I found doing a lot of my basic mod actions very difficult on the main reddit app, where Apollo makes them second nature.
Will you be losing the ability to do any mod actions?
They're just much harder or not available on the reddit app, as opposed to 3rd party ones.
Here is what one mod had to say. There are more if you check out the mod subreddits like r/modsupport
They are making the API cost money which will make mod tools harder to use and essentially break but, apparently they have made exceptions for that
What tools are they excepting?
I don't think any mod tools, but they've excepted some accessibility app.
This isn’t accurate, the costs are 20 times what they should be. It makes the tools not exist, it doesn’t break them or make them harder to use. They said they made exceptions for some bots and things but they’ve constantly outright lied and continue to not meet promises on improvements to their app. People have been asking for things third party apps provide on the official reddit app for years and they never come through. I don’t know what specific tools are going to go away but reddit has made it clear they only care about making money now off all the content we have provided. They want to make the most money possible with all the newer users who don’t care about ads, tracking or the user experience. Every cent that goes to a third party app dev is money that should be going to reddit.
What are the tools though and what do they do?
The main tool for me is Moderator Toolbox, others have other apps they're losing that make modding significantly easier.
Toolbox adds several functionalities that don't exist natively in reddit.
- Mod notes visible in threads / posts, synchronized across all mods in the sub
- Add anything noteworthy about previous interactions with someone, not always
- Color coding user names, also synchronized
- We used this to easily keep track of why someone had been timed out in the past, if someone was spamming, we'd give them a time out and give them a purple user name, then if we see someone with a purple username spamming, we'd immediately know not to give them another warning.
- Adds a mod actions button next to user names
- Allows for taking a mod action against a user from any page in the sub
- Otherwise this is the form you have to use:
Here you have to copy the name of the user, navigate to the ban page, paste in the name and ban them. - There are separate forms for bans, user flairs, and modmail, moderator toolbox automatically fills in the user's name and combines them all into one form you can open up in the same page as the content. It is much quicker and easier to use.
- Context popup
- Toolbox allows context to be expanded in reports, normally you have to open a separate page to view context.
- User Account filters
- Filter user posts and comments on a variety of criteria (sub, reports, score, etc.)
- User Account history
- Summary what subs they use most often, where they link to, etc.
- Moderation queue filtering and sorting
- I can sort posts by the number of reports, the score, the age, etc to prioritize what needs to be dealt with first.
- Moderation queue bulk actions
- I can go through and remove posts that need to be removed, then approve all the remaining posts
- Mod post / comment button
- post, distinguish, and sticky a post/comment with one button
- Keyword highlighting
- Only show new comments on a post.
- Get notification when something gets reported.
Those are the tools I use in toolbox, but there are a lot more in Moderator Toolbox.
I have also set up bots using the api to help run community events. Things like keeping track of scores of user predictions that would be basically impossible to do without api access. For example, we ran a presidential primary prediction competition in the 2020 election, it would not have been reasonable to keep track of ~100 users predictions over the course of a few months without api access.
- Mod notes visible in threads / posts, synchronized across all mods in the sub
