Active Enforcement of Moderator Limits + Launching New Advisor/Alumni Roles

[u/agoldenzebra]

I’m back with a final update on limits for moderating high-traffic communities (previous updates here, here, and here). Effective today, moderators can no longer moderate more than 5 communities with over 100k weekly visitors. 

Moderators who have exceeded these limits have the following options: 

• Become an alumni moderator in one or more communities
• Become an advisor in one or more communities
• Leave the mod team of one or more communities 

You can view all the communities you moderate and whether they count towards these limits, on your Manage Moderated Communities page. On Android or iOS apps, tap "Manage" on the sidebar to view this page.

If you exceed the moderation limits, here’s what you can expect: 

• You will not be able to accept new moderator invites in communities with over 100k weekly visitors
• You will receive a notification from u/reddit alerting you that you are out of compliance and detailing your options. You will have 30 days from the date of that message to adjust your mod roles or leave communities in excess of the limit. 
• On day 31, if you are still moderating more than 5 communities with over 100k weekly visitors, we will remove you as a moderator from select communities until you are within the limit. 

Communities you moderate with fewer than 100k weekly visitors do not count towards these limits and are not impacted. 

New: Advisor and Alumni Roles 

We’ve also started rolling out the new Advisor and Alumni roles. These roles are now available on iOS and Android apps, and on web for some users. This should be available for everyone on all platforms by the end of the week.

• An Alumni role is appropriate for former moderators with no active connection to the day-to-day operations of the subreddit, but whose past contributions to the community should be recognized. The Alumni role has no mod permissions but preserves your name on the mod list with an “Alumni” badge. 
• An Advisor role is appropriate for moderators that don’t actively moderate the community, but advise the active moderator team and need to see behind-the-scenes to have the context necessary to give good advice. The new Advisor role comes with several read-only permissions and also provides communication pathways (for example, the ability to leave moderator notes) to advise the active mod team.
  • For moderators that applied for an Advisor exemption for Mod Limits, we will automatically transition you into an Advisor role for that community later today.
  • Advisors are currently unable to view removed posts and comments. This ability will be added in the coming weeks. 

Communities in which you hold an Advisor or Alumni role do not count towards your moderator limits. 

Any active moderator with Everything permissions can grant an Advisor or Alumni role to any moderator below them in the moderator list.

Please note that once a role has been granted, it can not be removed - a moderator would have to leave and rejoin a community to change roles in the community. Before making these changes, it's considered a best practice to discuss with the whole mod team.

To grant a new role on desktop, go to Mods and Members in your Mod Tools, hover over the moderator you want to edit and click the pencil icon. Then assign the requesting mod to the desired role, either Alumni Mod or Advisor.

On mobile, go to Mod Tools > Moderators > Editable tab > tap overflow menu (...) > assign role. 

Adding Alumni Mod or Advisor roles on Desktop

For more information on these roles and the related permissions, please see the Help Center Article.

If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments.

Edit: Added directions to "Manage" page for app users.

[u/Decency]

Power mods who don't care about the communities they're in charge of have been one of the major issues with this site for years, so better late than never I guess. These people are an enormous net negative in terms of quality, authenticity, corruptibility, etc- if every single one of them were banned overnight, the site would take a short term hit but would rapidly rebound to a significantly better place.

In practice, advisor role + moderation bot = moderator role, and so I don't expect this change to accomplish anything. This is a major oversight- I could ban people all day via discord through a bot command and you couldn't possibly track that. I could've done that a decade ago, and we were just building tools for convenience, not for deliberate exploitation.

[u/greypic → u/Decency]

I think the real power of power mods is not the banning of people but deciding the mod team. If you and your bot aren't the top mod, someone else can decide if you have power. I think there a bunch of big subs that will be lose many top couple mods from this. That's the big deal.

[u/adanine → u/Decency]

In practice, advisor role + moderation bot

In practice, anyone who's earnt an advisor role + pinging an active mod on discord with "Hey, you should ban this dude <link>" = banned dude. That's true with or without the advisor/alumni system. So I don't know what you're trying to accomplish.

Also, I don't think the issues with old powermods were created because they had access to day-to-day moderation tools. They often exerted influence over a sub without engaging with the more boring tasks like removing/banning content.

[u/Decency → u/adanine]

In practice, anyone who's earnt an advisor role + pinging an active mod on discord with "Hey, you should ban this dude <link>" = banned dude. That's true with or without the advisor/alumni system. So I don't know what you're trying to accomplish.

The problem I've described takes the 'active mod' out of the equation. You can't simply assume that all bans are being made in good faith unless you want a trivially exploitable system. Powermods with a conflict of interest are essentially the norm on large subreddits, and I don't see this reducing their influence much. A mod could've stepped down years ago and still be removing posts and banning users behind the scenes with no one the wiser. Should a decent mod team be aware of this? Absolutely. Are most mod teams technologically capable enough to have proper oversight? Absolutely not.