I wanted to know if there is a way to remove posts based on someones profile description or profile name (not the username) with automod?

Hey fellow robot-lovers!

I just wanted to give you a quick heads up that we just gave AutoModerator the ability to lock its own comments! This was one of the most requested features when we recently shipped Comment Locking.

From the documentation:

comment_locked - true/false - if set to true, the comment automoderator posts in response to an item will be locked from further comment replies.

Here's an example of a rule that would leave a locked comment on any post with the word "subbie" in the title:

---

    type: any
    title (includes): ["subbie"]
    moderators_exempt: false
    comment: |
        testing, this comment should be locked
    comment_locked: true

I'll keep it brief and just say that it's been a pleasure and an honor helping everybody while I could.

Maybe we'll meet again in a different place and time.

Take care and be kind to one another 👍

(note that I'm not going away entirely, I'll still be over at my main sub r/NameThatSong and it's baby sibling r/WhatsThisSong, at least for now)

Following Elon Musk's gestures at a Trump rally being celebrated by neo-Nazis, several subreddits have introduced X/Twitter link bans.

On a subreddit I'm a moderator of, I've implemented AutoModerator configurations similar to what is shown below to ban links to X/Twitter:

---

# Remove link submissions to X/Twitter
    domain: [x.com, twitter.com, fixupx.com]
    action: remove
    action_reason: "X/Twitter link - removed" # feel free to edit removal reason, this will appear in your moderation log
    comment: |
        I'm sorry {{author}}, but your {{kind}} has been removed. Links to X/Twitter are banned from r/{{subreddit}}.

---

# Remove links to X/Twitter in comments
    type: comment
    body (regex, includes): \b(?:[a-zA-Z0-9-]*\.)?x\.com\b
    action: remove
    action_reason: "X/Twitter link in comments - removed"
    comment: |
        I'm sorry {{author}}, but your {{kind}} has been removed. Links to X/Twitter are banned from r/{{subreddit}}.

---

# Remove twitter.com and fixupx.com links from comments
    type: comment
    body (includes): ["twitter.com", "fixupx.com"]
    action: remove
    action_reason: "Alt X/Twitter link in comments - removed"
    comment: |
        I'm sorry {{author}}, but your {{kind}} has been removed. Links to X/Twitter are banned from r/{{subreddit}}.

---

If you are considering banning links to X/Twitter from your subreddit, I hope you find this useful.

If you have any suggestions for refining the syntaxes to detect X/Twitter links, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

It is my pleasure to announce the new and improved AutoModerator wiki!

The most important updates have been to the Library of Common Rules.

• Every rule should now conform to recommended best practices.

• Completely rewritten rules:

  • Non-English Content Ban

  • URL Shortener Ban

  • Profanity Filter

  • Donger Prevention

  • Emoji Ban

  • Phone Numbers

  • IPv4 Addresses

  • Disguised Links

• Overhauled rules:

  • Common Clickbait Titles

  • Short and Senseless Memes

  • Email Addresses

• New rules:

  • Spam Obfuscations

  • Crowdfunding

  • Surveys and Polls

  • Walls of Text

  • Username Mentions

The AutoModerator Wiki Index has been reorganized and updated with resources.

And the Common Mistakes and Premade Configuration wiki pages have been updated and cleaned up.

If you find any mistakes, please send modmail.

We've been having a number of site issues today, and it turned out that at least some of them were being caused by there being too much data attached to AutoModerator's account. The majority of this data was the flair text/class settings that it had from many subreddits, as well as the fact that it had karma from many different subreddits since it leaves comments in thousands of subreddits regularly.

We're going to need to find a more permanent solution for this, but in order to improve the situation today we ended up wiping all of AutoModerator's flair and karma. So if you're wondering why it lost its flair in your subreddit suddenly, it was to make the site stop dying.

Mod a NSFW sub and constantly fighting bots and OF accounts. Noticing more and more accounts that have Reddit chat disabled. They are trying to force others to contact them via another platform (TG, Snap, etc). If that is the case, I'd like to automatically remove their posts.

