Hi Mods,

I wanted to follow up on the CSS and redesign post from a few weeks back and provide some more information as well as clarify some questions that have emerged.

Based on your feedback, we will allow you to continue to use CSS on top of the new structured styles. This will be the last part of the customization tool we build as we want to make sure the structured options we are offering are rock solid. Also, please keep in mind that if you do choose to use the advanced option, we will no longer be treading as carefully as we have done in the past about breaking styles applied through CSS^1.

To give you a sense of our approach, we’re starting with a handful of highly-customized communities (e.g. r/overwatch and r/gameofthrones) and seeing how close we can get to their existing appearance using the new system. Logos, images, colors, spoilers, menus, flairs (all kinds), and lots more will be supported. I know you’d like to see a list of everything, but we think the best approach will be to show instead of tell, which we’re racing to as quickly as possible.

The widget system I mentioned in the last post isn’t directly related. Many communities have added complex functionality over the years (calendars, scoreboards, etc). A widget system will elevate these features to first-class status on Reddit, with the aim of making them both more powerful and reuseable. Yes, we’re evaluating how we would accept user-created widgets. We intend for widgets to be able to be updated via the API, so you’ll still be able to create dynamically updating content in your subreddit sidebar.

This change, and the redesign in general, is going to happen slowly. We will will not be abruptly cutting everyone over to the new site at once. We know it won’t be perfect at first (unlike the current site), and plan to include plenty of time to solicit feedback and make iterations. Sharing our plans for subreddit customization this far advance with you is part of this process.

We’ll start with a small alpha group and create a subreddit to solicit feedback. As we continue to add features, we’ll expand the testing group to an opt-in beta. If you’d like to participate in the alpha please add a reply to this comment. Please note, signing up does not guarantee a spot in the alpha. We want to be able to be responsive to the alpha testers, and keeping the initial group small has proved to be effective in the past.

I’d like thank everyone who has provided feedback on this topic. There have been some very constructive threads. I’d also like to take a moment to appreciate how civil the feedback has been. This is a topic many of you feel passionate about. Thank you for keeping things constructive.

Cool?

Cool.

¹ No snark allowed.

edit: See here for the post in /r/announcements about this change.

Hello there mods! As promised, we are providing you notice of an upcoming change: we will be adjusting the displayed scores on posts. Up until now, a side effect of years of legacy anti-cheating code has been to create an artificial normalization cap.

After this change you will notice that the scores on posts (past, present, and future) will be increased significantly. Since many of the scores of highly upvoted posts will increase to values in the tens of thousands, we will change the display of scores greater than 10,000 using a decimal system instead. For example, a post voted up to a score of 54,740 will have its score displayed as 54.7k. Here's a preview of the new display.

As a result of how our sorting works, many communities may see some shifting in the positioning of posts in your /top queues. This is largely because we’re now displaying votes that may previously have not been displayed due to our legacy code for content voting. This will be most noticeable when sorting by top from all time and past year. In short, the new scores that you see are more accurate than the older ones, which (poorly) obfuscated and hid the results of our efforts against vote cheating.

We will also be announcing this change to the wider community with more details, so stay tuned for more on this soon.

When someone deletes their reddit account, the site currently doesn't clean up much of the data associated with the account. This is causing a number of issues, so next week we're planning to deploy a more comprehensive clean-up process which will be applied to accounts 90 days after they're deleted to clear out various pieces of data that aren't needed any more. We'll also be going back and retroactively running this new process on all accounts that were deleted more than 90 days ago.

The most noticeable effect of this for most people is that it's going to remove all the deleted accounts' subscriptions. For most subreddits, this will probably cause a drop in subscriber count by about 3% to 5%, though there are some factors that can make it be higher or lower. For example, /r/reddit.com is going to drop by over 8%, since it doesn't really get any new subscribers any more, and a higher portion of the accounts have been deleted. Throwaway-heavy subreddits will most likely drop by a higher percentage as well. This shouldn't have any effect on the subscription statistics in your subreddit's traffic page, it will only cause the total number in the sidebar to drop.

Another problem this will fix that quite a few mods are familiar with is the "shrinking sidebar mod list". Currently, if any mod whose name is in the sidebar list deletes their account, the size of that list drops by 1. This is because the account is actually still technically a mod of the subreddit, but it's just "skipped over" whenever displaying the list of mods. So due to this, there are some subreddits that have very small (or even empty) mod lists in their sidebars, if most or all of the mods that were in the list have deleted their accounts at some point.

There are a few other minor issues that the expanded clean-up will help with as well, but they probably won't be relevant to the large majority of users so I won't go into detail about those here. If any of the above wasn't clear or you have any questions, please let me know.

P.S. Congratulations /r/pics, you'll get to celebrate reaching 10M subscribers for a second time!

Sorry for the lateness of this post, it's been a pretty frantic day. I actually pushed these changes out a couple of hours ago, but haven't had a chance to sit and write this post until now.

In case you missed it, last Friday I posted some information in the new /r/ModSupport subreddit about what had happened over the week, which included some info about multiple updates to the ability to sticky submissions in your subreddits.

