Hi Mods,
We’ve been working on a few things to make it easier for you to host events for your communities. Over the last week, we’ve invited a few mod teams (see comments for the list) to start trying them out as a beta, so we wanted to let the rest of you know what’s up as well.
Why are we doing this?
Many people come to Reddit during events—whether it's an AMA, a TV show premiere, a sports finale, or another newsworthy development. The problem is that it’s hard for users to find these events (both when they’re happening and when the next one is occurring) and even harder for mods to host and manage them using our existing tools.
Solutions like AutoModerator scheduler aren’t super accessible or easy to use for mods who aren't already AutoMod wizards, and other hacks communities have used to manage events have shown us where our tools could be improved.
So, what are the features?
We're building a suite of mod-only features to solve these problems:
- Event post metadata: This gives mods the ability to add start/end date/time information to posts. Users can see the start/end time from listings pages and on the posts themselves and “follow” the events. In the coming weeks, following the event will send them an app notification when the event starts.
- Post submission scheduling: This gives mods the ability to schedule when a post should be submitted. The first version of post scheduling will be event-focused with options to submit now or submit at event start time only.
- Post collections: This gives mods the ability to group posts together in a community “collection”. Users will be able to view and switch between posts within a collection easily. They can share a collection URL, which will automatically direct them to the in-progress/most recent event post (e.g., if I made a collection of pre-, live- and post- game threads for last week’s Notre Dame v Wake Forest college football game and you clicked the collection URL, it would open the post- game thread. If I clicked that same link when the game was in progress, I’d see the live- game thread). That said, you can still easily get back to the other posts in the collection as well.
We’ve broken event metadata, post scheduling, and post collections into separate features because we believe they have broader utility than the Events-specific use case and want to give mods flexibility as you test these out. Our goal for each of these is to reduce the amount of time/effort you put into hosting an event on Reddit and to make it easier for more mods to help host. As we evaluate these features, we may decide to invest more in some and less in others. Your feedback will help us prioritize this and we’ll keep you posted along the way.
I want to try it out, how can I?
We’re testing these features out with a few mod teams and going to launch a series of improvements over the next month or so. For now, you can join our waitlist. We’ll enable more mod teams periodically.
Thanks,
Hey mods!
We wanted to let you know that Reddit is once again partnering with National Voter Registration Day to help Americans register to vote on Tuesday, September 25th. In addition to the stuff you’ll see us do around the site at the admin level that day, we wanted to invite you to think about how you might spread the word in ways appropriate to your communities. Last year we only reached out individually to a narrow set of politically-focused subs, and the overwhelming feedback that we got was that a broader set of communities really wanted to participate. Message received! So here we are.
As you think about ways that your community may participate, be creative. In addition to sticky posts, custom styling, and the like, you might also want to consider more specialized ideas. Custom flair for those who demonstrate they’ve registered (be careful of PII, though)? Or maybe something more tailored to the subject of your community...TIFU, the not-being-registered-to-vote edition? Beautiful data about voter registration?
As you think about it, keep in mind that National Voter Registration is *strictly* non-partisan, and all messaging should be positive. So no messages like “Register to vote so we can kick out X politician or political party who totally suck,” or else the otherwise-very-friendly voter registration people will yell at me (you can totally mention general issues that are important to you, though).
If you’re looking for somewhere to link out to in order to direct folks to registration resources, this is the most direct place to send people.
There is obviously no obligation to participate. BUT this is Reddit, so there will be *recognition* for the best (or most creative) participation.
Happy registering!
National Voter Registration Day 2018 is September 25th
Edit: fixed link
Edit: Thanks for all the feedback about the Gold Award and its cost and benefits; we have updated the post for clarity.
Hi r/modnews,
Over the past couple months, we've been previewing and getting feedback on some upcoming changes to Gold. Today, we want to share a quick recap of these changes (which you should begin to see in the next week or so), and share how you and your subreddits can get involved.
Updates to Gold
We've made several posts about the upcoming changes in r/lounge and r/changelog, so if you want to catch up on all the details, check out our most recent posts there (1, 2, 3). For more of a visual tour, just skip to the screenshots at the end of this post.
In the meantime, here's a quick TL;DR:
- We're rebranding the monthly membership part of Gold as "Reddit Premium"
- We're converting Creddits into Coins
- We're introducing two new awards, above and below Gold: Platinum and Silver
- We’re updating Gold Award benefits and price (current Gold Award: costs $4 and awards one month of membership; updated Gold award: costs $2 and awards one week of membership, 100 Coins)
- We're raising the price of our monthly membership to better reflect costs ($3.99 --> $5.99/month)
What Does This Mean for My Community?
Here’s where you may see the changes in your subreddits:
- “Give Gold” button will open a new Awards dialog. You can see what this new dialog looks like by viewing the screenshots at the bottom of this post.
- “Give Gold” button will provide users the option to give new Award types. In addition to Gold, users will be able to give Silver and Platinum.
- New icons on posts and comments to reflect new Award types. As stated above, new Award types will carry their own icons.
How We’ve Partnered with Mods on Gold in the Past
There have been a few ways that we have partnered with Mods to give away Gold: Contests, Best of Year posts, and gilding everyone in r/me_irl after someone made a screenshot of a fake tweet from @reddit and it hit the front page.
This sort of collaboration isn’t changing. We will still give mod teams the ability to give Gold to winners of contests, prizes for Best of 2018, and more by giving out Coins.
As always, you can request a trove of Coins by sending in a modmail to /r/reddit.com, just be sure to explain what the event is and how many prizes you wish to hand out!
Looking for Subs to Collaborate with Us!
We see these changes as laying the foundation for a lot of fun things we have planned for Coins in the future. Given that, we’d love to collaborate with you on the future of Coins. If you’re interested in working with us in the coming months on some new experiences within your subreddit, please respond to the stickied comment below with the name of your subreddit.
And if you have questions or feedback on the general changes or ideas for future community features for us to consider bringing to Gold, let us know!
As promised, below is a preview of the upcoming changes.
New dialog to give the Gold Award
Top of the new Reddit Coins home page
Top of the new Reddit Premium home page
The Reddit Premium Coat of Arms
(For more commentary on the Premium Coat of Arms, please see the thread from the experts over at r/Heraldry)
Thanks for reading, and let us know what you think!
We’ve been making some more progress on the way that flairs work in the redesign. In this update, we’re excited to be launching updated image user flair (emoji) sizing and transparent backgrounds today (you may not see it immediately, but it'll be rolling out to everyone shortly)!
Gold for those who get the reference in this comment.
How custom image sizing works
In emoji settings, there is a new section called “Custom emoji sizing” with a toggle for you to enable custom sizing.
https://i.redd.it/3x3nwqdt0ck11.png
Some things to note:
- The maximum display width and height is 40x40 px.
- Enlarged image user flairs only show up in comment threads, not subreddit listings. In subreddit listings, you will still see the small version of the image.
- The custom sizing will affect all image user flairs in the subreddit.
- The recommended upload size is dynamic, and will change depending on the display width and height numbers you specify.
How transparent user flair backgrounds work
In user flair settings, when creating a new or editing an existing user flair, you will see a new toggle labeled “Add flair background”. When this toggle is set to off, the flair will have a transparent background.
https://i.redd.it/dmeh1ytv0ck11.png
When the toggle is set to on, the flair will have the background color that has been specified in the color picker.
https://i.redd.it/gktlf6ru0ck11.png
Please try both of these out, and let us know your thoughts!
What’s next?
We are still working on making flairs work better together across old and new Reddit. This includes things like an improved grant user flair page, being able to be a bit more prescriptive about what can go into user flairs (text and image restrictions), and making sure you don’t have to reassign flair to thousands of users when new flairs are introduced. We’ll keep y’all updated!
