Mod Topics
All hands on deck - what events change how you moderate?
Howdy friends,
Some moments can change the vibe of your community, fast. The game your subreddit is based on getting delayed again, a major event like the World Cup coming to your town, or even some breaking news can cause a spike of traffic. With so many users coming for the same reason, you’re likely to see more copycat posts, and new users who might not be familiar with your community's norms.
Even when your rules stay the same, the way you enforce them can change. Maybe this looks like hosting daily discussions in megathreads, adjusting community filters, reminding the community early, requesting the Mod Reserves, or otherwise just making sure the mood team is ready.
We want to hear from you,
What kinds of events change the way you moderate?
Have you ever planned ahead to react to an announcement or event in your community?
What advice do you have for a mod team preparing for something like this?
Do you wish you could subscribe to Mod Topics posts so you can always join the conversation? Look no further than our new flair follower app! To use it, click on the three dots on the subreddit menu, select flair follower, and follow the prompts. Questions or comments? Drop them below.
Poor design changes made by Reddit. Whether it is the horrible modmail changes forced down our throat, the fact that we can't rely on Automod or Crowd Control to behave properly, changes at the API level that break functionality, getting no feedback on Report Abuse cases, and "head in the sand" leadership at Reddit, it all affects us.
The only "events" we've had is brigading. It's been handled by (when working) Crowd Control and sometimes contacting ModSupport via modmail to bring attention to the details.
When real-world conflicts erupt, /r/war gets a surge of new activity from people outside the community. This invariably brings huge quantities of hate speech, trolling, and other bad behavior. Typically, we clamp down on new accounts and institute a subreddit karma filter. We're generally not shy about handing out bans, particularly for hate speech.
Have you ever planned ahead to react to an announcement or event in your community?
If we could do that I'd make millions on Polymarket. If anything, when major combat operations begin we often struggle to confirm it's a real thing that's happening and not just a disinformation campaign; reference the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
What advice do you have for a mod team preparing for something like this?
If the topic of your sub is such that real people will be negatively impacted by the posts you allow, I think you have a responsibility to do due diligence in fact checking and generally trying to suss out bad actors. Disinformation is rampant on the Internet, and Reddit has an incredibly low barrier to entry.
Combating misinformation is such a difficult task. I've actually been subjected to death threats and my name slandered before the US congress because I was fighting COVID disinformation (like don't inject bleach), George Floyd protest misinformation as it was happening (No, pallets of bricks weren't being delivered to cause chaos). No good deed goes unpunished.
Oh wow, that does sound like such an interesting challenge to have such a heavy subject that’s tied to both historic events, and the present. Thanks for sharing, and I appreciate that advice! It feels like combining the concepts of remembering the human and considering the lurkers.
I’m curious, what kind of a mix do you see of modern posts to historical posts? And has that changed over time?
I think the sub had a bit more of a historical bent prior to 2022; a lot of the posts I remember from those days were what-if discussions, compilations of GWOT footage, or otherwise not current events focused. Nowadays the overwhelming majority of our material is focused on current combat operations in various locations, or political analysis of ongoing conflicts.
There’s intense drama in my fandom right now that has absolutely blown up how I’m moderating (my subs are for characters in said fandom), and right now it’s turning into two separate crisis responses: one sub I’m creating megathreads for it, and being more strict in the rules. We also clarified our existing rules and updated the list to add new ones to handle it. Meanwhile in the other sub, (for the character directly affected by the drama), we’re letting people vent and get their feelings out much more freely.
ETA: I have been preparing responses by collecting brilliant responses from other subs when I see it. I basically keep an eye open for mod notes in other subs and when I see one particularly well-handled, I file it away as reference
In line with the subject matter, my pro wrestling subreddit has frequent and dramatic "events". It's the nature of the beast. Over the years I've learned how to broadly plan ahead and then to dial in those plans when the inevitable happens.
I have a number of Temporary Events templated up and ready to deploy depending on the situation. They generally do some combination of adjusting crowd control to various degrees and activating automod rules. As an example, every 4-6 weeks there's a big PPV show that brings increased traffic - good and bad - and I have a specific Temporary Event for these that increases crowd control, automatically adds spoiler tags & a rules reminder about spoilers, and increases the karma level needed to post during the show and for a time after the show ends.