The following things have changed:

You can now sticky link submissions, in addition to text ones

Previously it was only possible to sticky text posts, but we've now made it so that any submission can be stickied. This has some potentially interesting uses for things like reddit live threads, wiki pages, important news articles, and so on. For example, /r/space has already stickied their live thread about the Pluto flyby, which works far better than including it in a text sticky since you get the live thread itself embedded into the page.

You can now have up to two stickies, instead of only one

As I mentioned in the /r/ModSupport thread, this is something I was pretty opposed to myself because I don't want subreddits to start looking like those old phpBB forums where you have to scroll past a whole page of stickied posts and announcements to get to the actual content. People convinced me that two stickies had a lot of really useful applications though, so you now have access to 100% more stickies (if you want, you definitely don't need to use more than one if you're already satisfied).

When stickying things through the site, the post you're stickying will always go into the second slot automatically (but if there are currently no stickies, it will become the first one). If there's already other stickies present, it will become the second one (replacing the previous one if that slot was already full). I think this should cover what I expect will be the most common usage (a long-term sticky on top, and a shorter-term one on the bottom), and most other cases are still pretty straightforward with some manual unstickying of the other post involved.

If you're using the API, I've added a new (optional) num argument to the set_subreddit_sticky endpoint that lets you specify which slot you want the sticky to go into, which will cause it to replace any previously-existing sticky in that slot. If you don't specify, you'll get the same default behavior as through the site, which is replacing the bottom one. So really, the only number that gives different behavior is specifying num=1, which will replace the top sticky (whether there's a second one or not).

Along those lines, both the AutoModerator "rules" functionality (the things defined in /wiki/config/automoderator) and the scheduled posts (defined in /wiki/automoderator-schedule) now have support for specifying the slot, if you need this ability. So for example, if you have a single daily discussion that's posted by AutoModerator and that's the only sticky you want, you'd need to replace the sticky: true line in your automoderator-schedule configuration with sticky: 1. That will cause the new scheduled post to replace the previous one, instead of having it go into the second slot.

Things are much the same for the rules defined in /wiki/config/automoderator. Where previously you would define set_sticky: true, you can now alternatively define set_sticky: 1 if you want a post satisfying the rule to be placed in the top slot instead of the bottom one.

And as one more piece, there is also an alternate address for linking to the second sticky in your subreddit, if that's something you need to do. Previously, you could make a link that always linked to your current sticky post with /r/<SubredditName>/about/sticky. That same link will still continue to work and point to the top sticky, but to link to the second one you can do /r/<SubredditName>/about/sticky?num=2.

Replaced stickies are now listed in the moderation log

And just one more minor thing, as requested by /u/timotab in the thread, there will now be an extra entry added to the moderation log in the case where stickying a new post replaces an old one. This will show which post was unstickied, and have an extra note of "(replaced)" on the end of the line so that you know it was automatic. This can be helpful if you accidentally replace a sticky or something and need to try to find the previous one again.

Thanks for all the feedback and ideas so far, let me know if you have any questions about these updates or notice any issues (I know the /r/leagueoflegends mods already found one).

[Edit] This is now live

Hi Mods,

As we all know, Reddit provides a home for an infinite number of people and communities. From awws and memes, to politics, fantasy leagues, and book clubs, people have created communities for just about everything. There are also entire communities dedicated solely to finding someone to talk to like r/KindVoice and r/CasualConversation. But it’s not all funny memes and gaming—as an anonymous platform, Reddit is also a space for people to express the most vulnerable parts of themselves.

People on Reddit find help in support communities that address a broad range of challenges from quitting smoking or drinking, struggling to get pregnant, or addressing abuse, anxiety, depression, or thoughts of suicide. Even communities that don’t directly relate to serious topics can get deep into serious issues, and the person you turn to in a time of need may be someone you bonded with over a game, a shared sense of humor, or the same taste in music.

When you see a post or comment about suicidal feelings in a community, it can be overwhelming. Especially if you’re a moderator in that community, and feel a sense of responsibility for both the people in your community and making sure it's the type of place you want it to be.

Here at Reddit, we’ve been working on finding a thoughtful approach to self-harm and suicide response that does a few key things:

1. Connects people considering suicide or serious self-harm with with trusted resources and real-time support that can help them as soon as possible.

2. Takes the pressure of responding to people considering suicide or serious self-harm off of moderators and redditors.

3. Continues to uphold our high standards for protecting and respecting user privacy and anonymity.

To help us with that new approach, today we’re announcing a partnership with Crisis Text Line to provide redditors who may be considering serious self-harm or suicide with free, confidential, 24/7 support from trained Crisis Counselors.

Crisis Text Line is a free, confidential, text-based support line for people in the U.S. who may be struggling with any type of mental health crisis. Their Crisis Counselors are trained to put people at ease and help them make a plan to stay safe. If you’d like to learn more about Crisis Text Line, they have a helpful summary video of their work on their website and the complete story of how they were founded was covered in-depth in the New Yorker article, R U There?

How It Will Work

Moving forward, when you’re worried about someone in your community, or anywhere on Reddit, you can let us know in two ways:

1. Report the specific post or comment that worried you and select, Someone is considering suicide or serious self-harm.

2. Visit the person’s profile and select, Get them help and support. (If you’re using Reddit on the web, click More Options first.)

