We've been getting asked a lot lately, "Why does it say that my post has X number of comments but I'm only seeing Y number?" Fair question.

The reason is simple: Spam.

In this recent post, that anyone can go look for themselves, it currently says that there are 63 comments. However, when you open it up, you'll see about 15(?), give or take.

This screenshot should help you all see what's going on. Keep in mind that this is not all of the comments from this post and it's chopped up a bit.

What you are seeing are a few things here. First, this was taken from old reddit so it likely looks a little different to many of you; old reddit is still the best for modding, among other things, btw.

The PINK are spam users who have had their comments pulled by us, or our automoderator scripts, and their accounts have been suspended by Reddit.

The Reddish ones are comments that have been pulled by us. If they are spam, they have been banned and reported and are likely to be suspended fairly quickly. If they are single guys not respecting the post flair and title tags, you'll see a subsequent message from the mod team (there's one here in this screenshot).

The blue are just new comments that we haven't seen until now.

Our automoderator scripts pick up about 90% of these automatically. At that point, if the account has not been suspended by Reddit yet, we will ban the user and report them to the Admins. Usually when we report them the accounts are suspended within minutes - we've built up a pretty good rapport with the Admins.

If you have any questions on this, please feel free to ask, we try to be pretty open about the mod actions here.