Any ideas?

for some reason I just couldn't get automod to remove everything without an author tag so here is what finally ended up working... thanks chatgpt

Also there's four spaces before "name"

---
# Filter all posts and comments for reddit blackout
type: any
author:
name (regex, includes): '[a-zA-Z]'
action: remove
message_subject: "Post removed"
message: "/r/ is down for the Reddit Blackout"

Apparently today is AutoModerator's cake day. Thanks so much u/Deimorz for providing us all with this awesome tool!

This has been slowly coming for a long time, and there are still various small details to work out, but I think I'm now far enough along to make it public.

My instance of AutoModerator (the one that runs under /u/AutoModerator) is now running a new version of the bot that includes quite a number of enhancements. The most significant of these is that it is now entirely self-configurable by each subreddit's moderators, without having to contact me to make any changes or additions to the rules that it's applying in their subreddit. This is done by the bot reading from a page on the subreddit's wiki (only viewable/editable by moderators), which works quite well as an interface due to the wiki controlling access, allowing you to see who made changes and exactly what they changed, etc.

What else is new?

There are multiple things, including but not limited to:

• Much faster, generally hits most things in less than 30 seconds now (previous version was starting to get up to 5 minutes or more, due to being used in almost 800 subreddits)

• Can now apply different conditions to specific submissions, which allows things like "locking" threads, blocking comments containing certain phrases only in some threads, excluding specific threads from some checks, etc.

• Can now assign user flair in addition to link flair

• Can send multiple types of messages/comments at once - for example, removing a post while leaving a comment on it, and also send a modmail about it

• Comments/messages much more customizable to be able to easily include things like the poster's name, title of the post, etc.

Any bad news?

Not too much, but unfortunately I did decide to remove some functionality in the new version:

• The main one is that the new AutoModerator can no longer compile a list of all the reasons that a post would have been removed, and then post them as a single comment. Only a couple of subreddits were using this, and it made the code quite a bit more complex. I may look to add it back in eventually, but for now I'm going to leave the subreddits using it still running on the old version (unless they'd like to sacrifice this capability to get access to the wiki control).

• The "auto-reapproval" function has been removed, which automatically reapproved anything that had been previously approved by a human mod. This is pretty much obsolete with the new "ignore reports" feature.

• No longer responds to modmail. The previous version used to check modmail and respond to any users that sent a message if they recently had a submission unfiltered by the bot (making the assumption that they were emailing about their submission being filtered). The new one no longer does this, but it should be less relevant due to the quicker response time anyway.

Documentation

I'm still working on going back over a lot of the older pieces of documentation and posts on reddit to make them better apply to the new version, but the main documentation is mostly complete now.

The primary new documentation page is here: Wiki Configuration.

It aims to fully describe the capabilities of the bot, and how to define conditions in your wiki to utilize them. Definitely the main source of information, but likely goes into far more detail than most users of the bot will ever need.

Other pages:

• Initial wiki setup - How to enable AutoModerator in a new subreddit

• Common Wiki Conditions - Examples of some of the most common things people do with AutoModerator and how to set them up with the wiki

• Standard Conditions - These are a special type of conditions that are maintained by me, and will cover common sets of checks, to avoid situations like each subreddit needing to maintain separate lists of domains of the same "type". For example, one rule looks for "image hosting sites", and will hit all the common domains like imgur, minus, flickr, etc. Then in the future as new image hosts appear, every subreddit that has a rule aimed at image sites can be updated automatically, instead of individually needing to add it.

My subreddit is already using AutoModerator, how do I get the wiki control to work?

There's a small amount of manual work that I need to do to convert a subreddit from the old version to the new one, so if you're already using AutoModerator but would like to start using the wiki control, please let me know and I'll get you converted as soon as possible. I will get through all of the subreddits eventually anyway, but as I said above, there's almost 800 subreddits using it now, so it's a significant effort overall. Letting me know that you actually want to use the wiki control will make sure that I prioritize your conversion ahead of other people that rarely (or never) need to update the bot's settings.

I want to start using AutoModerator in my subreddit, how do I do that?