We’ll reach out to tell the person a fellow redditor is worried about them and put them in touch with Crisis Text Line’s trained Crisis Counselors. Don’t worry, we’ll have some rate-limiting behind the scenes so people in crisis won’t get multiple messages in short succession, regardless of the amount of requests we receive. And because responding to someone who is considering suicide or serious self-harm can bring up hard emotions or may be triggering, Crisis Text Line is also available to people who are reporting someone. This new flow will be launching next week.

Here’s what it will look like:

As part of our partnership, we’re hosting a joint AMA between Reddit’s group product manager of safety u/jkohhey and Crisis Text Line’s Co-Founder & Chief Data Scientist, Bob Filbin u/Crisis_Text_Line, to answer questions about their approach to online suicide response, how the partnership will work, and what this all means for you and your communities.

Here’s a little bit more about Bob:As Co-Founder & Chief Data Scientist of Crisis Text Line, Bob leads all things data including developing new avenues of data collection, storing data in a way that makes it universally accessible, and leading the Data, Ethics, and Research Advisory Board. Bob has given keynote lectures on using data to drive action at the YMCA National CIOs Conference, American Association of Suicidology Conference, MIT Solve, and SXSW. While he is not permitted to share the details, Bob is occasionally tapped by the FBI to provide insight in data science, AI, ethics, and trends. Bob graduated from Colgate University and has an MA in Quantitative Methods from Columbia.

Edit: formatting

Edit 2: This flow will be launching next week

I am sad to share that u/deimorz is leaving Reddit (just the company, not the site, hopefully). Chad joined us back in 2013 when the company was only about ten people. He is the author of AutoModerator, which enabled Reddit to grow to its current size, and he is the creator of r/SubredditSimulator, which will ensure our survival after you are all gone. If you have spent any time in r/bugs, r/help, r/ModSupport, r/AutoModerator, r/modhelp, r/redditdev, r/Games, r/TheoryOfReddit, and many others, you have probably met Chad and have likely been helped by him.

Chad, Reddit would not be what it is today without you, and we will miss you dearly. Best of luck out there!

Hello All--

We want to let you know that we have made some updates to our site-wide rules regarding violent content. We did this to alleviate user and moderator confusion about allowable content on the site. We also are making this update so that Reddit’s content policy better reflects our values as a company.

In particular, we found that the policy regarding “inciting” violence was too vague, and so we have made an effort to adjust it to be more clear and comprehensive. Going forward, we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people; likewise, we will also take action against content that glorifies or encourages the abuse of animals. This applies to ALL content on Reddit, including memes, CSS/community styling, flair, subreddit names, and usernames.

We understand that enforcing this policy may often require subjective judgment, so all of the usual caveats apply with regard to content that is newsworthy, artistic, educational, satirical, etc, as mentioned in the policy. Context is key. The policy is posted in the help center here.

EDIT: Signing off, thank you to everyone who asked questions! Please feel free to send us any other questions. As a reminder, Steve is doing an AMA in r/announcements next week.

There has been an increase in moderator accounts getting broken into lately. As I'm sure you're aware, moderator accounts are some of the most vulnerable accounts on reddit, so it’s important you protect them as much as you’re able to. Here are some steps you can take to secure your account as much as possible:

• Use strong and unique passwords on each site you sign in to. Never use the same or similar passwords across any other sites. This protects your online accounts should a site you use have their password database compromised.

• Secure the e-mail address you verified in your reddit preferences. Using an e-mail service that offers 2-factor authentication provides additional security.

• Never enter your credentials into any 3rd party sites, apps, or browser add-ons unless you are positive they are trustworthy.

• Secure your operating system and browser. Scan your computer regularly with anti-virus. Also, use no-script or similar software to protect against cross-site scripting (XSS) and sites with malicious javascript.

• Review your moderator lists and purge or restrict permissions of inactive moderators. See the guide on moderator permissions here.

• Don't give your password to sketchy mobile apps

• Don't use sketchy browser extensions

We're doing our best to do damage control, so if you see something wrong with your account let us know right away at [email protected], or send a message to the admins with an alt account.

Thanks, and sorry for all the trouble.

Hey everyone,

TL;DR: We’re expanding our source of subreddits that will appear on the front page to allow users to discover more content and communities.

This year we will be making some long overdue changes to Reddit, including a frontpage algorithm revamp. In the short-term, as part of the frontpage algorithm revamp, we’re going to move away from the concept of “default” subreddits and move towards a larger source of subreddits that is similar to r/all. And a quick shout-out to the 50 default communities and their mods for being amazing communities!

Long-term, we are going to not only improve how users can see the great posts from communities that they subscribe to but how users can discover new communities. And most importantly, we are going to make sure Reddit stays Reddit-y, by ensuring that it is a home for all things hilarious, sad, joyful, uncomfortable, diverse, surprising, and intriguing.

We're launching this early next week.

How are communities selected for “popular”?

We selected the top most popular subreddits and then removed:

• Any NSFW communities

• Any subreddits that had opted out of r/all.

• A handful of subreddits that were heavily filtered out of users’ r/all

In the long run, we will generate and maintain this list via an automated process. In the interim, we will do periodic reviews of popular subreddits and adding new subreddits to the list.

How will this work for users?

• Logged out users will automatically see posts based on the expanded subreddits source as their default landing page.

