Greetings, human moderators of Reddit

It’s your friendly neighborhood Mod Experience team back with some important updates from the Reddit moderator front. For those unfamiliar with us, we’re the team that focuses on empowering, protecting, and bolstering you, Reddit’s mods by building new tools and fixing problematic bugs! Since we last spoke, we’ve been busy working on launching a few new site improvements, while also tackling some troublesome bugs that have popped up on our radar over the past month. Let’s dive into the details:

Increasing the number of removal reasons

In the past, we limited the number of removal reasons a subreddit could have to 20. Over the years we’ve heard from a variety of mod teams that this number was not sufficient and that we needed to increase this limit. Good news - we’ve now bumped the limit up to 50 removal reasons.

We’ve also got big ambitions for overhauling our rules and removal reasons system this year (hello mobile!), and this is the first stepping stone on that path to the greater work we have planned. Please stay tuned for more information on this front in the not-so-distant future.

Increasing the subreddit emoji limit

Every week we receive multiple requests from mod teams kindly asking us to bump up their subreddit emoji limit. This is a relatively easy ask of us, and given the frequency of requests, we’ve decided to universally increase every subreddit’s emoji limit from 300 to 5,000. Go forth and make use of all those additional emojis you just got!

Improvements to automoderator

Over the past month, we made a couple of under the hood improvements to how automoderator functions. Those improvements are:

• u/gazpachuelo tackled a long-standing issue, where automoderator matching was slightly broken when Unicode characters were involved. This caused rules that filtered on `â` to actually matches on `’`. Huge shout to u/dequeued who reported this issue way back when, the level of detail they provided in their report was incredibly helpful to our team.
  
• Recently we’ve been noticing that automoderator has been struggling to keep up with the volume of actions in our larger subreddits. This issue understandably was causing confusion amongst both our users and mods. After taking a closer look at the issue, our team developed a solution and today automoderator is now roughly three to five times faster to process an event for the vast majority of cases. This means there should now be less of a delay between an action and automoderator’s response to it.

Crowd Control supports Post filtering

In October, we announced that we had improved Crowd Control so that you could filter comments from untrusted outsiders and review and approve them via Modqueue. As of last week, Crowd Control now supports filtering posts. For more information on this, check out this r/modnews post.

Modmail rate limits

We are testing new rate limits on inbound modmails that will prevent new accounts from sending too many messages to a mod team. To avoid accidentally rate-limiting a good user having a conversation with a mod team, we’ll be resetting the rate limit every time a moderator responds to a user. If you’re seeing something funky going on please let us know.

Thank you so much to everyone who brings these issues and requests to our attention in r/modsupport. We greatly appreciate your posts and all the helpful feedback you provide us. Please keep your eyes peeled for future updates and features fixes from our team (we’ll be back very soon!). In the meantime, please feel to drop any questions or feedback in the comments below.