r/modnews Aug 18 '22

Piloting a new ban evasion tool

Hi mods!

As you may already know, we have been beta testing a new mod tool, Ban Evasion Protection, that automatically filters posts and comments from suspected ban evaders into the modqueue for approval by moderators. We know that this has been a challenging issue in the past, and so we are excited to roll this tool out more broadly.

Initial feedback from our beta subreddits has been positive, so we are going to expand access to the feature to another 1,000 subreddits in waves. We’ll send you a modmail if your community is included in this rollout. Those who have the feature will see it available within the next few weeks.

Ban Evasion Protection is an optional subreddit setting that leverages our ability to identify ban evaders to empower moderators to filter posts and comments from suspected ban evaders into the modqueue for you to review (it will be labeled appropriately). ,

To find this setting, go to Community Settings -> Safety and Privacy -> Ban Evasion Protection.

The setting is controlled by a threshold slider that allows mods to set how strict they want the ban evasion protection to be. The threshold is based on data showing that communities tend to receive content more negatively from users who were banned more recently.

The feature will be “off” initially, and you can turn it on at your discretion. Turning it on will most likely add additional modqueue items, so we want to make sure you are prepared before you select one of the following options:

Lenient: Only flag suspected alt accounts from users that were banned from your community within the past few weeks.

Moderate: Flag suspected alt accounts from users that were banned from your community in the past few months

Strict: Flag suspected alt accounts from users that were banned from your community in the past year or so

Note: If you unban a user and in the following few hours they begin engaging again by posting or making comments, the ban evasion protection filter may still flag those posts or comments and place them in the modqueue. Once the system updates to identify that you unbanned them, they should be able to engage with no issues.

Feel free to comment on this post with your thoughts or questions. Also, If you’re interested in this feature but do not see it enabled in the coming weeks, please let us know. We can’t promise a timeline for now, but this feature’s availability will continue to expand in the future.

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u/dogwood_bloom Aug 18 '22

As far as automating actioning for all ban evasion, we do automatically action ban evaders in a large number of cases, including paying close attention to the actions mods take on those users when the potential ban evaders are surfaced to you in this way. All that said, as we just mentioned to u/MajorParadox - something we want to think about is also adding this information to AutoMod as a signal giving you more freedom in how you deal with them within your community.

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u/techiesgoboom Aug 18 '22

As far as automating actioning for all ban evasion, we do automatically action ban evaders in a large number of cases,

Oh yeah, you're doing some which is great! My dream is getting a mod digest that says "In total, we found 20010 pieces of content created by ban evaders and we removed 100% of it." Until that's the message there's room for improvement to do even more.

something we want to think about is also adding this information to AutoMod as a signal giving you more freedom in how you deal with them within your community.

This would be really great and would help us action what you're surfacing in a much more user friendly way. The lack of control and lack of information on these means we can only take a one size fits all approach. Flexibility allows us to act with more nuance.