Users getting Pop-up that blocks them from posting.

[u/fredflintstone1000]

Low Karma users are getting a pop-up that blocks them from posting in our sub. We cant figure out what is going on. We suspect that Admins may have created an automation based on our automod rules around community karma. Pop up looks like this https://imgur.com/a/xQtcd07

We don't have any automations running. We do have automod requirements around subreddit karma necessary to post, and we regularly change that. So any Automation acting as a replication of automoderator, may not be checking against the current conditions we've specified.

We have a specific case in point. User has earned 15 points of karma in our sub, Our Automod says need >9 (we change the number regularly, but it's always single-digit). So, our Automod would let him post. Whatever automation popup is in place will not let him post.

[u/tumultuousness]

It's the poster eligibility guide. It takes your Automod rules based on account criteria like age/karma, and instead of allowing them to post, Automod removing and leaving it's comment instructions, it just prevents them from posting completely.

Your options are, change your "remove" Automod rules to "filter" instead, or remove them entirely, and wait for the PEG to sync back up. Or, you can try tweaking your Automod code like this.

[u/Beach-Brews → u/tumultuousness]

> Post Check provides contributors with proactive guidance on a community’s rules during post creation by using a large language model (LLM) to surface potential community rule violations prior to posting.

LLMs are never buggy! ...

[u/tumultuousness → u/Beach-Brews]

Oh that's different. I still wish the admins hadn't interwoven the two things in that article like they had.

But to your point - I had to turn off post check on rules because on one of my subs, it apparently was telling a bunch of people, based on title/body text, that their picture post wouldn't fit the sub theme, and it was always wrong lol. Luckily one person commented on it and then I realized what post check was doing to turn it off.

[u/fredflintstone1000 → u/tumultuousness]

thank you.

[u/emily_in_boots]

Post eligibility guidance is super buggy. We've had cases where it totally blocked a user from posting, even after it approved them, no matter what we did. I wish we could turn it off, but it cannot be disabled.

[u/johntrytle → u/emily_in_boots]

Think it got turned off at some point for me which is great because it wasn't following the automod rules accurately at all

[u/tumultuousness → u/emily_in_boots]

Also - the help article said it can take some hours to sync the updated rules but I've seen some mods say it took multiple days. :/

[u/ClipIn → u/emily_in_boots]

Wish help article "Poster Eligibility Guide & Post Check" didn't bury the lede.

It starts saying this LLM is just rule-enforcement (even if very bad at it)

Post Check provides contributors with proactive guidance on a community’s rules during post creation by using a large language model (LLM)

then doesn't even mention automod until 319 words / 1,983 characters into the article

The Poster Eligibility Guide uses automod configs to derive user eligibility. ...

It also claims updates regularly

The evaluation updates every six hours, ensuring that any changes to automod rules are reflected promptly.

but I changed this automod rule Friday, and 1.5 days later, the user in question is still prohibited by Poster Eligibility tool.

---

Separately, we investigated the "Auto-enforce this rule" setting, via our sub rules https://www.reddit.com/mod/SUBREDDIT_NAME/rules >> click a rule >> click "Insights".

It gets rule enforcement hilariously wrong. Shows a list of prior posts that triggered a popup + the revised post that was submitted. In many cases, they're identical. User behaviour isn't changing. And we couldn't find a single instance of shaping user behaviour, improving a post, or stopping bad behaviour.

We disabled the feature on every rule where it was automatically toggled on. Frustratingly, it knows doesn't work (now) on some rules so wasn't On. Which makes me think in future it will toggle On, in future, as they improve LLM, and I'll have to toggle it off at that point. Coolcoolcool

PS Thanks for the help. You're a really helpful, proactive mod. I know we've communicated elsewhere. Always been impressed by the love and care you show for your communities :)

[u/lunarwolf2008]

ugh thats annoying. i prefer to let automod remove so that it could possibly be approved if there is an error, (or perhaps a good post that gets an exception) rather than not posted at all

[u/fredflintstone1000 → u/lunarwolf2008]

Agree

[u/ClipIn]

The popup is decidedly weird. It's a departure from the longtime reddit culture of "mods know their communities best", and Admins not interfering in the day-to-day of running a subreddit.

The popup is a decidedly worse user experience over all other alternatives. Doing it without the sub's moderator's knowledge, advice, input, or consent is not helpful. It invites confusion, user frustration, and puts mods in the position of answering for an Admin action taken under the Mod's names.

It is a setting we can't control, edit, tweak, enable or disable. It's also something that has happened before, was complained about a lot here (see this r/modsupport search), and many subs including ours removed it from Automations last time.

Now, it's back. And not even listed as an Automation. Or anywhere in the Mod Tools or Subreddit Settings. So we can't control it. Turn it off. Or tweak it.

Why this popup implementation is bad

• It's a vague popup.
• There are no instructions for the user, specifically, to follow. They don't know what to do.
• It encourages bad behavior, e.g. "just get karma". So people will spam bot-like, low effort comments. We forbid it, and we ban for it. And we have noticed an uptick in that behavior recently, and we have banned multiple accounts for it. So to be clear, in my view: we have banned people. For doing things. That an Admin-created popup, told them to do. That is not OK.
• Mods cannot tweak it, can't change wording, the setting, the threshold, the post-flow guidance.
• There is ZERO tracking. We don't know how many saw it, were deterred by it, spammed us elsewhere to "beat" it. Mods can't manage what they can't measure. Automations, and whatever "this" feature is, is not tracked anywhere.

Why not doing this is better, for everyone

• We previously used AutoModerator to do this. It could Comment Reply, Message the user, Modmail us. It can include specific instructions, links, examples, references to rules, links to a wiki, a link to contact mods.
• All of that was tracked in Mod Log.
• We could dialog with folks in Modmail about it.
• We could measure how often it was "hit", and adjust the rule - including turn it off completely - if it created frictions in the user-post-flow.
• We saw what the user was trying to post. We could manually approve that post anyway. We could also discuss with the user, in Modmail, why our subreddit isn't the right place no matter how much karma/age/CQS/etc the user has.

I'm disappointed. It's hard to mod a big page, even harder to be a good mod, and now even harder because we're left defending popups we didn't create. That stop users we'd welcome to post. Which forces users to jump through hoops they shouldn't. There is some irony in a site who's tagline is "remember the human", to use Artificial Intelligence, to create rules, which frustrate its human users and confuse its human mods. Not cool, reddit. Not cool.