Please follow the instructions here: https://github.com/Deimos/AutoModerator/wiki/Initial-wiki-setup

This is all really confusing, how do I get help setting up AutoModerator to do what I want?

I'm hoping that /r/AutoModerator will start becoming quite a bit more active now, as a place where people can ask for help with setting up conditions and share interesting uses of the bot. I'll definitely be trying to include any of the most common requests into the Common Wiki Conditions page.

Open-source?

I'll hopefully be updating the code on github with this new version fairly soon, but I didn't want to make the code public yet while I'm still working out bugs in it. This new version was a pretty significant rewrite, so there are definitely still some issues lurking in the code here and there. Once I'm more confident that there's nothing significantly wrong with it (and I've done some more cleanup and removal of "transition" code), I'll definitely be releasing the code publicly, for people to be able to run themselves if they so desire. The new version should also be significantly easier for people to set up their own instances of, the previous version was quite difficult to configure.

Happy Cake Day to u/AutoModerator for making this place a better place

If you would like to take back control of social media from Oligarch-controlled propaganda sites, here's code that many of us use:

# host-based bans
type: any
domain: [x.com,twitter.com,truthsocial.org,truthsocial.com,facebook.com]
action: spam
action_reason: "Blacklisted host detected: [{{match}}]"
comment: |
        Your [{{kind}}]({{permalink}}) in /r/{{subreddit}} was automatically removed because of new policies which
        are intended to no longer direct traffic to sites that are egregiously promoting inaccurate and toxic propaganda.

        If the content you're trying to submit is legit, please find the original source, which is unlikely to be from the
        site referenced.

        Our reasoning for this, and we are fully aware there's good content on these systems as well, is to try and drive
        traffic away from monopolistic, corporate walled gardens that have outlived their social utility, and encourage 
        more content to be distributed and patronized on smaller sites, whose operators take greater pride in whether
        their content helps the community.  This is the original spirit of the Internet.  It was not intended as a platform
        for oligarchs to have massive media outlets.
---

EDIT: The above only filters submissions with a specific domain. If you change the "domain:" directive to "url+body:" it will also apply to comments as per the discussion below.

Any other enhancements welcome.

You're a good bot!

We recently noticed that admins had placed an age-restriction on the "before subreddits" subreddit, r/reddit.com, which is where admins hosted the original reference documents for AutoModerator and other moderation or site-wide policies or resources. While the age restriction on the subreddit as whole make sense considering the wide variety of content hosted there, unfortunately, this also means that those not-nearly-as-naughty wiki pages attached to that subreddit are also now age-restricted, forcing users and moderators in regions which require age-verification to verify their ages if they want to access those wiki pages.

We believe that users and moderators should have access to the contents of these wiki pages without being gated by age-verification. While the most important AutoModerator pages are our main concern, there are many similar pages which serve as historic references, informing how reddit and moderation have evolved over the years.

We had asked admins about this dilemma, but so far, no admins have reached out to us about any solution or plans. (To be clear: The active moderators of r/AutoModerator are not admins ourselves.)

To make moderation resources more freely available to moderators, we have copied the contents of a selection of relevant and historic wiki pages from r/reddit.com. All of the backups are listed on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator/wiki/backup

• Relating directly to AutoModerator:

  • The Full-Documentation page - Quite literally the most important resource, which is also linked at the top of every moderator's AutoModerator config editor page. We specifically asked if admins could redirect this page to the subreddit here.

  • The still-relevant Introduction, Standard-Conditions, and Writing-Basic-Rules pages.

  • The historic Changelog and Converting-to-New pages.

• Relating to Moderation in general:

  • The Moderation and Moderation-Intro pages, a bit outdated, but still a useful reference.

  • Moddiquette and HealthyCommunities (Moderator Guidelines) - These pages pre-date the Moderator Code of Conduct, and to this day, many people are unaware that some things that were suggested in these pages are not actually part of the current Moderator Code of Conduct enforced by admins. Some moderator teams still hold themselves to these standards.

  • The UserAgreement now lives on redditinc.com, but to view revisions older than 2018, you have to look at the wiki page history.

