Actually, Reddit admin made it clear that we cannot just receive and ignore reports. We have to be 'active' or get on the naughty mod list.

FThumb already said here that you never use the Ignore Reports button.

So if the admin told you to be active and not ignore reports, they must not have been referring to the Ignore Reports button, but your overall level of activity as documented in your Mod Log.

If items have been reported to your queue and you just let them sit there without taking action on them, absolutely that is an actionable offense. The admins view this as abandoning your sub, and they can either shut it down (turn it private), put it up on r/RedditRequest, boot your mods from the team, or some combination of the above.

How do I know this? Because this happened to a niche sub I visited regularly. There was only one mod, they lost interest in the subject matter, and stopped attending to the queue. The admin sent them a warning in Mod Mail, and when they ignored it, they turned the whole sub private and no one was able to post or comment anymore. Many people were not subscribed, so they weren’t even able to get into the sub in the first place.

Luckily I had subscribed, so I was able to contact that mod, reach out to the admins, and get that sub up and running again. I am now the only active mod for that subreddit.

Because of your mod team’s actions, I no longer have access to that sub’s queue, and there is no one who can handle reports for the duration of my suspension.

In other words, by pursuing this stupid policy, you have put the status of one of my subreddits at risk. So yeah, I’m pretty pissed about that.

Moreover, it is the busy season for one of my other subs. The series is currently airing, this is the most active time of the year for our subreddit. That also means the queue is also receiving more reports than usual.

Since I’ve been suspended, more of the burden now falls on the other mods on my team, which is not fair to them, and inconveniences our users.

So I’m pissed about that, too.

Finally, I was hosting a couple events this week on another subreddit. One of them was yesterday. I’ve had to cancel and push them back, all because of this fucking suspension.

So when I say that you guys screwed me over, I mean it.

You owe it to your users to post a warning that you’re escalating reports to the admin. They have a right to know that they can get their whole account suspended or even banned just for submitting a good faith report.

All it would take is a simple mod note on the thread. And no one on your team could be bothered to do that.

We either must proactively approve them, which we will not do for people promoting violence, for instance, or we escalate them (for people promoting violence), because admin HAS gotten back to us that whatever anon report abuser has been seen by admin as abusing the report feature, and action taken on them. Ie, trolls who were abusing the report button were dealt with by admin because we escalated appropriately.

If it’s really that bad, why don’t you just program AutoModerator to filter all comments pending moderator review?

You see the comment first, evaluate whether it’s in violation of site-wide rules, approve & ignore if it’s good, proactively remove if it’s not.

If you do that, no one will be able to submit a “promoting violence” report in the first place.

That’s probably the most extreme solution, but it literally took me the time to type it out to think of it. I’m sure you could do better if you just give it some thought.

Most importantly, this method ensures that none of your regular users will ever be subject to accidental site-wide suspension, which is an issue that none of you seem to be taking seriously. Not based on the trolling responses I’ve received in this thread.

That escalation on the troll's hateful report led to your spam report being caught sideways by admin. We didn't escalate your spam report, we escalating a troll being a troll.

Did you ever consider that the troll is winning? With your current approach, you inadvertently got one of your oldest users suspended from the entire site. How do you think the troll would view that? Probably as a victory.

At a bare minimum if you insist on regularly escalating report abuse to the admin, you should program AutoModerator to post a warning on the thread whenever you do it. There are several ways you can accomplish this, and since you currently use AutoModerator to enforce turtling with more complicated rules, someone on your team should be able to figure it out.

But setting all these technical issues aside, what I was really looking for from this mod team was a simple Sorry! It won’t happen again.

But that level of basic courtesy was apparently too much to ask for. I expected better from you guys.