Thanks as always!
Edit: Swapped the images. Made some words more clear.
Hi Mods!
So, we’ve had this Mod Help Center out in the wild for a while, available in welcome messages to new mods and some tool menus in new Reddit, but we haven’t really announced it until now. It’s still in its infancy, but we want the Mod Help Center to be a place that complements both official and unofficial Reddit support communities by providing a centralized, searchable knowledge base for mods.
Background
Reddit’s support communities for mods (such as r/modhelp) are a great, trusted resource for new and established moderators. We want the Help Center to be a place to surface those communities and their resources as well as supplement them where mods of support communities might find it helpful.
Currently, the MHC is comprised of basic tool guides, info on getting started as a moderator, and best practices for growth, engagement, hosting AMAs, etc. You know—stuff you might not be aware of if you haven’t already been moderating for a while. But eventually, we’ll be expanding the content to be useful for new and old mods alike, which is where you come in.
Expanding the Knowledge Base
Over the past couple years in r/ModSupport, we've had loads of discussions with all of you about a wide range of moderation topics, but as time goes by they get buried or forgotten. We want to preserve your knowledge from those discussions and share it with other mods through Help Center articles that cover these community topics in depth. To demonstrate the kind of topics we’ll cover and how the threads will be used, we dug into this discussion about training new mods and wrote this article based on your responses.
We’ll keep working on and creating new articles based on our previous discussions, as well as having new discussions for topics in the future. If you’d like to be involved, please just keep sharing your wisdom with us when we do Friday threads in r/ModSupport. And as a reassurance, we will never directly quote you in an article without asking you first.
Let us know what you think
If you moderate a support community (or are just a mod who likes to help other mods) and have feedback, a suggestion for an existing article, or an idea for a new article, please send us your thoughts.
Hey Mods,
Some of you may have already noticed that your community’s banner and icon are displayed in the Reddit Android and iOS apps. These carry over from your community styling on new Reddit. This has been on iOS for awhile and on Android for the last few weeks.
We wanted to call attention to it today because today it will be going into beta for users, which means users in the beta group will be able to see community styling. In two weeks in the iOS 4.17 and Android 3.10 releases we will be flipping a feature flag to have community styling show to all users of the Reddit apps. We want to make sure mods have lead time to look at their communities on the apps and update them however you’d like. Here’s a few examples of how a community looks on web and the elements that get pulled into the app:
https://i.redd.it/c79mbslomwf11.png
https://i.redd.it/l12cv7lqmwf11.png
Now, you may be thinking “gee, isn’t this a coincidence — they roll out the traffic pages update and then tell us to style for the app?” Short answer is nope. Traffic pages were a separate update, styling has been visible to mods, we just wanted to make sure everyone knew to look. And the old Reddit mobile styling will continue to carry over on the app, so if you dig how your community looks you don’t have to change a thing.
On iOS you’ll also notice that the new Reddit sidebar carries over onto mobile (except for including the image widget!). We’re working on Android as I type and expect to get that out to mods in few releases out.
We’re excited to share these updates and hope mods dig how their community looks in the apps. Let us know what you think!
Edit: "their" not "they're"
Edit 2: Some people have already spotted that we did indeed get the image widget into an earlier iOS release so mods should expect to see it in their "About" tab
Hey mods,
Wanted to provide an update on automod as it relates to flairs and the redesign. Automod was flairing your posts and users on the redesign, but without styling. We’ve come up with a way to help with this!
Today, we'll be launching flair template IDs that you can use in your automod configs to apply the correct flair template from new Reddit to posts and/or users.
Here is a detailed post from r/AutoModerator on how this works. We’ve also updated the automod documentation wiki to reflect the change.
If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below.
Thank you!
Hey Mods!
It’s your friendly neighborhood data scientist, back with another post about traffic pages. When I posted about a back-end update to the pages last month, I had also asked for a bit of feedback and ideas for what additional features moderators would find useful when we’re building those traffic pages in the redesign. Overwhelmingly, the most requested feature was the ability to have insight to their subreddit’s usage broken down by platform. Moderators wanted to be able to get insight on where to best direct their efforts at community building and customization (e.g. the structured style header image is visible on Reddit Apps and the redesign, but not mobile web or old reddit).
Since this request was so popular, we decided to take the time to update the traffic pages on the legacy site before the redesign so every mod has it as well. So, beginning today, we’re rolling out an update to create stacked area charts on traffics pages, splitting out pageviews and uniques by platform.
r/redesign's traffic page, for example
Thanks so much to u/redtaboo, u/keysersosa, u/d3fect, u/jkohhey and u/shrink_and_an_arch for help getting this together! And as always, I'll stick around in the comments to shitpost answer questions
Edit: someday I'll get to make a post about a feature with no bugs, but today is not that day. Looks like the change accidentally ended up doubling all the values in the tables when totaling them up. Sorry about that, stand by for a fix in the morning!
Edit2: u/d3fect found the table issue and fixed it :)
Salutations, redditrequesters!
We’re pleased to announce that some spiffy new updates are on the horizon for our dearly beloved /u/request_bot! Coming soon, /u/request_bot will be able to automate some of the workload around here, which should hopefully help us achieve faster turnaround times on processing redditrequests, as well as Top Mod Removal requests.
Wait, what the heck is this /u/request_bot you speak of? Years before I began working at Reddit, I created /u/request_bot to help the community team weed out ineligible requests. For the past 6 years this bot has run faithfully without hardly a hiccup, much to my bewilderment because I’m certainly not a programmer. However stable my bot was, it wasn’t very smart (and it’s certainly not a genius). Because the bot only used our public APIs, it lacked any capability to judge activity based on anything other than publicly visible comments or posts. Now that is changing!
So what’s new?
Soon our trusty bot will be able to use our private internal data to help make more educated decisions when processing requests, and in some cases it will automate handoff with little to no delay. This means on your next request, you may find that it is processed as soon as possible without having to wait 2-6 weeks like it’s some mail-order decoder you ordered after collecting enough points from the back of a cereal box!
Does this mean bots are taking over /r/redditrequest?
Woah there, Nelly, let’s not get too excited. There are still a lot of circumstances where we’ll have to manually review your request to ensure we’re responsibly handing off communities. However, we’re hoping adding some long-needed automation to the bot will help reduce the number of requests we receive, thus speeding up our average processing time on manual reviews. There may also be some cases where the bot gets it wrong and we’ll have to call take-backsies, so your patience and understanding in these situations is much appreciated.
While there aren’t any other significant changes to how we process requests here, we’ll also be making some adjustments to the sidebar to tidy things up, as well as adding some styling to the subreddit in the redesign.
Hey, mods!
Since our last update on chat, we’ve been rolling out the ability to opt into subreddit chat to more and more communities. Today, we wanted to share an update on the status of our rollout, talk about a few (mostly mod tool-oriented) features we shipped in the past few weeks, and give a quick how-to for those of you who are interested in setting up chat rooms for your communities.
First, the rollout status
As of today, all communities will have the ability to create chat rooms if they so desire. (By default, your community won’t have any rooms, but if you want to flip the switch and create one yourself, you can skip to the “How to create chat rooms” section below.) Only mods with the “Chat Configuration” permission are able to create, delete, and edit rooms (explained in more detail in our post about new chat permissions), but the TL;DR is that if you’re a mod with full permissions, that will include Chat, and if you’re not, you’ll need that box to be checked by another mod). Chat rooms can be accessed by users on both old and new Reddit.