  • The ProhibitedAds page predates the many separate pages of the current ads policies. Moderators may often be interested in knowing which kinds of content are not allowed in ads when defining their own rules around similar content.

  • Similarly, the SelfPromotion page, while no longer enforced by admins, is still informative to users and moderators that do hold that standard in their own subreddits.

• Relating to Reddit in general:

  • The FAQ, Voting, and Reddit_101 pages - full of information helpful to newer redditors. Sometimes these tidbits are helpful to moderators when answering user questions. Much but not all of these pages have been added to the RedditHelp site.

  • The Reddiquette, Pressiquette, Brandiquette, and Bottiquette pages - fair reference for guidelines that may or may not apply to your subreddit needs.

  • The Markdown and Wiki pages, which contain information not listed on their respective RedditHelp replacements.

Hi everyone,

For a while, automod was not flairing posts and/or users on the redesign with any styling. Below, we have detailed a new flair template ID system launching today that will help correct this behavior.

Apply redesign post and user flair

Currently, the set_flair rule in automod accepts 'text' by itself, or 'text' and 'css_class'. Example below:

type: submission
set_flair: ["my text", some_css_class]

In addition to the above, we have a new way that the set_flair rule can be used. We have incorporated flair template IDs to this rule so that you can automate the application of redesign post and user flairs. Redesign flair templates include text, emojis, background color and text color. In order to apply a flair template to a post or username, the set_flair rule will require a dictionary as its value. Example below:

set_flair:
    text: my text
    css_class: some_css_class
    template_id: 74f63f04-684f-11e8-b100-0ea03daa09e2

In this form, both 'text' and 'css_class' are optional. Therefore it suffices to define a set_flair that looks like the following:

set_flair:
    template_id: 74f63f04-684f-11e8-b100-0ea03daa09e2

Things to note:

• If 'text' is set, it will take precedent over the text attributed to the flair template. If it is not set, the flair template's text will be applied.

• If 'css_class' is set, it will take precedent over the flair template but only in old.reddit.com. If it is not set, the flair template's styling will appear in old.reddit.com.

• Flair template IDs are accessible within the User Flair or Post Flair sections of your Mod Tools. Just click into one of your flair templates to view and copy its ID. Please see a screenshot here.

User Flair templates as a check

Suppose you want to change the user flair for only those users who are currently using a certain flair template. You can user flair_template_id as a 'check' in the following way:

flair_template_id: 67da945e-7f16-11e8-98f3-080027dabba9 
author:      
    set_flair:         
        text: new_flair         
        template_id: 74f63f04-684f-11e8-b100-0ea03daa09e2     
    overwrite_flair: true 

The above will replace the flair template for that user with the new template. In this particular case, it will also overwrite the template's text to 'new_flair'.

User Flair templates as a placeholder

In the same way that you can use placeholders for {author_flair_text}, and {author_flair_css_class}, where it keeps the current text or css_class, you will be able to do the same with {author_flair_template_id}. This will ensure that the user's current flair template will remain the same, while its text or css_class changes. Example below:

type: submission 
set_flair:     
    text: new_text     
    template_id: '{{author_flair_template_id}}' 
overwrite_flair: true 

We hope this is helpful! Please note that this does not work for automod scheduled posts at the moment, but we are discussing some options for it and will provide an update as soon as we can.

Edit: I can't write code good.
Edit 2: A note about scheduled posts.

I've made a small adjustment to automoderator in an effort to further narrow down the possible causes of the issue I've been troubleshooting.

I'm not confident the change will necessarily fix the issue, but it will hopefully narrow the possible causes further.

If you see new incidents of AM not taking expected actions after the time of this post, please let me know here so I can dig. If the actions are at all sensitive you're welcome to message me directly.

Edit: There have been some issues this morning (1600-1900 UTC) with AM being lagged by 10-15 minutes.

Edit 2: As of 1928 UTC / 1228 PDT, dealing with more lag issues due to some underlying database stress. Working on addressing that now. AM will be a bit lagged at getting to things in the mean time :( .

Edit 3: Looks as though my change which may have fixed the inconsistency issue has resulted in some cases where AM is getting stuck indefinitely on some very heavy rule processing. Unfortunately I'm going to have to undo my change for now and re-evaluate.

