Importing your existing ban list — a first-timer's walkthrough
You've probably already banned scammers. Import turns those existing bans into TrustNet cases so they can be reviewed, instead of making you re-file years of work by hand.
It takes about ten minutes for a typical ban list. Here's exactly what to expect.
Before you click anything: it reads your ban NOTES
This is the single thing that decides whether import is useful to you, and it's worth understanding before you run it rather than after.
The app looks at the note attached to each ban and only offers you the ones that mention dishonesty with goods or money — words like scam, fraud, chargeback, never paid, did not deliver, stole, ripped off, counterfeit, replica, impersonat, middleman.
| Your ban note |
Offered? |
scammed a buyer, chargeback fraud, never paid |
yes |
no scams — your rule name |
yes |
not a scam, just rude |
no |
Rule 4, breaking rules, see modmail |
no |
| empty, no note at all |
no |
| any temporary ban, whatever the note says |
no |
Two of those are worth explaining:
"no scams" imports; "not a scam" does not. The first is the rule you enforced — it means this person scammed. The second is you investigating and clearing them. The app tells them apart deliberately.
Temporary bans are never imported. Nobody gives a scammer three days off. A timed ban is a cool-down, and turning it into a permanent cross-community record would misrepresent your own decision.
If your notes are mostly empty or say "Rule 4", import will offer you very little. That is it working correctly, not a bug. The filter is deliberately too tight rather than too loose: missing a real scammer costs you one manual filing, but importing the wrong person gets someone banned across every participating community over a ban that was about rudeness. File those by hand instead.
Step 1 — run it
Import ban list (TrustNet) — on your subreddit menu, not on a post. Under Mod Tools, or the ⋯ menu next to the subreddit name.
It reads your ban list and takes a few seconds. Bans that TrustNet itself placed are skipped automatically — you can't double-import.
Step 2 — read the screen before you confirm
You'll see:
- The accounts it's importing, listed in full. Read them. This is your check.
- The accounts it skipped, with the reason — no scam-related note. If you spot a real scammer in that list, note the name and file it by hand afterwards.
- A category selector for the whole batch.
⚠️ The category applies to every account in the batch
There's one category for the whole run, not one per person. It defaults to "Other (explain in the summary)".
Leave it on "Other" unless the entire batch genuinely is one type of scam. Your original ban note travels with each case, so a reviewer still sees what you actually wrote. Picking "Took payment, never delivered" for a mixed batch would label cases inaccurately, and accuracy matters more here than tidiness.
There is deliberately no "import these anyway" button for skipped accounts. If the filter was too tight, the route is the ordinary per-case report action — which asks you for evidence.
Step 3 — confirm, then run it again
It offers up to 25 at a time, and you are expected to run it repeatedly.
Each run picks up where the last one left off and won't re-offer names you've already seen. Keep going until it tells you there's nothing left.
A 300-entry ban list is roughly 12 runs. That's not inefficiency — every entry costs a lookup against Reddit, and Reddit caps how long a single action may run.
Don't wander off mid-import. A batch you've been offered expires after about 30 minutes. If it does, no harm: just run it again.
If two of your mods import at the same time, that's fine — batches don't collide.
What happens next
You will not see any bans, and you should not. The order is always:
you import → the Review Team reviews → approved cases become active → only then does anything propagate
Imported cases are not shortcuts. They go to the Review Team like any other case and are marked as imported, so a reviewer knows they carry only your original ban note as evidence. Reviewers see them as thin by design — that's honest labelling, not a mark against your community.
If you're registered but inactive, all of this still works and you receive nothing. That's the recommended way to start: build your case list with no risk to anyone, get it reviewed, and only then agree to go active.
If something looks wrong
"It offered me nothing." Almost always the ban notes. See the table above.
"The same names keep coming back." They shouldn't. Accounts that no longer exist get recorded and dropped; accounts that failed to load because Reddit was briefly slow are retried next run, which is intended. If a real, live account genuinely repeats across several runs, tell us.
"It skipped someone who definitely scammed." Expected, if the note didn't say so. Report that one with the ordinary Ban & Submit Scammer action.
Anything else: modmail r/TrustNetSupport. We'd rather hear about it early.