While all communities can create rooms now, we are slowly rolling this feature out to users over the next week or so in order to make sure our systems can scale. This means, as you create rooms, many visitors to your subreddit may not be able to see your chat rooms yet. We recommend you promote your rooms to make sure all of your community visitors can join them (either by linking to a chat room in a post, putting a link in your sidebar, etc.). Anyone who clicks on a room link will automatically be in the chat experience without needing to wait for our rollout.
Shiny new tools: @all, banning from chat only, and more!
Along with the rollout today, we’ve also released more features, most of which are aimed at giving you all more tools to manage chat rooms:
- Delete All Messages from a User - If you’re a mod with the “Chat Moderation” permission, you’ll be able to have the option of purging all messages from a particular user. Roll over a message and you’ll see the mod tools appear.
Hover over any message to access the delete message action
- Ban User from Chat Only - If you’re a mod with the “Chat Moderation” permission, you’ll also be able to ban a user from only chat. Currently if you ban a user from your subreddit, they’ll also be banned from your chat rooms. Now, you can ban users only from chat and they will be able to continue to access your subreddit. Roll over a message and you’ll see the mod tools appear, or you can “View Members” from the settings cog in the top right and take action on a user in the members list.
Hover over any message to access the ban user action
- Username Mentions of Members Already in a Chat Room - Any user in a chat can mention another user who has already joined that chat room. A user who is mentioned will be notified by a push notification (if they have the app) and the unread count will increment along with a badge on the room itself. Users who “mute” rooms will not be notified.
Start typing \"u/\" or click the \"u/\" button to initiate a username mention
Friendly reminder: Users can control push notification permissions in many ways, including turning off notifications for each chat room they’re in. Furthermore, in the general Settings section of the app, users can customize which notifications they receive (like turning on/off all notifications for chat).
- @all Mention Every Member in a Chat Room - Any mod can @all mention any room in their subreddit. This will notify all users in the room. With great power comes great… whatever.
How to create chat rooms
Although chat rooms can be accessed on new or classic Reddit, you’ll need to create them by first visiting your subreddit from your desktop browser on the redesign (don’t worry, you can opt back out to classic Reddit after you create your room).
- In the Mod Tools dropdown of the Community Details sidebar, there’s an option to “Manage Chatrooms.”
Create chat rooms from the mod tools dropdown on the redesign
- After you click “Manage Chatrooms,” you’ll see a pop-up with a button in the top-right corner to “Add Room.”
Click \"Add Room\" to begin creating rooms
- From there, you’ll need to input a title (the name of your chat room) and description (what people see before they enter a room) and set the room to “Private” or leave it as the default, public setting. Public rooms can be joined by anyone, while private rooms require an invitation. (Note: ***Once you set the visibility of the room it cannot be changed!***)
- If you decide you want to edit or delete a chat room you’ve created, just go go back to the “Manage Chatrooms” step under Mod Tools and click the edit icon next to the room name.
Until we chat again...
Over the past several months, we’ve had the chance to work with a lot of mods and communities very closely, and this product has come a long ways. It still has a long ways to go, but a lot of communities have been asking to have this feature enabled and we’re happy they don’t have to wait any longer. We know there are still specific tools and features mods and users would like to see in future updates, but we're proud of what we've built so far with your help and excited to see what you all do with chat rooms in some of your communities.
As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback. Check out r/subchats if you want to see a directory of chat rooms which our users are gathering or if you want to submit your room. Also check out r/community_chat if you want to connect with other mods who have been with us through the beta or want to work closely with us. Thanks!
A little while back, we made a post about the state of user and post flairs on the redesign. At the time, we had fallen short with the flair experience, so we spent the last few months working with mods to improve the flair experience on new Reddit. Today, we wanted to give you an update on some of the big ticket flair projects we’ve shipped and what’s on deck.
This past week we shipped three big features to support mods transitioning flair to new Reddit:
Rendering richtext flair on old Reddit (rolling out incrementally, currently at 10%): Richtext flairs (background color and emojis) created on new Reddit will show up with the correct styling on old Reddit. In most cases, CSS on old Reddit should take precedence over styling from new Reddit. If it breaks CSS for you, please let us know and we’ll be happy to look into it.
Bulk upload for emojis: This shipped last week! You can now upload up to 100 emojis at a time just by dragging and dropping a folder. You’ll be able to see upload progress as well as error messages for images that failed to upload. We expect that this feature will help mods running communities that have a lot of images in their flairs.
Number of emojis per community: We’ve had the opportunity to test out increasing the current 300 emoji per subreddit count with some communities that have a ton of image flairs, and it worked out nicely. We will be increasing this limit for subreddits on an as-need basis, as it can have a profound impact on site performance. Please stay tuned for details on how you’ll be able to request this for your community!
And here are some features we’ve recently shipped:
Post flair searching: Part one of this shipped last week, where post flairs in the feed are now clickable! Clicking on a post flair will bring users to a search result page that displays all posts that have been assigned that particular flair. Part two of this project will be a customizable widget that will allow you to showcase the post flairs that are most prominent in your communities. This is distinguishable from creating a button widget because it will maintain the styling in your post flairs. We’ve also got adding sorts like Best, Hot, etc. onto results pages on our radar, which will come down the road.
Post flair templates: This shipped a while back. You can create a post template tied to a specific post flair so that when the flair is applied, the post will automatically be styled in that way. Styling options include: thumbnail image, background image or color, and post title color.
The good stuff doesn’t stop there — here’s what’s on deck for flair:
Automod post flairing: We’ve incorporated new Reddit’s user and post flair templates to the set flair rule in automod, so it will enable you to attach flairs from the new site onto posts or usernames. We’ll provide more specific details shortly — stay tuned.
User flair emoji size and shape: We received a lot of feedback that the current 16x16 image flair size was not adequate for some of the more creative user flairs that you’ve been using. After a lot of design considerations, we’ve just started the engineering work to increase the maximum dimensions of user flair images to be 40x40. The images you upload do not have to be in square ratios and can be rectangular, as long as they fit within the 40x40 dimensions. We are also working to allow for a transparent background when flairs have images only.
Grant flair page: The design team is currently working on a grant flair page, similar to the one you’re used to on old Reddit, but better. You’ll be able to manage your user flairs here, including being able to bulk grant and bulk edit flairs for users in your community. We’ll also show you flair template IDs (from new Reddit) and CSS classes (from old Reddit) side by side, so you can match them up.
We’ll be sure to provide more updates on the works in progress as we go. Thank you for your patience throughout all this, and especially all your feedback that has helped us put all this into motion. Stay tuned!
Edit: words I didn't mean to say.
Hi All, I have a quick update on spoilers in comments.
A couple weeks ago we shipped the final piece of the spoilers puzzle.
Redditors can now indicate that text within their post or comment contains a spoiler AND these spoilers will be obscured across classic Reddit, the redesign, and our native apps. The classic site and the redesign have been supporting inline comment spoilers for a couple months. Our iOS app supports it in version 4.12 and our Android app supports it in 3.5.
We know spoilers are a key piece of functionality for many communities and are excited that we are supporting them natively so that no one gets an unexpected spoiler.
This cool new functionality works using the Fancy Pants editor in the redesign or using markdown. The markdown syntax is >!balance restored!<.
Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on how we can improve spoilers in the future.
UPDATE: all communities now have the ability to create rooms so you don't need to opt-in anymore! Details can be found here.
tl;dr - you can create rooms from the redesign accessible in the mod tools dropdown of your community.
--
Hey everyone!
Today, I'm happy to announce that we've released two new mod tools to make chat moderation easier and more scalable: custom rate limits and keyword filters. Since we first announced subreddit chat back in April, we've been working closely with mods of select communities to get their feedback on how we could make it better. A couple weeks ago, we updated our mod permissions and added new features like editing and deleting rooms. You can read the full announcement here..