• Logged in users will be able to access this list by clicking on “popular” in the top gray nav bar. We’re working on better integrating into the front page but we also want to get users access to the list asap! We are planning on launching this change early next week.

How will this work for moderators?

• Your subreddit may experience increased traffic. If you want to opt-out, please use the opt-out of r/all checkbox in your subreddit settings.

We’re really excited to improve everyone’s Reddit experience while keeping Reddit a great place for conversation and communities.

I’ll be hanging out here in the comments to answer questions!

Edit: a final clarification of how this works If you create a new account after this launch, you will receive the old 50 defaults, and still be able to access "popular" via link at the top. If you don't make an account, you'll just be a logged out user who will see "popular" as the default landing page. Later this year we will improve this experience so that when you make a new account, you will have an improved subscription experience, which won't mass subscribe you to the original 50 defaults.

You can read the full announcement post here, but the mod-focused summary is:

• Text-posts provide some of the best original content on Reddit.

• We’re going to start giving out karma for text-posts in the same way we do for link posts and comments.

• This will be from today going forward. There will not be any retroactive karma hand-outs.

• Link Karma is replaced by Post Karma, which is a combination of karma from link posts and text posts.

• Mod tools that have karma checks (e.g. Automoderator, wiki editor settings) will check against Post Karma.

I know that some subreddits use text-posts as a way of combatting low-effort content. If this is a concern, you may want to look at adding some of Automoderator's content quality control rules.

Quite a few moderators have said that these two gold features help them a lot when moderating, and losing access to them hurts if their gold runs out. So to help with that, we've now made it so that mods always have access to these two gold features in subreddits they moderate, even if they don't currently have gold.

If you want to disable the new comment highlighting, the preference to do so is available in a gold box at the bottom of the preferences page, and will show up as long as you're a moderator somewhere, regardless of whether you have gold or not.

Let me know if you notice any issues with this, thanks for all the hard work.

TL;DR before I start rambling - AutoModerator is now built into reddit itself. You don't need to do anything, your subreddit's configuration will automatically be converted to the new version for you soon. Links to specific changes and new documentation are at the bottom of the post.

A brief history of AutoModerator

Today is a very big day for me personally. A little over 3 years ago (and about a year before I started actually working at reddit), I created a reddit bot named AutoModerator to use in the subreddits I was moderating. I had found that a lot of the things I needed to do regularly were fairly straightforward tasks, so the idea was to build something that would allow me to define a bit of logic to perform moderation actions automatically. Things like "if a submission from any of these known-good domains gets automatically spam-filtered, approve it", "if something gets a huge number of reports, remove it and send a modmail so we can verify", "if a new user with 'hole' in their name posts a comment linking to an image, remove it", and other essential tasks.

I found AutoModerator hugely useful in my own subreddits, and I set it up for a few moderators as well, but it was initially pretty inconvenient for anyone else to use. To be able to use it, anyone else either had to set up and run their own instance of a fairly complex Python bot, or they had to contact me every time to make any sort of changes to what it was doing in their subreddit. So at least initially, it didn't really become a widespread part of moderation on reddit. But then in May 2013, I released a new version of the bot with an extremely major upgrade - it was now completely self-configurable by moderators through reddit's wiki system, and could be added to subreddits and set up without any need for me to be involved at all.

Since that release, usage of AutoModerator has absolutely exploded. It has active configurations in over 7,400 subreddits now, and performs in the range of 100,000 moderation actions every day across them. It's definitely become an essential moderation tool for many people, but it's always still been fairly unofficial, and remained as kind of my own side project (and was even still running on my own personal external server). However, starting today, AutoModerator is now finally becoming an official part of reddit itself.

Built into the site

Over the last few months, I have been working heavily on a complete rewrite of AutoModerator in order to make it able to operate internally. Being truly built into the site makes a lot of things easier, and it opens up quite a few exciting possibilities for enhancement of AutoModerator in the future. This initial release has mostly focused on trying to duplicate the functions that were already available so there isn't too much new yet, but there are already a few nice new things:

• It's no longer necessary to send a message to AutoModerator to update your configuration and then wait for a response to find out if you have any errors. The configuration is now checked when you save the wiki page, and you will not even be able to save it if an error is present. As soon as the page saves successfully, your new configuration will be active immediately.

• Response times should be almost instant.

• Comments and text submissions can now be re-checked when they are edited.

• AutoModerator no longer even needs to be a moderator of the subreddit, and doesn't need to worry about having specific permissions. (I'm hoping a decent number of subreddits will remove it as a moderator after converting to the new version, so that maybe loading its userpage won't keep... you know, crashing browsers). Note: you should not remove AutoModerator as a mod if it still needs its mod position in the subreddit for some of the other things it does outside this "core" rules functionality including the scheduled self-posts, and the "/r/all warning" flair.

And even though it's been fully rewritten, things are still mostly the same from a user perspective. It is still simply configured through a wiki page (though the page is at a different location - "config/automoderator" instead of "automoderator"), but I've also taken this opportunity to fix some of the poor design and syntax choices that I made in the past, so this new version does require some syntax changes. All subreddits will be automatically converted to the new version over the next few days without any work required by you. So if you're using AutoModerator in a subreddit but aren't particularly confident with it, don't worry. You don't need to do anything, and will receive a modmail telling you when your subreddit has been moved to the new version.

