A moderation bot to report posts that are from domains that are not commonly used. On many subreddits, most posts originate from a relatively predictable list of domains, and if a domain is posted that has never been seen before it can be an indication of spam activity.

This app allows you to set four options.

Act on sources that have been seen this many times or less

E.g. if the threshold is zero, no posts will be reported. Some subs might find it useful to run with this setting for a week or two after install to help build up a store of domains that the sub sees (although the app does attempt to build a list on install - see the Operation Notes section).

If the threshold is 2, the first and second post that uses that domain will be reported, but no further ones.

Act on sources that have been recently seen from this many users or less

E.g. if the threshold is 10, and the source has been seen recently shared by 50 distinct users, no report will be made. However if it had only ever been shared by the OP, it would be reported.

Check posts after approving out of the modqueue

If enabled, posts will be checked both when they are submitted (if they get past Automod or Reddit filters like Crowd Control) and when filtered posts get approved out of the modqueue.

If disabled, posts will only be checked if they get past Automod/Reddit filters.

Template for report text

Allows you to specify a custom reporting message. Placeholders {{domain}} and {{usecount}} are supported.

Operation Notes

When the app is first installed, it analyses the first 1000 subreddit posts when sorted by "hot" and stores the number of times each has been used. This should reduce the number of spurious reports that would otherwise occur if every post was considered the "first time"!

After that point, the app will gather statistics on domains seen as posts are created or approved out of the modqueue, maintaining this data store.

If a post has been removed by a moderator or deleted by its author, it is not taken into account for future reports.

Checks are not currently run on posts while they are still in the moderation queue because it is not possible to report a queued post. This means that you may find you approve a post and then immediately get a report from the app unless you turn off that option.

You can also configure the app to ignore sources that have been widely posted by other users across Reddit as a whole, avoiding false positives for domains that may not be shared often on your subreddit but might have been recently seen in many other subs (e.g. a British news source being shared in a US-focussed subreddit).

Source Code

Spam Source Spotter is open source. You can find the source code on GitHub here.

Change History

v1.2.0

• You can now configure the app to only act on sources that have been seen on very few or no other users recently across Reddit as a whole. This permits sources that are clearly legitimate but not frequently seen on your subreddit to be ignored.

v1.1.3

• Further mitigations against duplicate actions

v1.1.2

• Mitigate against duplicate actions if the Developer Platform is having issues

v1.1.1

• Update Devvit and dependencies to the latest version. No user facing changes on this release.

v1.1

• Fixes a bug that can result in usage count not decrementing when a post is deleted
• Fixes a bug that can prevent install from working on some subreddits
• Update Devvit and dependencies to latest version

v1.0.3

• Fixed an error that prevented scores from being decremented is a user deletes their own post.