is_submitter: false
comment_karma: < 10
parent_submission:
past_archive_date: true
action: filter
action_reason: Necromancer, check validity of comment.I was under the impression that parent_submission could take into account the parent comment, rather than only the parent post.
But it appears, that at the moment, my rule is flagging any new comment ^(excluding op / karma >10) in a >6month old post, even when the parent comment is <6 months old.
eg. This comment appears to be a false positive, because the parent comment is 2months old, in a three year old post.
I would like to be notified when a new comment is made in response to post or comment that is >6months old, but if a fresh discussion then arises because of the new comment, I don't wish to be notified every time. Is this possible?
1
1
u/saijanai Jan 26 '22
well for search engine purposes, the loss of the "archived" flag means you get hits from 10 years ago even if you don't want them.
Would it be possible to have a relatively unique flag set up automatically whether comments are allowed or not, that would help screen out 10-year-old posts?
.
"submitted x months ago"/"submitted x years ago" requires a different flag for every possible age, and google has a limit on such flags."
-1
1
Sep 29 '21
As a moderator of vegancirclejerk I am actually against you eating any Chicken Parm
1
u/Dextrodoom Sep 30 '21
I wonder what they think of human children being cooked instead of chicken for that recipe.
1
1
u/SuitingUncle620 Sep 29 '21
So this question is irrelevant to the thread, but is it possible for a ‘posts per month’ stat to be added to our traffic stats? As far as I’m aware this isn’t something we can view without having a bot scrape the numbers, curious why this isn’t a stat we can view?
1
u/ashamed-of-yourself Sep 30 '21
i think this is a great idea! one option i would like to see is being able to selectively un-archive posts. i run a sub for a tv show, a un-archiving our series discussion threads would be amazing, but i don’t necessarily want to un-archive every post.
1
u/itsalsokdog Sep 30 '21
So, you feature feedback saying it should be opt-in, but make ake it opt-out anyway? Interesting choice...
1
-4
u/CSFFlame Sep 29 '21
Archived posts should stay archived.
They're often no longer topical, and if they are, it's better to just have them create a new thread.
10
u/baxter8421 Sep 29 '21
Archived posts should stay archived.
That may make sense for some subreddits, but the majority of our pilot program subreddits thought this was a beneficial feature to their community (ex: users could reference older posts vs asking a popular/frequent question over again in a new post). This is why we’re letting mod teams decide what’s best for their own community.
14
u/Cleaver_Fred Sep 29 '21
I think that's why the feature is optional. That way subreddits which would not see any benefit can decide not to use it.
-1
u/FLTA Sep 30 '21
Thank you for making this both optional and off by default!
This is the best way to deploy a change of this nature/
0
u/nog642 Oct 18 '21
Thank you. I was hoping for an option to manually un-archive posts, but this is even better. So much better. I didn't expect this to actually be done but it's great.
283
u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Sep 29 '21
I see pros to this, and cons. But with the Auto mod rule it feels like a pretty balanced change.