Converting to the new version

For those of you that are interested in the specifics of what's new and want to look into converting your subreddits yourself or taking advantage of some new capabilities, this section has links to pages and documentation related to the new version. A decent number of knowledgeable users have been helping me to test the new version over the last week as well, so they should also be able to help. One warning in advance: due to the syntax changes, other than the pages linked below on the reddit.com wiki, almost all information about AutoModerator syntax on the internet is now somewhat obsolete. I'll be trying to add warnings about this to as many places as I can, but just take care with where you're finding information about how to do anything.

Here are the links, please feel free to ask any questions at all in this thread (or make a new post in /r/AutoModerator) and I'll try to help out or update any parts of the pages that are confusing.

• Information about how to manually convert to the new version (again, this is not necessary for you to do yourselves)

• Basic information about AutoModerator

• Introduction to writing AutoModerator rules

• Full documentation

We've noticed that in situations where a mod's account gets taken over (ATO'd), one of the first actions by the attacker is to demod everyone else. Since there have been previously been no notifications on removal, there's a critical delay between the ATO and the newly kicked moderators noticing and letting us know something is up. The intention here is to cut down on that delay while we work on tightening security in other ways.

The message is sent via modmail to create a sort of "paper trail" within the subreddit. This also means the newly demodded (demoted?) user gets an official notice from the subreddit rather than from a specific user (as a way to try to minimize subsequent drama if this is a legitimate removal).

Here's the commit, for those interested.

Also, 2FA. I know you want to ask about that. As I mentioned last week, we're working on it.

On the comments page for self-posts, there is a new button above the comment section for "sticky this post". By using that button, that self-post will stay "stuck" at the top of your subreddit's hot page, regardless of age/voting/etc.

Some more important details about how this works:

• Yes, this works for mobile users. Unlike CSS ways of doing a "sticky/announcement", this inserts the sticky into the listing itself, so it will come up at the top of the subreddit for mobile users as well. At least initially, apps won't know to treat this any differently, so it will simply appear to always be the #1 post in the subreddit for them.

• Users can still choose to hide the sticky, so do not count on the post always remaining visible to everyone. If they do hide it, they are hiding that individual submission (not the overall concept of a sticky), so any new stickies in the future will be visible to them initially again.

• Outside of your subreddit, the post will look and behave like every other submission. A stickied post will still appear in /new when it is new, still exists in /r/all, it will not be stuck to the top of users' front pages, etc.

• The stickied link has the stickied class inside the subreddit if you want to style it differently with CSS. The default style gives it a bold green title inside the subreddit.

Now that this is finally available, please please please stop asking users to "upvote for visibility" for your announcements. Asking for votes is one of the very few things against the overall rules of reddit, so it sets a really terrible example for users and makes them think it's okay to ask for votes too when they feel like their submissions are "extra important".

Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback about this feature.

Hey Mods,

Tomorrow we’ll be launching spoiler tags to all subreddits. You can read more about the feature in the changelog post. This has been an oft requested feature and we’re excited to finally share it with you all.

Overview:

• Mods and OP can tag posts as spoilers

• Spoilers are supported across our 4 platforms: desktop, mobile web, iOS & Android

• When a post is tagged as a spoiler:

  • It is labelled with a tag

  • Its thumbnail is replaced with an icon

  • Its preview (if available) is hidden and requires a click to reveal

• If a post title contains ‘spoiler’ or ‘spoilers’ it will be automatically tagged as a spoiler. However, in the cases where a title contains ‘no spoiler’ or ‘no spoilers’ it will not be automatically tagged. This is the same behavior as the NSFW tag.

• Like NSFW, AutoMod has a corresponding action set_spoiler: true/false

• By default marking and displaying spoilers is enabled for all subreddits. If spoilers are not appropriate, you can disable them via a subreddit setting on r/subredditname/about/edit: example.

If you want to see spoilers in action, check out r/powerlanguagetest.

Thank you to all the subreddits that helped beta test this feature.

Note: This feature is spoiler support for posts not comments. We’ll be looking at adding spoiler support for comments in the future.

edit: r/cssnews post here: r/cssnews/comments/5ojv90/upcoming_css_change_spoiler_tags/

Hi Mods,

You may recall from my announcement post earlier this year that I mentioned we’re currently working on a full redesign of the site, which brings me to the two topics I wanted to talk to you about today: Custom Styles and Mod Tools.

Custom Styles

Custom community styles are a key component in allowing communities to express their identity, and we want to preserve this in the site redesign. For a long time, we’ve used CSS as the mechanism for subreddit customization, but we’ll be deprecating CSS during the redesign in favor of a new system over the coming months. While CSS has provided a wonderful creative canvas to many communities, it is not without flaws:

• It’s web-only. Increasing users are viewing Reddit on mobile (over 50%), where CSS is not supported. We’d love for you to be able to bring your spice to phones as well.

• CSS is a pain in the ass: it’s difficult to learn; it’s error-prone; and it’s time consuming.

• Some changes cause confusion (such as changing the subscription numbers).

• CSS causes us to move slow. We’d like to make changes more quickly. You’ve asked us to improve things, and one of the things that slows us down is the risk of breaking subreddit CSS (and third-party mod tools).

