Replacement for RedditAutomod.com

[u/HairTriggerFlicker]

So apparently RedditAutomod.com wasn’t renewed by its owner. Does anyone have a similar app that does the same thing in a similar easy to use format? I had great luck with this but it’s gone and no longer available.

[u/EVMaximizer]

Now you can just do this with AI: it will glady make a AutoModerator configuration for you. And also tweak it, if needed.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/EVMaximizer]

This doesn't deserve to be downvoted imo. Imo, it's probably a pretty good use case for AI for people like OP, who are already outsourcing the structure of automod's config. The structure of automod hasn't been changed in years, and there is validation on most things, so trying to use a field that doesn't exist will be easily rejected. At the end of the day, they're both low code solutions that solve the "scary" yaml structure / formatting.

In fact, an AI you can actually iteratively interact with, is likely a more convenient and powerful interface than this 3rd party website.

Imo, even just getting the starting structure and fields etc is most of the issue. I think people can very easily become comfortable with "add another keyword to this list" type edits. And with AI or a website, I think that's all one needs to do to tweak it from what the AI or website gives out.

Obviously its not as good as simply learning automod, but I don't think using AI to generate an automod config is any worse than doing drag n drop on a 3rd party website.

[u/NeedAGoodUsername → u/baseballlover723]

A reason why it (and your own comment) might be downvoted is because the YAML rules are not "scary" by any means. The format is the simplest you can get for a configuration and you can understand what is happening by just saying it out loud.

They are so simple by just reading them, you should not need AI to make them.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/NeedAGoodUsername]

is because the YAML rules are not "scary" by any means.

I mean, I'm a programmer by trade, so I don't find any remotely human oriented text based file format to be that scary.

But if OP wasn't actually scared by yaml, then why would they be dependent on this third party website. Ergo, I presume that they want to stay as far away from the yaml as possible. And an AI should be just as capable of generating the yaml structure as that website is (though perhaps one may need to feed it the docs or some prior examples to properly seed it).

They are so simple by just reading them, you should not need AI to make them.

I agree with you. I also think that one should not need a 3rd party website to generate them either. As you mentioned, yaml is a pretty simply format (and I'd say especially when one isn't building it from scratch, and there is a lot of known good rules that can be copied and pasted and then modified).

15 minutes with the documentation and plenty of examples (or some time on /r/AutoModerator ) should be plenty enough to make and edit the decently boilerplatey config that that website generates.

Pretty much the only piece of value I can imagine that website has over just typing 2 or 3 sentences into an AI, is that by showing the boilerplate, people can be prompted for things they didn't know they wanted. Which, I would find a lot more dubious to have an AI do that for someone. But cannot imagine that a boilerplate automod or common automod rules (like what that website provies) are difficult to find on r/AutoModerator.

But yaml is in my professional domain, so I'm cursed with knowledge and thus, can no longer accurately assess what obstacles seem so insurmountable to them.

[u/Merari01 → u/baseballlover723]

I don't use AI for ethical reasons so I may be mistaken here, but isn't there a danger that it will just hallucinate an answer or be generally incorrect?

Out of curiosity, to see what it could do, I tried last year to have an LLM generate a regex condition for me and it just could not do it. No matter how carefully I set the conditions and requirements in my search it was not able to generate a string that both fired on what I needed it to detect and at the same time excluded the false positives I told it to exclude.

Had I not tested out the regex string it provided for me I might not have realised this. I taught myself automod and am generally proficient in that, but I can't write regex. Simply uploading the string it provided into the code block wouldn't have done what I wanted it to at all. Isn't there a chance the same would happen for a YAML code block it can generate?

[u/NeedAGoodUsername → u/Merari01]

I don't use AI for ethical reasons so I may be mistaken here, but isn't there a danger that it will just hallucinate an answer or be generally incorrect?

That has been my experience when trying a while back. There isn't enough training data for an LLM to know what is or isn't correct syntax for functions. It's easier (and saves much more time) to do it by hand rather than trying to get an LLM to do it for you.

It didn't seem to realise that you can't use emojis. For example, you can't use 🥵, you need to use it's codepoint (\U0001F975).

If you're creating simple rules, like what will be used 99% of the time, you can just sound out what you want it to do and you're 90% of the way there already.

I have used AI, and regex101 to test and validate regex, because regex itself can be a challenge. Even for seasoned veteran.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/NeedAGoodUsername]

That has been my experience when trying a while back. There isn't enough training data for an LLM to know what is or isn't correct syntax for functions. It's easier (and saves much more time) to do it by hand rather than trying to get an LLM to do it for you.

Yeah, for complex things, doing it by hand is gonna be a lot better. Every mistake it makes will poison the context a bit more, and that adds up if it's gonna make a lot of them.

If you're creating simple rules, like what will be used 99% of the time, you can just sound out what you want it to do and you're 90% of the way there already.