As always, chat is opt-in for communities: only mods with the appropriate permissions will have the power to create rooms. After adding the tools today, we’re going to begin enabling even more communities to create chat rooms. We hope that in the next couple months all of our communities will be enabled to create chat rooms and all users will be able to see and join chat rooms. In the meantime, if you’re looking for chat rooms to join or want to opt in your community to start testing it out early, read on!
Okay so, what’s new in this update?
Today, we released two new mod tools that many of you have been asking us to build for months: custom rate limits and keyword filters. Yes, there's still lots of functionality we'd like to add in the future (the ability to add regex, for example), but the basics are now in place:
- Custom Rate Limits - this allows you to set the pace of chat depending on what's right for your community.
- Keyword Filters - this allows you to add words to a "blacklist" for automatic deletion, making moderation less manual.
On web, mods with the chat config permission (which grants the ability to create, edit, delete rooms) can now manage these settings. Simply go to "Manage Rooms" (where mods create rooms) and there'll be a new "Settings" button in the top right corner of the modal. Within the chat settings mods can input words or phrases (comma separated) which will automatically be filtered out from chat and set a custom rate limit (number of messages per 10 seconds). If no rate limit is set - the global rate limit is used.
But wait! In the next few weeks, we're going to add several more features we've gotten a lot of requests for. Here's what to expect:
- Username mentions
- @all mentions for mods
- Ban a user from only chat (not banned from the rest of the sub)
- Delete all messages from a user
- Mute a room (will suppress badging)
What We Learned from Mods (and Our Data) in v1 & v2 of Our Beta
- Moderation actions haven’t been used much so far (0.3% of users have been banned, 0.2% of users have been kicked). That said, we have more tools coming to lessen the burden on mods, who are very busy as it is.
- Many communities are using private rooms for mod-to-mod communication.
- Mods who distribute links to their chat rooms (via sticky posts, links in sidebar, links in relevant threads, etc.) have been able to reach a critical mass.
- Chat rooms are different from, and often useful supplements to, comment threads—even game day threads or discussion threads. We haven’t seen cannibalization of content.
Check out some rooms!
Right now, we’re enabling select users to join chat rooms, but anyone can be invited to a subreddit chat room or join one if you see a room being publicized. Some subreddits, which are okay with receiving the extra traffic, have publicized their rooms. Check out the public list and drop by to chat! (Note: Joining any one of these rooms will also enable subreddit chat for you, if you don’t have access already.)
Mods: Rollout & Opt-in
If you’d like a community you moderate to be part of the communities that get this feature early, please opt in by replying to the stickied comment. We’ll be adding new communities into subreddit chat every week.
If you’d like to share your subreddit chat, comment in the same sticky comment below with your share link (gear icon on web > Copy Link).
We’re also going to continue rolling out to subreddits (beyond the opt-in list), with the goal of enabling every community in the coming months. This means any moderator (with the right permissions) will be able to create a room for their subreddit, but the choice is still yours if you don’t want to.
Last but not least, if you want to connect with other mods who have already used chat rooms, come visit r/community_chat or reach out to me directly.
Happy Friday, mods!
I’m wearing my admin hat today to let you know we made a slight change in the way we’re aggregating pageviews on your subreddit and profile traffic pages (you can read more about the previous update to these aggregates here).
In short, most subreddits will see a slight increase in counts of unique viewers, and a less-slight increase in pageviews. In rare cases, the count of unique users/pageviewsmight decrease, but that shouldn't be too common. The metrics presented include counting across all our first-party platforms (legacy web, the redesign, the official Android and iOS apps, and mobile web).
This change only affects subreddit and profile traffic pages; there are no changes to post view counts, ad views, etc.
I’ll stick around in the comments to shitpost answer questions if you have any; otherwise, enjoy your weekend!
edit: looks like this change might break today's traffic stats though . . . that wasn't intentional
edit2: fixed!
edit3: See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/954a8p/traffic_page_update_see_your_subreddits_traffic/
Hey Mods,
It’s been a while since we’ve given you all an update about where we are with rolling out the redesign. And over the last few weeks of talking to mod teams and combing through feedback in r/redesign, we realized not being clear about the rollout was causing anxiety about when and how to get your communities set up on the redesign aka new Reddit.
Just as the prophecy has foretold...
So today we want to update you on what’s happening with the rollout in the simplest possible terms and commit to doing a better job of partnering with all of you to build new Reddit in a way that works for your communities.
TL;DR: Our success is your success, so we’re going to make sure Reddit is always a place where your communities can thrive.
Rollout Status & Plan
Logged in redditors, which means you mods and members of your communities, will no longer be opted into new Reddit by default. We want you and your communities to adopt the new site when you’re ready, so we don’t have a timeline for actively opting redditors into the new experience.
As you know, logged out visitors see the new Reddit by default. A primary aim of Reddit’s redesign was to be more welcoming and easy to use for new users to browse and connect to communities and content, and we’ve seen that the new Reddit experience is achieving that aim for n00bs. But fear not, redditors who chose to use the site logged out can still browse old Reddit by hitting old.reddit.com.
What We’re Working Towards
Our vision for new Reddit is that any mod team, not just those with coding skills, can customize their community as awesomely with styling tools and widgets as technical mods could on the old site. And since today the majority of traffic comes from mobile devices we need to be able to support community styling across desktop and mobile, which we couldn’t do on the old site (for some perspective, when Reddit started the smartest phone was the Motorola Razr). Don’t worry, we’re not leaving CSS behind, we’ll be posting about that in the coming weeks.
We’re also aiming to make moderation as painless and efficient as possible for communities and mod teams of all sizes on new Reddit. We want you to be able to spend less time on the dirty work so you can spend more quality time with your communities. That’s the inspiration behind new Reddit’s mod queue, post requirements, in-context banning, and mobile mod tools, all features that we’re looking to hear about from you so that we can continue to improve.
But neither Rome nor Reddit was built in a day: we know we haven’t reached our vision for new Reddit yet. And we’ll continue to work with you, our mod community, until we do.
How We’re Working With the Reddit Community
In addition to combing through r/redesign feedback daily, over the last few months we’ve been on calls and chats with mods of sports subreddits, discussion subreddits, media sharing subreddits, Q&A subreddits and more to figure out what’s missing from our moderation, styling, and customization tools so that new Reddit can work for all types of communities and mod teams.
And we’ve used your feedback to help prioritize our roadmap. That’s why we’ve been investing heavily in flair, making sure we support large image sets and making it easier to transition to the emoji system on new Reddit (which will appear as images on old Reddit so mods don’t have to manage two sets of image flair!); we’ve been expanding the color customization for widgets and buttons; we’ve fixed the calendar widget functionality to better support events; we opened the widget API; we’re updating the lightbox to retain community styling and feel less like a preview modal; we shipped night mode (our most requested feature); and we just launched community styling and sidebars to moderators in our iOS app (it’s only visible to mods for now so you can preview and play with styling — Android’s coming soon!).
Next up, we’re continuing working on flair including a new flair filtering feature and widget so it’s easier to dive into categories within a community; bringing wikis (along with your Automod config page and versioning) natively into the redesign; and making the banner more customizable with expanded link, image and even widget support. These are just the biggest areas of work we have on deck but *definitely* not the exhaustive list.
What You Can Do
To make sure we’re building what the Reddit community needs, we’re continuing to ramp up our coverage in r/redesign. We want to invite everyone to post their feedback, the good, the bad and the ugly (but respectfully — remember we’re humans too) in r/redesign, and check there for weekly release notes of what’s shipped.