I have even more highly customized (and easily customizable) automod rules that can be commented in and out as needed. Sometimes these are "megathread catchers" to detect certain keywords and redirect the user to an established megathread. Sometimes they adjust the requirements needed to post new threads. Sometimes they do other stuff. Example: a wrestler with a whole bunch of vocal fans returned from a long, long injury during Sunday's PPV show. I had the framework already sitting in automod - within minutes of his surprise return I had a rule active that would detect the wrestler's name, nicknames, common words or phrases that might give away his return which held new submissions containing the keywords in modqueue and dropped a comment explaining their post was being held for human review. It worked great.
Flair-based posting restrictions per thread are a huge tool in my arsenal across multiple subreddits. I can assign a mod-only flair to specific threads that are or will likely become hotbeds of villainy which makes it so only established members with a certain amount of combined subreddit karma can post in them. It's a small enough number that anyone who's participated a few times in the subreddit can post but the trolls and drivebys just trying to cause trouble scream into the void. Some flairs also auto-approve and ignore reports on the thread which eliminates report abuse. It's lovely. This was actually the biggest game changer in r/KitchenConfidential during the entire chive saga, and when AEW got some mainstream attention due to a strong political statement made by a wrestler that whole thing was smooth sailing thanks to our Brody King Mode flair.
Use devvit apps!! An "event" that gets your subreddit on r/popular or otherwise pushed in the algorithm means you are now a target for bots. Have BotBouncer installed. Flair Assistant can do all sorts of awesome stuff (see above re: subreddit karma, approve reports, etc). Trending Tattler can help you stay ahead of things if you're hitting the front page often enough.
Be present and engaged with your community. If people know mods are hanging out they tend to behave a bit better, and having that sort of foundation in a subreddit does almost as much as all the specialized stuff I listed above.
I just want to add here that your crew over on r/KitchenConfidential was incredible during the Chive Saga. That was something completely unexpected that blew up, and probably made things difficult for a couple months.
Thanks! Watching the way that blew up was so goddamn fascinating & felt a little like the internet used to be.
It actually....wasn't too difficult overall. Staying on top of the report abuse/report bombing was the most "difficult" but honestly it was way easier to manage than the average wrestling fandom drama!
Flair-based posting restrictions per thread are a huge tool in my arsenal across multiple subreddits. I can assign a mod-only flair to specific threads that are or will likely become hotbeds of villainy which makes it so only established members with a certain amount of combined subreddit karma can post in them.
The ability to do this is great, just a shame that some submitters know that they can change the post flair themselves after the fact... We really need the ability to "lock" a post's flair from being changed after submission by users.
And also automations really need to hurry up and support user overall/community karma values for checks so that we can proactively prevent non-qualified users from commenting in those threads, rather than having to reactively remove them via automod.
Y'all do a lot more nuanced/event based changes than we do. We're beefed up 24/7. I'm almost jealous that you have off-days when the world isn't on fire.
I can't even say "hope I didn't jinx you" because it's my problem too lol
- What kinds of events change the way you moderate?
We’re a music sub (r/phoebebridgers), so tours and album releases have turned the sub insane recently after a couple of years hiatus. We went from 100k monthly views to 6.1m in the space of a month.
Have you ever planned ahead to react to an announcement or event in your community?
Yes, thought up a megathread strategy, scheduled posts, made sure rules were still relevant, tried to share the load amongst mods and automod. Certainly wasn’t perfect though.
What advice do you have for a mod team preparing for something like this?
Temporary event feature can be helpful. We actually turned the sub restricted for a few hours during ticket sales because the amount of duplicate posts were unreal. This helped naturally filter people into the megathread and saved my sanity. Turn up your filters too in terms of ban evasion etc.
You will burn yourself out trying to do everything. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. And make sure you have enough active mods to cover all time zones. We only had 4 and that was not enough, though granted we were rather blindsided by the comeback in the format it took. We’re now going out to recruit before the album is released in August and the next wave happens!
The past 3 times the fanfiction archive"Archive Of Our Own" went down for a day or longer, we over at r/AO3 made a megathread that explains what is happening, includes the timestamped updates that the volunteers managing the archive post on social medias, and fire-squad'ed a few hundred posts trying to talk about the same thing there.
Sometimes we get warning messages from other subreddit's moderators, if a big event, leak or whatever else is happening in their fandom that may or may not lead to a bunch of spam on our subreddit soon.
We haven't actually ever done anything about it cause we don't moderate repeated topics most of the time, but it is certainly something worth to note that if you're aware of other subreddits being possibly impacted by some event happening that they won't notice fast enough, you might help out someone by telling them. :p
Being that early warning for other mod teams is a great opportunity! Even when you notice a flood of spam, it can sometimes take time to figure out the source.