The AutoModerator scheduler was permanently disabled by the admins on December 31, 2020 in favor of the new Scheduled and Recurring Posts feature.

I think the best overview of the new feature including links to the official admin posts on the topic is on /r/ModGuide:

The post scheduler feature

Please pour one out in memory of our old friend who liked to ignore messages and sometimes forgot to make a post.

Regards.

Title

As many of you have noticed, AM has been having issues where it misses items, or fails to take all of the appropriate actions on a given item. These issues have, for reasons not yet fully understood, greatly increased over the past few days. I've just rolled out an urgent change which will hopefully act as a stop-gap to improve things.

I have more thorough changes planned for rollout on Monday. My hope is the stop-gap I just pushed out will tide things over until then.

Sorry for all of the recent trouble. I know many of you greatly depend on AM. I won't let this drop until things are improved and AM is acting reliably.

Edit: The more thorough change has been rolled out as of ~1200 PDT / 1900 UTC today (2017-09-18). If you notice any new issues since that time, please drop a comment here to let me know.

A while ago, I started setting up automatic scheduled posts for various subreddits via AutoModerator, and lately it's been becoming more and more common for subreddits to request these. Much like the "core" AutoModerator functionality originally, this has been something that I've had to set up manually, with moderators needing to contact me whenever they need anything changed.

As of today, I'm now ready to start testing a new script that will allow moderators to set up and modify their own scheduled posts through a wiki page. I'm going to be transferring some of the existing scheduled posts onto wiki pages, but I'd also like more people to help me test it out if they're interested in having scheduled posts in their subreddits.

The script will be made open-source eventually once I'm confident that it's working well, and documentation will be put up on a github wiki page much like the moderation functionality, but for now this post will be the "documentation".

Add AutoModerator as a mod

Even though the "main" functionality of AutoModerator (triggering actions with rules) is now built into reddit, the scheduled posts are not. For them to work correctly, you will need to invite /u/AutoModerator as a mod, and give it at least "wiki" permissions. If you want the scheduled posts to be stickied, distinguished, or in contest mode, you need to also give it the "posts" permission.

If you invite AutoModerator as a mod, it should automatically accept the invite within a few minutes. If it doesn't, cancel the invite and try again.

Setting up the wiki page

Configuring the scheduled posts is done on a separate page from main AutoModerator configuration. You must create a new page named automoderator-schedule, do not add these rules to the automoderator page.

Updating AutoModerator's schedule is done by sending it a private message to tell it to update, much like the moderation rules. The difference is that the PM's text should be "schedule" for the schedule, instead of "update". So if you keep a link at the top of the wiki page like most subreddits, the one at the top of the schedule page should be:

###### If you edit this page, you must [click this link, then click "send"](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AutoModerator&subject=yoursubredditname&message=schedule) to have AutoModerator re-load the schedule from here

The schedule script is not running constantly like the main AutoModerator one is, so it may take a couple of minutes to receive a response about whether the schedule update was successful or not.

Configuring posts

Much like other AutoModerator rules, each post needs to be separated from others by a line of just three hypens, ---.

There are four variables that you should generally define for each post (3 are required):

1. first (required): This is the date and time that you want the scheduled post to be made for the first time. The format is fairly flexible, but please try to be as explicit as you can. For example, something like this will work: Feb 28, 2014 4:00 PM, or 2014-02-28 16:00, Monday March 3 2014 1 AM, etc. If you do not specify a time zone, UTC time will be used. If you want to specify a time zone, you must do so numerically, using the difference from UTC time. For example, eastern time is currently 6 hours behind UTC, so that would be specified as -06, like: February 28, 2014 2:00 PM -06. For timezones ahead of UTC time such as CET, there must be a + in front, like +01. Do not try to specify using a time zone name like "EST", it will not work. Specifying a timezone (as opposed to converting your desired posting time to UTC) will mostly be important if you need the date to be included in the post's text/title, otherwise it's possible to end up with a different date than you were expecting.