We also want to make sure we’re hearing from the full spectrum of community types on Reddit. We built a foundational toolkit, but we know the tools today don’t meet the specific needs of different types of communities — something we’ve been thinking a lot about (see u/ggAlex’s Theory of Reddit post), so we’d love to hear from you! If you can take a second, leave a comment letting us know:
- What type of community do you run?
- What are the key tools you need in order to moderate and style your communities successfully on new Reddit?
This has been a long post, so thanks to everyone who has read it to the end :)
PS. Hi, my name is JK and I’m a product manager on the Community Experiences team here at Reddit. Yes, my karma is low but only because we start new admin accounts as sn00bs!
EDIT: Thanks for all the great comments. Appreciate the feedback and ideas y'all are giving us, we're working our way through it all.
EDIT 2: "a while" not "awhile"
Hey, mods!
Per feedback we got from the announcement about OC tagging, we are rolling out OC tag + OC mods support in old Reddit.
What updates have we made since the last post based on your feedback?
- OC tag will show up on post level in old Reddit
- Mods can mark/unmark a post as OC in old Reddit
- CSS style update to support the OC tag in old Reddit
https://i.redd.it/igp3jsinm0511.png
Cheers!
Hey everyone! On April 30th we announced that subreddit chat was rolling out to select communities. We used this time to work very closely with mods from these communities to collect feedback and make improvements. Many mods fairly pointed out that our announcement was a bit tone deaf - and I’m responsible for that but had a chance to clarify here. Chat is opt-in for communities: only mods will have the power to create rooms. We are going to begin enabling more and more communities to create chat rooms as well as allowing communities to opt in (see below).
So you all know what’s happening, tomorrow we will release the ability to set 2 different mod permissions: Chat moderator and Manage chat rooms. Any mod with “Full permissions” will automatically have new permissions. For more details and impact to the public API, check out last week’s r/redditdev post. There are more moderation features coming as well -- read on!
New and upcoming features
Available Wednesday 6/20
- New moderator permissions: Chat moderator - allows you to give people the ability to moderate chat (kick, ban users from chat, lock room, delete messages) without giving them access to any other moderation features on your sub. Many communities use this model to moderate chat rooms.
- New moderator permissions: Manage chat rooms - allows you to give specific permissions for the ability to create, edit, and delete rooms.
New Features since 4/30
- Mods can delete and edit rooms
- Sharing room links works seamlessly, and grants access to the chat rooms feature if the feature was no enabled previously
- Chat is on the official mobile apps
- Users can minimize the chat window on web
Upcoming Features
We want to make sure we provide tools that allow you to moderate chat at scale. After talking to many mods and getting feedback from our previous post and in r/community_chat we’ve been actively working on the following features. We expect these to land towards the end of June or early July (you know how software development is…).
- Ban a user from only chat (not banned from the rest of the sub)
- Delete all messages from a user
- Custom message rate limiting for your subreddit’s chat rooms
- Keyword filter for your subreddit’s chat rooms (automatically delete messages containing blacklisted words)
Learnings from Mods/Communities in the Beta v1 & v2
We’ve been grateful to have the opportunity to work with a handful of mods and communities from various use cases (live events/sports, support/help, social, gaming, TV shows, etc.) which tested chat rooms over the last two months. A few things we’ve learned:
- Moderation actions haven’t been used much so far (0.3% of users have been banned, 0.2% of users have been kicked). With that said, we have more tools coming to lessen the burden on mods, who are very busy as it is.
- Many communities are using private rooms for mod to mod communication
- Mods who distribute their links (via sticky posts, links in sidebar, links in relevant threads, etc.) have been able to reach a critical mass.
- Chat rooms are different from comment threads - even game day threads or discussion threads. We haven’t seen cannibalization of content.
Rollout & Opt-in
If you’d like to be part of the communities that get this feature early, please opt in by replying to the stickied comment. We are going to add communities into subreddit chat every Tuesday and Thursday.
If you’d like to share your subreddit chat, comment in the same sticky comment below with your share link.
We are also going to continue rolling out to subreddits (beyond the opt-in list). This means moderators can create rooms for your subreddits, but the choice is still yours if you don’t want to. If you want to connect with other mods who have already used chat rooms, come visit r/community_chat or reach out to me directly.
Check out some rooms
Some subreddits, which are okay with receiving the extra traffic, have publicized their rooms. Check out the public list and drop by to chat.
Hey, Mods!
I wanted to introduce myself: I’m Vanessa. I recently joined the community team here at Reddit and I’m so excited to be planning the 2018 Mod Roadshow series. But enough about me, this is about YOU!
We wanted to post a reminder to please sign up for the "Mod Thank You Roadshow"! This is last call before we start sending official invitations out for each city.
If you are not familiar with what the Mod Roadshow is here is a quick breakdown: We send a bunch of admins from every team at the company to cities across the U.S. to meet, chat with, and show our appreciation for the hardworking redditors who make our site better every day… you!
At each event, there will be food, there will be swag, there will be drinks and laughs. It is a unique chance for admins and mods to hang out together—no formal presentations, no karma, just good times and conversation.
Below is the schedule of events! We hope you can make it to a city near you.
Schedule
| Location | Date |
|---|---|
| London | June 14 |
| Boston | June 26 |
| New York City | June 28 |
| Austin | July 17 |
| New Orleans | July 19 |
| Minneapolis | August 7 |
| Cleveland | August 9 |
| Los Angeles | August 29 |
You can sign up for any of the above dates by following this link.
(Times will be approximately 6-9pm, minus Boston, which will have a special 4:30-7:00+ time slot.)
The fine print...
What won't this be?
I'll repeat exactly what u/bluepinkblack said in our initial post from last year: this **won't** be us giving you any kind of spiel, any kind of talking to, or any major Q&A Reddit roundtable. Of course, we can talk about any issue you want to, but we're not intending for these to be town hall meetings. This also won't be us trying to sell you on any features, changes, or themes of interest to the admins. We'll have community managers and product managers at every event, so if you're interested in talking about those things, you can do that, but ultimately our intent is just to hang out and enjoy each other's company. =)
Interested in attending any of these events?
*Space is limited*, so please sign up as soon as you can! Fill out the form linked here, and be sure to include your name, username, city of interest, and the subreddits you moderate. As mentioned above, our goal is to have a diverse group of users, and space is extremely limited for each city. You will be notified once we have the lists finalized. Mods who have been selected will be contacted approximately one month before the event, with a follow-up message coming one week before the event letting you know the time and location.
This year, there may be cameras—don't freak out!
Last year, for our first roadshow, we were very particular about *not* wanting to bring cameras to our events, for many reasons (we wanted folks to feel comfortable, maintain privacy, not feel awkward, etc.). This was fine, and I think we did what was right for our first year, but we learned two very important lessons: 1. Mod attendees seemed pretty unphased by cameras and were totally fine taking group photos and such all night long (we took so many photos together!), and 2. because *we* didn't bring cameras, we had no evidence to show legitimately how awesome each event was. Because of this, for 2018, we're planning to bring a few cameras, so we can show off how much fun these events are. (Don't worry, if you're still interested in maintaining your privacy, just let us know. We'll make sure it's easy to steer clear of being in any photos. This is just an early heads-up on the change to this year's event.)
I'll be sticking around to answer questions. In the meantime, on behalf of all of us at Reddit HQ, thank you all for everything you do.
We're excited to meet a lot of you very soon!
Hey Mods!
A few weeks ago we announced [1] [2] support for a new OC tag in r/redesign and r/modnews. Today, we’re opening the beta to allow more communities to try out the OC tag. We’d like to get more of your feedback on the feature.
What updates have we made since the last post based on your feedback?
