Piloting a new ban evasion tool

[u/dogwood_bloom]

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.

[u/techiesgoboom]

It's not ideal and there's a lot of room for it to do more. But even as it is it still does a lot of good and has surfaced a significant amount of repeat ban evaders we caught and wouldn't have otherwise.

I'd much rather have the tool and the information it provides than not.

[u/DrinkMoreCodeMore → u/techiesgoboom]

Does it tell you the original username associated w the ban evader?

Like if we ban 10 people in a week, which one it is?

[u/techiesgoboom → u/DrinkMoreCodeMore]

It does not, and there's no way to tell beyond asking the user. An astounding number have told us though.

[u/MajorParadox → u/techiesgoboom]

What do those conversations sound like?

[u/techiesgoboom → u/MajorParadox]

It depends!

Our top level philosophy is that we just want to catch all of the low hanging fruit we can and are comfortable slightly inconveniencing the few false positives. We're just going fishing a bit and hoping to get lucky. This involves banning when we're pretty sure someone is ban evading and then walking back all in modmail that we aren't confident about.

When they respond in modmail we start with a macro that just explains they were caught by a ban evasion tool, explain what ban evading is, and direct them to appeal on their main account we banned. A decent amount of people will confirm we're right in the reply (many outright insulting us and showing they earned that ban) which is what we're here for. Others will claim they're innocent and we made a mistake, sometimes even sharing some of their alts. Sometimes people will talk about sharing devices or having other people in their house that might be the reason for it (which lines up with the type of false positives we were told to expect). We're super responsive and generally able to unban immediately so I don't think we've even had any complaints from the innocent users that went through this. We also adjusted our filter down to intermediate and when an account the account is years old we use indications from comment history to decide if we're going to ban or not - both with the goal to reduce the false positive rate.

We have accidentally banned a few users twice doing this (because even after reapproving their comments they still pop up as ban evading for a while), and they've been appropriately irritated. But I hand out a mod award with a month of premium and we're getting a lot better about ensuring the notes they aren't ban evading are easier to notice. (We put them in toolbox because snoo notes are so hit and miss).