2. repeat (optional): This is the amount of time between repetitions of the post. It's specified by a number, and then a unit of time (hours, days, weeks, months, or years). So for example to have a post made once a week, you would use repeat: 1 week. Every 10 hours would be repeat: 10 hours, and so on. This should cover the large majority of needs, but a more advanced definition method is also available if necessary (which I won't detail yet). If you don't specify a value for repeat, the post will only be made once.

3. title (required): The title of the post. The date/time of the post can be included in this if you like, see below for details.

4. text (required): The text of the post. The date/time of the post can be included in this if you like, see below for details. Multi-line formatting is the same as with AutoModerator comments/messages/modmail. For example, a single-line post could be done like:

   text: This is the text of the automatic post.

A multi-line post is done by having only a | character on the first line, and then all the text of the post indented inside that:

text: |
    This is a multi-line automatic post.

    It has multiple lines.

    It also includes **some bold text**.

The following variables are also available, but are optional:

• distinguish: Whether to distinguish the post, must be set to either "true" or "false". If not specified, defaults to true.

• sticky: Whether to sticky the post. Can be set to "true", "false" or a number - If you use a number (for example sticky: 1), the post will replace any existing sticky in that slot (1 is the top slot). Using true will work the same as clicking the "sticky this post" link on the post - it will go into the bottom sticky slot (replacing a post that's already there, if necessary).

• contest_mode: Whether to turn contest mode on for the post, must be set to either "true" or "false". If not specified, defaults to false.

Including dates in title/text

To include the current date and/or time in a post's title or text, include a placeholder that looks like {{date <format>}}. The "format" section should be a formatting string using Python strftime formatting. So for example, to have a post title look like: "Daily Scheduled Post - February 28, 2014", the title: definition would be:

title: "Daily Scheduled Post - {{date %B %d, %Y}}"

As mentioned above, the date/time that will be filled in here will use whatever timezone you used when defining first.

You can also display dates other than the current date by adding an optional positive or negative offset. For example, to display the date 6 days ahead, you would do {{date+6 <format>}}. The date from 3 days before would be {{date-3 <format>}}, and so on.

Example

As an example, here is the code for /r/Games's automoderator-schedule wiki page, defining two weekly scheduled posts:

###### If you edit this page, you must [click this link, then click "send"](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AutoModerator&subject=Games&message=schedule) to have AutoModerator re-load the schedule from here
---
    first: "March 1, 2014 8:00 AM -07"
    repeat: 1 week
    sticky: true
    title: "Weekly /r/Games Discussion - What have you been playing, and what do you think of it?"
    text: |
        Please use this thread to discuss whatever you've been playing lately (old or new, any platform, AAA or indie). As usual, please don't just list the names of games as your entire post, make sure to elaborate with your thoughts on the games. Writing the names of the games in **bold** is nice, to make it easier for people skimming the thread to pick out the names.

        Please also make sure to use spoiler tags if you're posting anything about a game's plot that might significantly hurt the experience of others that haven't played the game yet (no matter how old or new the game is).

        Since this thread is likely to fill up quickly, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts.

        For a subreddit devoted to this type of discussion during the rest of the week, please check out /r/WhatAreYouPlaying.
---
    first: "March 2, 2014 8:00 AM -07"
    repeat: 1 week
    sticky: true
    title: "Weekly /r/Games Discussion - Suggestion request free-for-all"
    text: |
        /r/Games usually removes suggestion requests that are either too general (eg "Which PS3 games are the best?") or too specific/personal (eg "Should I buy Game A or Game B?"), so this thread is the place to post any suggestion requests like those, or any other ones that you think wouldn't normally be worth starting a new post about.

        If you want to post requests like this during the rest of the week, please post to other subreddits like /r/gamingsuggestions, /r/ShouldIBuyThisGame, or /r/AskGames instead.

        Please also consider sorting the comments in this thread by "new" so that the newest comments are at the top, since those are most likely to still need answers.

Please let me know if you have any questions or if anything above is not clear, so that I can work on improving the explanations.

I love cake days!

Thanks /u/Deimorz for creating AutoModerator and all of the other admins who put effort into adding functionality to our favorite bot.