- Moderators now have the ability to enable OC tags via subreddit settings. This will allow posters to mark post as OC during post creation in the new desktop redesign (by default, these settings are disabled):
https://i.redd.it/az9jw4kn49111.png
- AutoModerator support to filter OC tags and mark posts as OC (documentation). For example, you can filter for posts marked as OC and assign specific flairs to the post.
- Moderator log support for OC tags, so you’ll be able to see when other moderators mark/unmark OC tags
- Tooltips on the OC tag that explain what they are
Why should you try out OC tags?
- Users submitting post to your subreddit no longer need to add “[OC]” to the title
- You can easily recognize OC posts and assign flairs and moderator actions
- Ability to add/remove OC tags from a post (rather than needing to remove the post entirely because you can’t change the post title)
I’ll be hanging out in the comments to answer questions. Thanks!
Cheers!
People have come to Reddit for news since the site first launched back in 2005. In the decade-plus since then, you've demonstrated the power communities can have with News — analyzing articles, providing exposure to multiple perspectives, and having millions of discussions that bring context and insight to the conversation. You've shown us that news is an important part of how you use Reddit, but it's gotten harder to only get the news and related discussion, especially if you're subscribed to lots of non-news subreddits or browse r/popular and r/all. Today, we’re taking a first step towards launching a dedicated News tab by testing an alpha version with some of our iOS app users.
Before I get into the specifics, we’re launching this as an alpha product only on iOS in order to get critical early feedback from redditors before rolling out to more users and platforms. This is a starting point that will help us learn how we can improve going forward. If you’re lucky enough to have the News tab, expect to see a lot of improvements in the coming weeks and months.
So what’s the News tab and how does it work?
The News tab is the easiest place to find news shared by communities across Reddit. When you open your iOS app, you'll find it to the left of "Home" and "Popular." In the tab, you'll see content pulled from a group of subreddits that frequently share and engage with the news (more on that later). This content is then divided into a handful of common news topics, with options to customize your News tab by selecting the topics that interest you most. Here's a link to a GIF of the News tab.
Which subreddits are included in the News tab?
In order to build the tab, we first had to find which subreddits were engaging with news the most. To do this, we looked at the most-clicked posts by domain, limited the list of domains to media and publishers and ended up with a list of ~1000 domains. This list helped us to identify communities that met a minimum threshold of engagement with posts from the domain list. (Note: We only used this domain list to help us identify our initial group of subreddits, not as a filter for content featured in the News tab.)After this quantitative approach, we applied a few additional qualitative rules for sourcing the communities including:
- The community must have a strong record of upholding Reddit content policies and be in accordance with our guidelines for healthy communities
- The community must have active moderation
- The community must require that the post title accurately reflects the article title
We then mapped this initial list of communities to topics, such as sports, entertainment and tech. From there, we added a filter on post types to ensure only link posts are included across most News tab topics, though we do allow video posts on certain topics, such as sports.
We want your feedback.
Last week, we messaged the mods of the all the communities included in our initial alpha and we’ve already gotten a lot of valuable feedback. We’ll continue to update these mods and seek their feedback as we roll this out to more users. As more mods and users test this out, we expect to evolve how the product works as well as our criteria for subreddits and content types included. As we go forward, we’ll continue being transparent with users and mods about changes to both the product and our criteria.
In the meantime, I’ll be sticking around to answer your questions.
EDIT: 10:54am - Fixing image links.
UPDATE: all communities now have the ability to create rooms so you don't need to opt-in anymore! Details can be found here.
tl;dr - you can create rooms from the redesign accessible in the mod tools dropdown of your community.
--
Late last year our team released private 1:1 and group chat beta to a limited number of users. While some users on Reddit know each other and interact - a lot of the feedback pointed out that chat would be much better in a community than privately between users. Today we are releasing subreddit chat rooms to a small number of communities and more communities will be getting this feature in the coming weeks.
This feature is optional - mods don’t need to create chat rooms if they don’t want them for their communities. Furthermore, users don’t have to chat if they don’t want (just like they don’t have to comment, upvote, downvote, etc.). We’re looking forward to the feedback, feature ideas, and any bugs that you find. If you want your community to have the ability to create chat rooms leave us a note in the sticky comment below.
The rest of this post contains allllll the details you would care about with our subreddit chat beta.
Subreddit chat rooms are coming to beta
Starting today, we've enabled a handful of communities with subreddit chat. Other communities who are interested can opt in to our subreddit chat rooms beta by leaving a comment below. We will be slowly enabling other communities so if you've left a comment but still can't create rooms - there's nothing wrong, please be patient.
For communities who have subreddit chat enabled, mods will be able to add chat rooms to their communities, and invite anyone they’d like to those rooms. On the redesign, users in the beta can look in the subreddit sidebar to see chat rooms for that community and join them in order to chat. Once a user has joined a room, they can chat in "classic" reddit or the redesign. We hope that topic-based chat rooms will be a useful supplement to communities that use them.
Why we’re making subreddit chat rooms
For a long time, Redditors have been using external chat platforms to supplement communities, drive them, and create experiences that have made Reddit a special and powerful platform. For example, many communities have used IRC for years, and more recently Slack and Discord in a lot of sidebars.
Mods need to chat in real time to not just moderate their communities, but also to collaborate and build their communities. Reddit Live contributors use chat to coordinate and surface the most important information, like during Hurricane Harvey, when a handful of dedicated Redditors helped inform not only their real world communities, but also the Reddit community. Sports communities have game day threads that might be more fun as, or supplemented by chat. Chat is also a great platform when someone needs a quick question answered where it may not make sense to have an entire thread.
There are also a bunch of subreddits that are more organically social in nature, and right now they need to leave Reddit to create the experience they want. Sometimes, the communities with the strictest rules generate the most interesting discussion, but they’re necessarily heavily moderated, and users have had to turn to external platforms to discuss off topic subjects with the people they’ve gotten to know in the community. We think chat rooms will help make all of these things better!
How chat rooms work so far (subject to change as we develop)
User experience
- Please focus on the web browser version for now. For now, chat rooms are web only, and the mobile app version is coming soon. We ask that everybody focuses on how Subreddit Chat works on web browsers, and we’ll let you know when the Android/iOS versions are ready.
- People in the beta and on the redesign will be able to find public rooms they can join in the sidebar of communities that have public rooms. Currently this sidebar section will automatically show up in the redesign. People who aren’t using the redesign will need to be invited to rooms directly.
- Once in a room, users can chat in "classic" reddit or the redesign.
- Initially, only a small number of people will have access to the chat rooms feature. This will help us understand the server needs of the feature better so that we don’t crash Reddit. That said, anyone who has the beta will be able to invite anyone else to a room they’re in. Inviting someone to a room will grant them access to the beta if they don’t have it already.
- People in the beta now have a Rooms tab in their chat inbox. The Rooms tab lists all chat rooms that that person has joined, as well as any rooms they’ve been invited to.
- There are two types of rooms: public and private. Public rooms are visible and joinable by anyone who has access to the chat rooms beta and hasn’t been banned from the community. Private rooms are invite only, and invisible to anyone who hasn’t been invited.
- Chatrooms have limited (24 hour) history. Each message in a room will automatically be deleted 24 hours after being sent.
- Rooms have a name and a description to help focus conversations on topics
- Unlike direct chats, no push notifications are sent to mobile devices when messages are sent in rooms.
- All features in direct group or 1:1 chats also exist in subreddit chat rooms, with the exception of full chat history and push notifications/badging. See more details from an older post here.
Moderation
- We understand that adding chat rooms to a community may add workload to moderators. Chat rooms will always be opt-in, and we’ll default new subreddits to 0 rooms. We’re also very focused now on building features to help moderate chat both manually via moderators and automatically (think bots, etc).
