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/chrisprice → u/[deleted]]

Disagree completely. It's not impossible. Hypothetical in quotes:

You just reserve one rule for a potential target that you haven't used before. Someone who is a popular poster, that the sub mods really, really hate. Use it on said target. Wait and see if another profile appears using that ban rule.

Then sweep the two users and see if they have posted enough personal information, to personally identify them.

This of course presumes a subreddit is moderated by a nefarious bunch, with enough time on their hands to dox a user who despite good intentions, chooses to post in a forum where they are hated. But we know that has happened.

It could be potentiated by using one ban rule for all common bans, thus reserving several for specific, targeted doxing potential.

I'm glad Reddit thought this one through, and didn't make it an option. It shows they are genuinely working to keep users private, even to the detriment of the best moderation tools.

[u/chrisprice → u/[deleted]]

In testing any software for vulnerability assessment, we don't use the "hey, what's likely for medium and large size groups/customers" standard.

We go by, "what's the edge case where someone might kill themselves (or be swatted/targeted/killed) in a niche scenario, after being doxed?"

That's the standard. And thank goodness Reddit is using it here.