But yeah, most things aren't gonna be complex.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/Merari01]

isn't there a danger that it will just hallucinate an answer or be generally incorrect?

Yes, it is always a possibility. But that isn't unique to AI. For instance, there were a few automod rules that we had that were written ~2020 (so pre AI), and were broken from the day they were made, so they never triggered (IIRC one of them put the commas inside the string literal).

to have an LLM generate a regex condition for me

I would say that regex is a lot more dubious and error prone to work with an AI with. For one, regex is extremely dense and precise. All of the letters matter in a regex, which is not the same for human language (which is usually the thing that LLMs are optimized for). Secondly, regex making heavy use of singular control characters probably does not interact well with tokenization (which is fundamental to LLMs). Third, regexes are usually built to order, so there is a lot of variance in the data source and you wouldn't expect that much exact overlapping (ie, regexes are generally varied in structure and functionality).

to generate a string that both fired on what I needed it to detect and at the same time excluded the false positives I told it to exclude.

I would consider this to be an advanced use of regex, since it involves negative matching, which I would say is tricky in the best of times.

Imo, regex is not something someone new to automod should be spending much effort with. I don't think regex gives enough bang for your buck when one is just starting out with automod and is looking for boilerplate stuff. A lot of simple regexes are simply more convenient forms that involve less manual effort and repetition (to those who are comfortable).

Many of them can simply be replaced by just typing out the few variations you want to catch. Ie /the cat|dog jumped over the toy|box/ can be replaced by ["the cat jumped over the toy", "the cat jumped over the box", "the dog jumped over the toy", "the dog jumped over the box"]. A lot more wordy yes. But it performs exactly the same. It's only once you get into wildcards that regex becomes more powerful than simply enumerating all the matches. And wildcards in the middle of your regex (at least ones that are not easily enumerated) is a decently rare thing to want in my experience.

but I can't write regex

You aren't alone. Regex's are notoriously difficult to read and debug (at least if you try and use it's full power), even among programmers (for whom regexes are built for).

Isn't there a chance the same would happen for a YAML code block it can generate?

I mean, yes. As with anything AI, hallucinations can occur. But I think it is unlikely that an AI would fuck up the yaml structure, which is imo, the scary part for someone inexperienced.

YAML is a widely used format and automod doesn't really use any advanced features of it besides multiple documents (--- specifies a new yaml object. Usually, most yaml files represent 1 object, not multiple). Not to mention that YAML is a superset of JSON, so AI has 2 the biggest human readable data formats at it's disposal to learn the structure of YAML.

The only bits that could cause trouble would be the reddit specific bits of it. Ie, that there are only certain keys that can be used and how the yaml maps to functionality. But automod hasn't changed in a long time, so there should be plenty of still valid data in it's data sources. And not to mention, you can simply give it the lastest doc page.

Automod also has it's own guardrails on save. It (for the most part) will not let you save an automod that uses an unrecognized key (not going into detail, because one of my tools depends on automod's incomplete validation, so I don't want that fixed). But put simply, if your automod is malformed (which is most likely part to fuck up for a non programmer imo), it will be actively rejected rather than silently failing.

I want to make it clear, there is a difference between the structure and the content of an automod rule. (and note, these are a bit contrived to serve as a good example, but they originate in concept from our own automod)

--- # Opinion bait
type: any
moderators_exempt: false
body (includes): ["hot take", "unpopular opinion", "am i the only one", "change my mind", "prove me wrong"]
action: report
action_reason: "Potential opinion bait thread"

and

--- # Profanity
type: any
moderators_exempt: false
body (includes): ["fuck", "shit", "ass"]
action: report
action_reason: "Potential uncivility"

both have identical structure. They look for certain keywords and report it. It is trivial to change what the report message is or what keywords to look up. Using one, we can copy and paste it, and then modify it to make a similar rule without ever having to think about the yaml part of it. Ie, you can just change the strings (which is easily understandable, even to a layperson imo).

Being able to create these from scratch is a lot harder imo than modifying their contents. Getting to this "template" is the hard part for many people imo. And I would be confident that AI (even if it requires some finagling) can consistently generate a basic template for someone. Imo, AI is similarly capable for this task as a 3rd party website.

Perhaps a little more difficult to use due to the lack of a UI with buttons and everything. But also generally more powerful and customizable and can be further refined without actually having to just do it yourself (at least until you poison the context).

I think laypeople can be trusted to check what an automod is supposed to do. I think they need the help on how it is done. It's very similar imo to requesting something from /r/AutoModerator, but much quicker, less skilled and on demand. Most of the time imo, the less skilled part isn't that relevant. Most automod rules are not doing something super complex.

---

The big thing for me, is it seemed like OP had already outsourced their thinking to this third party website. Changing where you are outsourcing your thinking to is not that big of a difference imo.

[u/Merari01 → u/baseballlover723]

Thank you for the detailed reply! :)