- Mods are responsible for moderating chat rooms in the same way they’re responsible for moderating the rest of their community. In the future, we’ll be adding a more robust roles and permissions system for chat which will let mods give some chat moderation permissions to people who aren’t a part of the full mod team.
- Mods can create as many (or few) rooms as they’d like.
- Banning users from your subreddit will automatically ban them from all of your chat rooms. This includes users you’ve already banned.
- If a mod doesn't want to drop the full ban hammer, they can kick a user from a specific room for 10 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, or 3 days.
- Reports about chat messages are sent to Reddit (not to mods).
Some things on our roadmap (also subject to change depending on feedback)
User experience
- Image sharing
- Emojis
- Username mentions
- Flair in chat
Moderation
- Lock room: prevent everyone in a room from sending messages while the room is locked.
- Mute user: prevent a user from speaking while muted.
- Remove another person’s messages.
- Remove all messages in all rooms from a specific user.
- Roles and permissions: tbd, but generally the ability to give users in chat a role with certain permissions. This would allow mods to, for instance, give some users a role with certain chat moderation permissions without having to make them a moderator of your community.
- Bots: think automod, dice roll, etc. This is a complex project, and probably a ways away.
- Mark room as nsfw.
Aw man, that was pretty (really) long, but it’s important to us that you understand our thought process, goals, and what we’re trying to do with chat. We also want it to be awesome, because we spend a ton of time on Reddit, and really appreciate any feedback you send along. Again, let us know in the stickied comment below if you want in to the beta. Thanks!
Hey, Mods!
Last year, Reddit's Community team put on our first ever "Moderator Roadshow," where we sent a bunch of admins from every team at the company to five cities across the U.S. to meet, chat with, and show our appreciation for the hardworking redditors who make our site better every day: you all!
At each event, there was food, there was swag, there were drinks and laughs, and all of us had a great time meeting the mods behind some of our favorite communities IRL. It was a unique chance for admins and mods to hang out together—no formal presentations, no karma, just dinner and conversation. In fact, we had such a great time that we've decided to bring it back as a new tradition, with more cities, more swag, and one addition you asked for last year: a European location!
Without further ado, we're excited to announce the dates and some deets, for everyone who's new to this event.
Schedule
| Location | Date |
|---|---|
| London | June 14 |
| Boston | June 26 |
| New York City | June 28 |
| Austin | July 17 |
| New Orleans | July 19 |
| Minneapolis | August 7 |
| Cleveland | August 9 |
| Los Angeles | August 29 |
You can sign up for any of the above dates by following this link.
(Times will be approximately 6-9pm, minus Boston, which will have a special 4:30-7:00+ time slot.)
What we learned in 2017
While the intention for each event was to say thank you, we found there were some really fantastic effects that came out of this.
After reviewing post-event surveys that attendees filled out (both users and employees), we found these events were highly successful in bringing all parties closer. User-to-admin and user-to-user relationship feedback was fantastic, and many of us have continued to keep these conversations going.
These events were very positive for Reddit product managers and folks who have worked on the redesign. In fact, several conversations between admins and users at these events directly led to real product changes we shipped in the redesign. This wasn’t planned, but it showed us how valuable it is to include people from our Product, Eng, and Design teams in these events, not just the admins you know from our Community team.
For the data-driven among you… we found that of the Mods who responded to our post-event survey and gave their event a score out of 10, the average response amongst those attendees was 9.12. We saw repeatedly in our survey results that people appreciated getting to talk about mod tools, trade tips with other mods, and meet the admins IRL (especially Steve and Alexis!).
What won’t this be?
I’ll repeat exactly what I said in our initial post from last year: this won’t be us giving you any kind of spiel, any kind of talking to, or any major Q&A Reddit roundtable. Of course, we can talk about any issue you want to, but we’re not intending for these to be town hall meetings. This also won’t be us trying to sell you on any features, changes, or themes of interest to the admins. We’ll have community managers and product managers at every event, so if you’re interested in talking about those things, you can do that, but ultimately our intent is just to hang out and enjoy each other’s company. =)
Interested in attending any of these events?
Space is limited, so please sign up as soon as you can! Fill out the form linked here, and be sure to include your name, username, city of interest, and the subreddits you moderate. As mentioned above, our goal is to have a diverse group of users, and space is extremely limited for each city. You will be notified once we have the lists finalized. Mods who have been selected will be contacted approximately one month before the event, with a follow-up message coming one week before the event letting you know the time and location.
This year, there may be cameras—don’t freak out!
Last year, for our first roadshow, we were very particular about not wanting to bring cameras to our events, for many reasons (we wanted folks to feel comfortable, maintain privacy, not feel awkward, etc.). This was fine, and I think we did what was right for our first year, but we learned two very important lessons: 1. Mod attendees seemed pretty unphased by cameras and were totally fine taking group photos and such all night long (we took so many photos together!), and 2. because we didn’t bring cameras, we had no evidence to show legitimately how awesome each event was. Because of this, for 2018, we’re planning to bring a few cameras, so we can show off how much fun these events are. (Don’t worry, if you’re still interested in maintaining your privacy, just let us know. We’ll make sure it’s easy to steer clear of being in any photos. This is just an early heads-up on the change to this year’s event.)
I’ll be sticking around to answer questions. In the meantime, on behalf of all of us at Reddit HQ, thank you all for everything you do. We’re excited to meet a lot of you very soon!
** Additional names for this year’s event included...
- Mod Bless
- For Mod’s Sake
- Cape Mod
- Applaud-a-Mod
- American Mods
- City of Mod
- Mod Future
- #ModGoals
- Modrophenia
Hey mods!
There are hundreds of amazing communities built around redditors creating content for other redditors. We want to take what people are already doing on the site and make it native by creating an Original Content tag. We love all of the hard work you’ve put in to build and grow your communities and we hope that by creating a tag for OC, we can give better attribution to users and make that content more discoverable.
What we’ve working on:
- Ability for posters and moderators to tag/untag posts as “OC” (so your users won’t have to put “OC” in the post title). This tag will work very similarly to Spoiler and NSFW tags and give you the ability to mark or unmark posts as OC. We made an announcement for this last week.
- Updates to post creation page on the desktop redesign to help redditors find and share their work with OC-friendly communities.
- Helping people discover content and OC-friendly subs on a new OC Discovery page. On this page, we’ll highlight the top posts tagged with OC from participating communities (using hot, new, and top sorts). So if you have a small, but growing community around users sharing their garage band music or maybe great tutorials around woodworking, we’re going to help those who are equally passionate about these topics find your community and content. We will respect the discoverability setting for your community in subreddit settings.
What we’re looking for:
- More subreddits that are interested in testing this out with us. If you have a subreddit that’s sees a lot of original content (writing, photos, music, art, food recipes, memes, comics, etc.) we want to hear from you!
- If you’re interested in joining the beta, please reply with your subreddit to the stickied comment below.
- By joining the beta:
- Users can tag posts to your subreddit as “OC” instead of putting it in the title.
- Users will be able to find your community more easily during post creation and will be able to tag posts as OC.
- Your community and its OC content will eventually be more discoverable on a new Original Content Discovery page that highlights the best original content across Reddit.
We plan to open up the beta to more communities in the upcoming weeks. Special shoutout to these communities who are interested in helping us beta test this:
- r/aww
- r/cats
- r/art
- r/comicbookart
- r/diy
- r/foodporn
- r/shittyfoodporn
- r/pics
- r/SmallYTChannel
- r/youtubehaiku
- r/Filmmakers
- r/fantasywriters
I’ll be hanging out in the comments to answer questions. Thanks!