We’re designing a new set of tools to address the challenges with CSS but continue to allow communities to express their identities. These tools will allow moderators to select customization options for key areas of their subreddit across platforms. For example, header images and flair colors will be rendered correctly on desktop and mobile.

We know great things happen when we give users as much flexibility as possible. The menu of options we’ll provide for customization is still being determined. Our starting point is to replicate as many of the existing uses that already exist, and to expand beyond as we evolve.

We will also natively supporting a lot of the functionality that subreddits currently build into the sidebar via a widget system. For instance, a calendar widget will allow subreddits to easily display upcoming events. We’d like this feature and many like it to be accessible to all communities.

How are we going to get there? We’ll be working closely with as many of you as possible to design these features. The process will span the next few months. We have a lot of ideas already and are hoping you’ll help us add and refine even more. The transition isn’t going to be easy for everyone, so we’ll assist communities that want help (i.e. we’ll do it for you). u/powerlanguage will be reaching out for alpha testers.

Mod Tools

Mod tools have evolved over time to be some of the most complex parts of Reddit, both in terms of user experience and the underlying code. We know that these tools are crucial for the maintaining the health of your communities, and we know many of you who moderate very large subreddits depend on third-party tools for your work. Not breaking these tools is constantly on our mind (for better or worse).

We’re in contact with the devs of Toolbox, and would like to work together to port it to the redesign. Once that is complete, we’ll begin work on updating these tools, including supporting natively the most requested features from Toolbox.

The existing site and the redesigned site will run in parallel while we make these changes. That is, we don’t have plans for turning off the current site anytime soon. If you depend on functionality that has not yet been transferred to the redesign, you will still have a way to perform those actions.

While we have your attention… we’re also growing our internal team that handles spam and bad-actors. Our current focus is on report abuse. We’ve caught a lot of bad behavior. We hope you notice the difference, and we’ll keep at it regardless.

Moving Forward

We know moderation can feel janitorial–thankless and repetitive. Thank you for all that you do. Our goal is to take care much of that burden so you can focus on helping your communities thrive.

Big changes are ahead. These are fundamental, core issues that we’ll be grappling with together–changes to how communities are managed and express identity are not taken lightly. We’ll be giving you further details as we move forward, but wanted to give you a heads up early.

Thanks for reading.

update: now that I've cherry-picked all the easy questions, I'm going to take off and leave the hard ones for u/powerlanguage. I'll be back in a couple hours.

No, seriously. We know it’s taken us a while to build two-factor authentication. We’re starting to roll it out beginning with a beta phase. We’ll release it soon to all moderators and to users afterwards.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds additional security to your Reddit account. It requires a 6-digit verification code generated from your phone in addition to your username and password to login. If a malicious user has your username and password, your account would still not be accessible if the feature is enabled. It’s especially important for our moderators, some of whom manage communities with millions of subscribers.

How it works

When signing in with your username and password to Reddit on desktop, mobile, or third-party apps, you’ll be asked to enter a 6-digit verification code which expires after a short time.

Verification codes are generated using an authenticator app (we’ll support codes delivered via SMS text in the future). Examples of these apps are Google Authenticator, Authy, or any app supporting the TOTP protocol.

Next Steps

Initially we are rolling this out to a small number of moderators to work out any unanticipated bugs. If you have interest in participating in the beta release, please reply to the sticky comment below to sign up!

Edit: Grammar

Update on ETA (9/1/17):

Thanks for the replies! We’re planning on adding batches of users next week so stay tuned. We’ll continue signups until next Tuesday 9/5, so if you arrive to this thread before then there’s still time to enroll.

Update (9/6/17):

We’ve added the feature for those who replied to the sticky. You should receive a PM with information on setup, resources, and ways to submit feedback.

Please let us know if you run into any issues or have suggestions! We’ll continue rolling this out to the larger moderator user base.

Update (9/19/17):

Bug fixes:

• Sessions issue causing users with 2FA enabled to be logged out of Reddit

• Android/WebView issue where some users were kicked to the desktop login in the OAuth flow (affected Reddit is Fun)

Update (11/7/17):

Two-factor is now available for all mods.

Update (1/24/18):

Two-factor authentication is available to all users.

We've just released a new feature, post locking, to all moderators. This feature lets moderators stop a post from receiving any new comments. Here are some details:

• No new comments by users can be posted on a locked post. Everything else about that post is unaffected, including voting.

• Moderators and admins can still post comments on a locked thread

• Existing comments on a locked post can still be edited or deleted by their authors

• Moderators can unlock a locked post at any time, at which point comments can posted again

• Locking and unlocking a thread requires the posts mod privilege

• AutoModerator supports locking and unlocking posts with the set_locked action

What users see

• Users on reddit.com will see a notice at the top of a locked posts indicating that they won't be able to comment

• If a user tries to reply to a comment on reddit.com, they'll see a message indicating that the post is locked from new comments

• On a subreddit listing, locked posts will have the CSS class locked, so subreddits can choose to style locked posts. There is no styling for locked posts on listings by default.

• The experience on other platforms, such as mobile apps, will vary depending on what the developer has implemented. We'll be posting details about API changes to support locked posts in r/redditdev

This has been in beta for the last few weeks, and we've made multiple updates based on community feedback. Huge thanks to all of our beta-testing subreddits for helping us test this, and giving us feedback on what to improve.