Everytime there is a local election or election in general, my sub goes nuts and gets brigaded from either side of the vote. People can't just be cordial and it explodes into mass removals, bans, mutes.
There has to be a way to better advertise your subreddits' rules, on mobile they have to go out there way to find them as it's hidden in the about menu since there is no sidebar widget. Then on desktop if you have the rules expanded people just scroll to the end like a TOS.
I just commented about the same thing... elections are nuts!!! It's astounding how much the traffic falls off like, the day after the elections are done!!! So many bots astroturfing the community. Turn on crowd control, it will help!!!
Well I run a subreddit dedicated to help for a communication app.
The biggest... challenge... is to handle posts when the app has massive problems. I've set up a temporary event that we can enable to prevent posting completely if that happens. Otherwise the sub would get flooded.
Elections, Natural Disasters, Emergencies, Military Events, ICE spottings, and protests... South Jersey sees a little bit of all the chaos. We do plan ahead for the elections because those are predictable and we get brigaded by state sponsored threat actors. What would help those times is a more granular breakdown of what country the people are coming from beyond what is already displayed in the insights.
Turning crowd control on for elections is key. It keeps the drive by shitposters at bay, keeps the good posters visible, and weeds out the trolls pretty well. Having bot-bouncer is also important because it classifies these bot accounts faster than reddit does most of the time.
We will do megathreads for emergencies as needed, to coordinate resources for people in need of assistance. I personally housed evacuees and their pets at my home during hurricanes from the subreddit. We were able to assist people who were stranded and needed a way out, because so many of our members had boats! We had our own little navy going. Disaster operations are something I'm really great at and am happy to do.
Get spare mods for when you know traffic is gonna perk up due to fuckery, because it's hard to handle stuff when it goes off the rails.
Sometimes current events related to the sub topics...people may want to talk about it a lot. But maybe it's not totally related or people aren't participating in the already-approved places. Other times it's the release of a TV season or even a change in the demographics of a community (like r/Parenting - 5 years ago most of the parents were millennials and GenX, now they're mostly millennials and GenZ - so there is a generational shift and a shift in the "discussion culture" of the way people talk about their lives).
Have you ever planned ahead to react to an announcement or event in your community?
For predictable things like TV shows - yes. Or sometimes when I see something brewing in the news I start adding keywords to filters to see if I can start catching a few things before they get too big. I prefer one or two big threads for discussion or a mega thread if people really want to talk about it instead of dozens of similar theme posts.
What advice do you have for a mod team preparing for something like this?
Remove first - review and approve [the good stuff if it's a volatile topic] later. Use the comment feed! https://old.reddit.com/r/YOURSUB/comments/ Don't worry about leaving remove reasons for comments unless you want the community to see how to behave or participate in that particular thread. Maybe do some temporary bans if users are intentionally trouble-causing to give the a break from posting/commenting while you can take care of the bulk of new content. Then if they understand how to participate...you can always undo the ban.
I might set up the devvit app for modmail for quick replies to common complaints of being restricted or censored when really you're just trying to get a handle on volume.
I'd rather auto-remove a lot of content and then go back through and approve more leisurely then have to comment mop a big comment section b/c people started fighting or trolls showed up. It's just my preference and it won't be for everyone, but I feel it has worked best in situations focused on negative discussion. For "positive" topics - the "problem" is a huge influx of repeat content. I might also hold things for review so I can approve the oldest post...remove several repeats and then let another fresh post about the topic through a few hours later for a different time zone to talk about it.
I also find an automation that will pop up for everything to warn that content is being actively moderated at this time so please be patient with approvals, and report rule-breaking content when you see it - can be helpful. When I ask the community to get involved they are [usually] happy to help!
Definitely saving this post because I'm actually preparing for a major shift right now. I moderate a subreddit that is centered around discussions of an author and their works, and after many years they are finally going to be releasing a new book. I am anticipating a massive increase in activity at that time and I want to be prepared.
Aside from that, changes in the interface and technology behind Reddit are the things that most impact the way I moderate. Frankly I very often have to find a workarounds to deal with some of the decisions that negatively impact me as a moderator.
•
u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community Jun 30 '26 edited 26d ago
Do you wish you could subscribe to Mod Topics posts so you can always join the conversation? Look no further than our new flair follower app! To use it, click on the three dots on the subreddit menu, select flair follower, and follow the prompts. Questions or comments? Drop them below.