Hello moderators,
A few weeks ago we made a post regarding new mod tools such as bulk mod actions, submit time validation, removal reasons, styling in the redesign, as well as giving you all moderators access to the redesign.
What’s the latest?
As previously mentioned, we started off by focusing on making it easier for moderators to style their communities. Special thanks to the the folks to created r/RedesignHelp, which is a user-run subreddit for getting help with the new styling tools. Side note - be sure to check out the styling showcase we’re running!
We’ve also been working hard to ship bug fixes (and better track which features are not yet built on the redesign (more below). So far, we’ve shipped over 150 features, we've fixed over 1,400 bugs, and we're moving forward at a rate of ~20 features and 200+ bugs per month. A few improvements that we think you might like (to cherry pick from the weekly release notes in r/redesign):
- Mod tool improvements (Mod Mode): We heard your feedback that the mod tools were difficult to navigate and frequent actions were hard to take, so we’ve rejigged how a lot of that looks to make it easier. We’ve implemented a new mod mode (similar to the native apps), which will hide mod actions when you’re just trying to browse through content. Mod queue received some love as well (and will receive more soon)! It’s now a little easier to tell the difference between a post and comment and to view reports, to name a few things. Soon, we’ll be pulling more mod actions out of the drop-downs in classic and compact views for even better accessibility.
- Spoilers: Now we have the ability to tag text spoilers in both comments and posts. These spoilers will be obscured across the redesign, classic reddit, and our native apps (in a few weeks). Also, we are reaching out to 3rd party app developers to help them support it too. This cool new functionality works using the Fancy Pants editor in the redesign or using markdown. The markdown syntax is >!some spoilers about Snape!<.
- Performance update: Over the last few weeks we have been focusing a lot on performance. We pushed in a few improvements around the video players, autoplay behavior, removing blurs in card view, removing sticky behavior in Lightbox, and preloading/prefetching critical redesign assets to make scrolling experience better in the listings and comments page. We will continue investing more on performance and memory usage optimizations in the coming weeks.
- Mod queue confirm removal: We’ve added a ‘Confirm removal’ button on posts and comments removed by automod so that you can actually clear it from your queue.
We are continuing to work on new mod tools and will have updates to share once those features are further along. Tell us in the comments what modtools you’d love to see next! On that note, here is a preview of what structured styles will look like on mobile (waddup r/pigifs). On iOS, moderators can see what your community looks like with the styling.
There are things that we plan on building that are not on the redesign… yet.
Migrating over all of Reddit is a huge undertaking, and we’re still hard at work in scoping out some of those features. We know pages like wikis including your automoderator config, r/mod, and /comment listings are extremely important, and those pages still work -- we are currently working on the plans to port these over to the new site. That said, we do not want to break that functionality in the interim so it’s safest to have those pages exist on the current site before bringing them over to the redesign. We ask you to bear with us in this time of transition as there will be pages that revert to the current site.
What can you expect in terms of timeline?
Starting next week, we plan to begin adding more users to make sure we can support a bigger user base on our new codebase. As mentioned before, users will still have the option to keep the current design as their default as we have no plans to take that away. Additionally, we’re working on making toggling between the two designs easier as we open up access. Toggling back and forth will be easy, especially if you’re a mod needing tools that haven’t been ported yet. We do not wish to force the redesign on anyone who doesn’t want to use it, but at the same time, we really appreciate everyone who tries it out as we put a lot of hard work into it.
We will be adding a way for users to opt-in to the the redesign in the top left corner of the page, which will impact CSS. This will have a small impact on your subreddit since a small percentage of Redditors will start using your community in the redesign. We would appreciate if you took another look at your subreddit to make sure the styling is ready for your users (plug, r/redesignhelp).
I also wanted to take the opportunity to share a big thank you with everyone that has helped us so far. The feedback we’ve received has been incredibly helpful - keep it up.
Hi mods!
Communities are what makes Reddit unique and we want to make sure that’s foremost in how we approach the redesign. That said, we need your halp! We want to give you early access so we can get your feedback and you can begin styling your communities before opening it up to beta users. Don't worry, you will be able to use the old site as you currently do. In a couple weeks, we will open up alpha.reddit.com to our beta users and we want your community to be ready for it (and have some time to hear your feedback about some of the new mod tools!).
Starting today, all moderators have access to the redesign so that you can begin accessing the new mod tools and begin styling your communities. All you have to do is opt in in your user preferences, which you can do here.
As a moderator, you will have access to a few new mod tools:
- Bulk Mod Actions: Moderating subreddits with a high volume of activity can be difficult, and next to impossible without the help of third-party tools. To make things easier, we've been working to improve our native mod tools, both in our apps and in the redesign. Instead of taking one action at a time, you can now moderate multiple posts or comments at once. You’ll also be able to switch between different community mod queues with ease.
- Submit Validation: Moderators work hard to maintain the quality of their community. With the new Post Requirements, moderators can specify certain guidelines that a post has to abide by, such as requiring flair or title length restrictions. Users will be notified prior to submitting their posts so they aren’t confused by the rules when posting in a new community, they have the opportunity to fix their errors, and so moderators can spend less time addressing posts that don't meet these guidelines.
- Removal Reasons: Over the years, Toolbox has built some amazing features that have simplified moderation. As a Toolbox-inspired effort to improve our own mod tools, we’re pleased to support removal reasons as a native feature in the redesign. (Note for existing Toolbox users: Throughout our redesign process, we also worked with the toolbox team to make sure they have everything they need to make sure Toolbox features work in the redesign.)
Here are some of the things we’re continuing to work on:
- New Mod Tool Improvements: Building great products requires iteration. Mod Tools are some of the most important features on Reddit itself. Based on the feedback we’ve heard about the new mod tools over the previous year, certain workflows are clunky and usability can be an issue. We are currently working on iterations to improve upon mod tool experiences, particularly in the mod queue.
- Mod Mode: We also heard from moderators who’ve been testing the new site that it’s common for them to mod while they casually browse their subreddits, while at other times they want to zone into moderating. We are working on implementing a mod mode that will give you the ability to toggle between the two easily similar to how it works on mobile.
- Whitespace: We’ve seen a lot of feedback about whitespace and we hear you. We decided to give users the option to keep a more classic look (and make Classic View feel more familiar to the Reddit you’re used to) by expanding the width of the listing. We will update you when this work will land; it’s still in testing.
- Styling/CSS: As mentioned above, community identity is critical on Reddit. Today, communities often use CSS to create a unique identity, but it can be daunting and confusing for first-time moderators setting up new communities. Furthermore, CSS can break when new changes are introduced to the site. We’re building a structured approach to make sure communities are easy to style in a way that is uniform across all of our platforms. However, we do recognize that we are not as creative as our users, and we won't be able to build a structured solution for everything. Today in the redesign you can use our structured styling tools for the general subreddit look and feel, and can use CSS in the sidebar widget. We are planning on enabling CSS further and will update you with our progress.
We know change is hard, but would appreciate if you tried our new tools and let us know what you think. Please opt in and start styling your communities so we can work together to make sure we are building things in a way that is helpful for you all. Your feedback has been incredibly useful and we appreciate all the time you take to help us improve. Thanks again for all that you do.
This is like /r/announcements, except for topics that are only of interest to moderators.
- /r/ModSupport - Discuss moderation issues with reddit admins
- /r/modhelp - Get help from other moderators about anything pertaining to moderating on reddit
- /r/IdeasForTheAdmins - Specific ideas for site-wide improvement that aren't moderation specific should go in /r/IdeasForTheAdmins
- /r/help - Have questions on how to use reddit as a user? Check out /r/help
For general questions that aren't moderation related, please send to the rest of the community team here.
This is an admin-sponsored subreddit.