edit: This went live for all communities on May 5th, 2023

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Guess who's back?

Last August, the Safety team posted an update on the Ban evasion filter, a mod tool that automatically filters posts and comments from suspected community ban evaders into the modqueue. We are happy to announce that the tool is being released to all subreddits over the course of the next few weeks! Once live, we will let you know directly.

How does the feature work?

Ban evasion filter is an optional subreddit setting that leverages our ability to identify posts and comments authored by potential ban evaders. We identify potential ban evaders based on various user signals related to how they connect to Reddit and information they share with us. Our goal in offering this feature is to help reduce time spent detecting ban evaders and preventing the negative community impact they have.

Once this setting is available to your community, you can find it by going to Mod Tools -> Safety (under Moderation section) > Ban evasion filter. When the setting is turned on, you can set your preferences on how much content is filtered to the modqueue. The preferences include:

• Time frame: which allows you to set a timeframe for how recently a user was first banned from your community. FWIW, our data shows that communities tend to receive content more negatively from users who were banned more recently.
• Confidence: which allows you to set a leniency threshold for posts/comments separately.

Settings for the Ban Evasion Filter

When content is filtered for ban evasion it will show up as follows in the modqueue:

A comment filtered by the Ban Evasion Filter in the modqueue

Note that when we roll out the feature, it will be “off” for all communities, and you can turn it on at your discretion. The exception being communities in our Beta, who should not see any changes to their settings.

Limitations

While we are really excited to make this tool publicly available, there are a couple limitations to be aware of:

1. Accuracy: It isn’t 100% accurate, as the user signals we use are approximations. Please use your discretion when deciding to allow users to participate in your community. If a positive contributor is getting repeatedly flagged, know that you can prevent their content from being filtered by (A) adding them to the “Approved Users” list in your settings, or (B) manually approving their filtered content three times.
2. Latency: 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 posts or comments from the recently unbanned user and place them in the modqueue. Once the system updates to identify that you approved them, they should be able to engage with no issues. This is just one example of latency that has prevented perfect performance, but as you use the tool you may notice other examples.

Also, please note that if you were a participant in the Beta communities, our most recent updates will not be applied retroactively to content that was previously filtered by the Ban evasion filter. As we continue supporting the portfolio of safety tools for moderators, we will work on making this one faster and more accurate without compromising on privacy.

What’s next?

We know there is more for us to do. If you suspect ban evasion in your community that we may have missed, please file a ban evasion report using the /report flow. Note that your reports and your usage of the filter informs how we detect and action bad actors. We will also be continuing to improve the signals that inform ban evasion detection.

Before we go…

We wanted to thank our Beta members. Our Beta communities have been amazing at delivering helpful feedback that inspired feature improvements such as details around recency and adding more clarity and granularity in the settings page. Thank you once again to all the communities that participated and passed along feedback.

We know that this has been a challenging issue in the past, and so we are excited to make some headway by making this tool available to all qualifying communities. If you have any questions or comments – we’ll be around for a little while.