As I'm sure most of you have already seen, Ellen made a post yesterday to apologize and talk about how we're going to work on improving communication and the overall situation in the future. As part of that, /u/krispykrackers has started a new, official subreddit at /r/ModSupport for us to use for talking with moderators, giving updates about what we're working on, etc. We're still going to keep using /r/modnews for major announcements that we want all mods to see, but /r/ModSupport should be a lot more active, and is open for anyone to post. In addition, if you have something that you want to contact /u/krispykrackers or us about privately related to moderator concerns, you can send modmail to /r/ModSupport instead of into the general community inbox at /r/reddit.com.

To get things started in there, I've also made a post looking for suggestions of small things we can try to fix fairly quickly. I'd like to keep that post (and /r/ModSupport in general) on topic, so I'm going to be treating this thread as a bit of a semi-AMA, if you have things that you'd like to ask me about this whole situation, reddit in general, etc. Keep in mind that I'm a developer, I really can't answer questions about why Victoria was fired, what the future plan is with AMAs, overall company direction, etc. But if you want to ask about things like being a dev at reddit, moderating, how reddit mechanics work (why isn't Ellen's karma going down?!), have the same conversation again about why I ruined reddit by taking away the vote numbers, tell me that /r/SubredditSimulator is the best part of the site, etc. we can definitely do that here. /u/krispykrackers will also be around, if you have questions that are more targeted to her than me.

Here's a quick introduction, for those of you that don't really know much about me:

I'm Deimorz. I've been visiting reddit for almost 8 years now, and before starting to work here I was already quite involved in the moderation/community side of things. I got into that by becoming a moderator of /r/gaming, after pointing out a spam operation targeting the subreddit. As part of moderating there, I ended up creating AutoModerator to make the job easier, since the official mod tools didn't cover a lot of the tasks I found myself doing regularly. After about a year in /r/gaming I also ended up starting /r/Games with the goal of having a higher-quality gaming subreddit, and left /r/gaming not long after to focus on building /r/Games instead. Throughout that, I also continued working on various other reddit-related things like the now-defunct stattit.com, which was a statistics site with lots of data/graphs about subreddits and moderators.

I was hired by reddit about 2.5 years ago (January 2013) after applying for the "reddit gold developer" job, and have worked on a pretty large variety of things while I've been here. reddit gold was my focus for quite a while, but I've also worked on some moderator tools, admin tools, anti-spam/cheating measures, etc.

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.

Oh, hello there mods.

Last year, we were excited to launch a slew of new modmail features and improvements like:

• rate limits

• mute length option

• ban appeals folder

• advanced search UX

• share private message link

As great as that was, we knew we had unfinished business to make sure we were building a feature with all the bells and whistles that mods need. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making the following improvements:

• Bulk Actions -- We’ve heard you ask for this and here it finally is: Highlight/Unhighlight, Mark As Read / Unread, Archive / Unarchive in multiple messages at once. This launches today!

• User Join Requests Folder (& enabling Join Requests on Private subs) -- Users that request to join a subreddit will go to their own “Join Requests” folder in modmail. Mods can easily “approve” or ignore the request from the inbox without jumping into the messages. We’re also expanding the ‘request to join’ button to Private subreddits. You can disable it if you’re not accepting new members in community settings. This launches today!

Thank you to our Mod Council for sharing how difficult it is to manage your private community membership. We’re able to build better with your feedback.

• Response Indicators -- We know how annoying it can be to send a modmail only to later see that a fellow mod has also responded. It’s annoying for mods and confusing for users. Good news! Soon we’ll let you know if a fellow mod has started typing a response or if a new message has been sent but not loaded in the message you're looking at.

• Many under the hood improvements that shouldn't affect you but will result in a more stable and performant service.

The future of legacy modmail

Four and half years ago (yep you read that right) we launched “beta” modmail and it featured a number of substantial improvements over legacy modmail:

• Aggregate modmail across multiple subreddits so you can conveniently switch between subreddit inboxes.

• Support for shared inbox archiving, highlighting, mod team only notes and auditing mod team actions so that your team can be efficient and in sync.

• Reply as a subreddit to keep the focus on the message and not the messenger.

• Integrated user panel featuring the most recent posts, comments and modmail messages from the user you’re messaging so you have more context at hand.

• Folders for filtering in-progress messages, archived messages, mod only messages, notifications and highlighted messages to improve organization.

• New modmail APIs to automate your messages.

Along the way, we made a lot of progress and launched the following enhancements:

• Enabled search across modmail so you can find that message about the thing that was sent by someone with “Pogs” in their username, the third Tuesday in June.

• New rate limits to curb spam and abuse.

• A new folder for ban appeals so you can be in the right headspace for these decisions.

• Added new mute length options and total mute counts to let you decide how long someone needs to chill before they smash the reply button.

• Added more advanced search UI capabilities to make it easier to harness these powers.

• Built private message links to reference specific private messages with users

• And all our upcoming features mentioned above.

