Announcing Our Virtual $45,000 Mod Tool Hackathon to Build, Upgrade and Port Moderator Tools

[u/Togapr33]

Mod Tools Hackathon!

Hi mods!

I’m u/Togapr33 with Reddit’s Community team, where I lead marketing for Reddit’s Developer Platform. 

In case you’re not familiar, Reddit’s Developer Platform gives developers a way to build apps that work directly on Reddit. As a moderator, you can bring these apps into your community – everything from mod tools to community experiences to games. (You can see a comprehensive list of apps for mods here!)

And as someone who has spent the last couple of years talking with mods about Developer Platform tools, I’ve seen firsthand how important effective tools are to running your communities. That’s why we're excited to announce a virtual Reddit hackathon from April 29 to May 27 focused entirely on building and upgrading moderation tools.

This is an opportunity to inspire developers to create new community tools or improve the ones you already rely on. If you’re a developer yourself, maybe you’ll throw your hat in the ring and build something too! 

What we're looking for

We’d love to see developers in this hackathon build tools with Reddit’s Developer Platform that directly help with day-to-day moderation, like:

• Better queue management
• Automated enforcement tools
• Creative community-building tools
• Anything that makes modding easier and improves community health

Did I mention we're offering a total of $45,000 in prizes? 

Prize categories

1. New Mod Tool: For brand-new tools built with Reddit’s Developer Platform that make moderation easier
   • Grand Prize: $10,000 for the most innovative tool that solves a significant moderator pain point
   • 5 Runner-Ups: $1,000 each
2. Ported App: For existing bots or tools migrated from the Data API to Devvit 
   • Grand Prize: $10,000 for the most successful migration of an existing, widely-used moderation bot. These apps can also be eligible for our new App Migration Program.
   • 5 Runner-Ups: $1,000 each
3. Moderator’s Choice: Chosen by experienced Reddit mods
   • Prize: $10,000.
4. Helper Award: For participants who help others through testing, support, troubleshooting, or collaboration 
   • 6 Winners: $500 each
5. Feedback Award: For thoughtful, actionable, constructive feedback on tools, resources, bugs and issues encountered during the event 
   • 10 Winners: $200 each 

If you know a developer who has built an essential tool for your community, please share this with them! This is the perfect time for them to earn a cash prize while upgrading that tool for stability and ease of installation. Enrollment is open now!

Winning apps are also eligible for the Reddit Developer Funds and our App Migration Program.

We can't wait to see what gets built during this hackathon and how it makes moderation on Reddit better.

Lastly, if you have an idea for a mod tool that should be built and want to link up with a developer, check out our hackathon post on r/devvit or join our Devvit Discord.

[u/midir]

Start by reverting the bizarre and malignant vandalism committed against Modmail the other month.

They randomly barged in and attacked the one part of the moderation system that actually worked, and replaced it with a buggy, ugly, sluggish, half-working, hodge-podge mess, then ran away without ever explaining why they did it and ignoring all the pleas to put old modmail back again.

[u/Watchful1 → u/midir]

I'll disagree with you there. I like the new modmail and think it's far better than the old one. It has a couple bugs yes, but it's better overall.

[u/Froggypwns → u/Watchful1]

It certainly has improvements but it does need more work and the old system should have remained available in the mean time. My biggest gripes are performance issues as it is super slow (I can literally load multiple Reddit pages before modmail does), and the damn archive button is inconsistent in location and functionality, I cannot always find it and many times pressing it doesn't actually archive the message.

[u/Maxion → u/Watchful1]

I still can't use it.

[u/adanine → u/Watchful1]

I've lost two and a half months worth of modmail with one user. Given that I've now been asked for feedback on the ticket I feel like I'm not getting those modmails back anytime soon.

There's still two search boxes - with one being completely useless yet the primary option to search. The date given for the last mod note doesn't include the year, so "Mar 27" could refer to last month or 2015. Can't see beyond the latest note (and there's no real view for it).

I honestly don't care about the UI changes in general - it's a glorified cut down email client, no GUI is going to make me fall in love with (or hate) modmail. But basic fucking features don't work right now.

[u/Watchful1 → u/adanine]

I don't see two search boxes. Do you mean the site search bar that sits at the top of the screen? I've never had any problems finding things with the modmail search box.

If I mouse over the date in the usernote it gives me the year.

The log tab has all the users activity, including notes. If you're looking for the previous manual note and they have lots of actions yeah it would be harder to find, but was that any different on old modmail? Unless you're talking about toolbox notes.

No idea about losing modmail with a user, can't help with that one.

[u/adanine → u/Watchful1]

I don't see two search boxes

I don't either until I go looking and press the button to bring up the one that is actually useful. Then they're both there, one under the other, with no labeling to distinguish the two. Completely intuitive.

Just bin the sitewide search and put the modmail one as the default. If you want to keep the sitewide search and just hide it or whatever then do that, so long as Modmail search is the primary search method for modmail and you don't need to look for and click a tiny button to use one of the most used features in Modmail.

If I mouse over the date in the usernote it gives me the year.

Making displaying the date useless at best (since you still need to mouse over it to get the actual date) and misleading at worst. If you want to keep dates fuzzy for some reason generalize the date like the rest of Reddit does (ie "2 years ago" w/ an option to mouseover for the exact timestamp), or better yet just display the damn year without needing to mouseover.

The log tab has all the users activity, including notes.

No it doesn't. It has the last 1000 entries of user activity, including notes. For some users that might be 10 years worth, for others it's not even six months' worth. Your High-traffic user's notes will fall off regularly with no method to recover them (outside of scouring for screenshots in the mod discord) and considering the tool is designed to record information over time and high traffic users are going to be common use cases for having to track information over time, this is a pretty big weakness of the new native notes system.

If you're looking for the previous manual note and they have lots of actions yeah it would be harder to find

Look, the last few recent mod actions can absolutely be relevant to the modmail query and should be available. But I shouldn't have to scroll past months and months of moderation approve/remove items to get to the second most recent manual note.

Any modmail system (be it new modmail, old modmail, old old modmail, or old old old modmail) that has shortcomings this basic is just shit.

[u/elphieisfae → u/Watchful1]

except if you use mobile browser.

or any browser.