“New” modmail has a superior feature setlist and we can no longer justify maintaining two separate modmail services and features. As we prepare for building out support for native mobile modmail in the second half of the year, we’re consolidating our support for one modmail service. Given that, we’re planning to officially depreciate support for legacy modmail. Here’s our current plan:

• In the second half of June, we’ll automatically transition all remaining subreddits to new modmail and we’ll turn legacy modmail into read-only access for 30 days. After this, you will no longer be able to respond to users in legacy modmail message so you should really consider self upgrading earlier by opting in from Subreddit Settings: “new modmail enrollment”

• Around late July, we’ll remove links to legacy modmail and redirect them to mod.reddit.com

We’ll be sure to give folks multiple heads up well in advance so they can prepare for the transition, and we’ll also be sending out a series of modmail messages to affected mod teams to remind them as we get closer to the date. If you believe you have any special considerations (like bots and other integrations), please use the stickied comment below to share your special considerations.

We’ll be hanging out in the comments answering your questions and secretly gilding comments for the next few hours.

Hey Mods,

This is a long post, but please take the time to read all of it. Important information lies herein.

You may remember that 3 months ago we put the call out for subreddits to help beta test the New Modmail that we were building. Since then we’ve been talking to mods in r/modmailbeta and making changes based on their feedback (special mention to u/jakkarth and the r/DIY mods, u/tizorres, u/korbendallas and the r/partyparrot crew and u/creesch and the r/toolbox developers for all their feedback). We’re now ready to go to general release. This means:

• Existing subreddits can enroll to use the new modmail

• Newly created subreddits will be automatically enrolled in the new modmail

Key features of the new modmail:

• Clean design

• Quickly see what modmail needs addressing

• Archive modmail that has been resolved so other mods don't have to waste time reviewing it

• Send replies as the subreddit

• Leave internal moderator notes (messages in a thread that are not visible to the end user)

• See recent posts, comments and modmail messages from the end user

• See actions that other mods have taken on the thread

• Route notifications from scripts and bots to a separate folder

You can read a full list of features in the help documentation.

What to know before enrolling

Enrolling into modmail is on a per-subreddit level, not per-user. This means enroll in will affect every mod on your subreddit. Please do not enroll your subreddit in until you have discussed it internally with your co-mods.

Once you enroll all incoming modmail will be created in the new system. Old modmail will still be accessible via the legacy system. If someone replies to a thread created before you enrolled in the new system, it will show up in the legacy system

The new system is a change from legacy modmail. Change can be scary. If you want to test out the new modmail before enrolling your subreddits, we’ve set up a sandbox subreddit: r/modmailsandbox. To become a mod, PM u/bouncerbot with the subject 'join' and it will mod you.

Additionally, because this is a new system 3rd party apps and tools may not work straight away. If anyone on your mod team depends upon these tools to use modmail, you may want to consider waiting to enroll in the new modmail. We’ll be working on documenting the New Modmail API once we’re confident everything is stable post-launch.

How to enroll

We’ve added a preference on the subreddit settings page. A mod will need config and mail perms to enroll the subreddit. As stated before, enrolling into the new modmail will affect every mod on your subreddit. Please do not enroll your subreddit in until you have discussed it internally with your co-mods.

Due to some changes in authentication scope, you may need to log out of Reddit and log back in to be able to access the New Modmail.

How to use new modmail

• Firstly, read the help documentation as it explains the structure of the New Modmail

• You can access New Modmail by clicking the shield icon in the header area.

• The r/history mods have been kind enough to share their workflow for the New Modmail .

• The demo video from the beginning of the beta will give you a rough idea of how the message flow works (though there have been some changes since the video was made).

And finally a big thank you to u/d3fect, u/nr4madas, u/toasties, u/uzi and u/deimorz (😢), for all their work on modmail.

I’ll be around for a while answering any questions you may have in the comments.

Hey mods,

We launched our native apps today, and a part of that is easy image uploading through the apps.

These are direct image links stored on i.reddituploads.com. Examples here: https://www.reddit.com/domain/i.reddituploads.com

We've had a couple questions with the launch around whether i.reddituploads.com is legitimate and owned by reddit - the answer is yes. For those of you who restrict images or restrict to specific direct-image-only domains, you may want to update your automoderator configs.

A new setting is now available near the bottom of the subreddit settings page - "Minutes to hide comment scores". If set, comments in the subreddit will have their score hidden for the specified number of minutes, after which the score will appear as normal.

For example, if set to "60", any comments less than an hour old will not show their score. Voting still behaves normally, and behavior of the page will not otherwise be affected (best/top sorting will still use the scores, comments with score less than the user's threshold will be collapsed, etc.), but the comment's actual score will not be visible until it is at least that many minutes old.

The goal of this feature is to try to reduce the initial bandwagon/snowball voting, where if a comment gets a few initial downvotes it often continues going negative, or vice versa. By hiding the score for a while after posting, the bias of seeing how other people voted on the comment should be greatly reduced.

Some other notes about how this feature works:

• The maximum for the setting is 1440 minutes (24 hours).

• Scores will remain visible to moderators (and admins).

• Scores will also be hidden for RES users, mobile users, etc. (will display as the comment having the default 1 point in mobile clients)

One thing I want to note is that if you decide to try this out in your subreddit, it's probably a good idea to solicit community feedback on it. Since the scores are not hidden for moderators, your own experience won't be affected at all by it and it will be difficult to judge how it feels for users.

Let me know if you have any other questions or feedback, I'm definitely really interested in seeing how many subreddits use this and what sort of effects it has.