r/ModSupport • • 1d ago

Randomly unarchived post

In r/scams we have enabled auto-archiving after six months and I think it's been set up this way for at least three years now. Working as intended until today.

This is an important feature for us because scammers tend to lurk old posts to prey on people who have been scammed and shared their story, and also new victims tend to comment on old posts looking for help, instead of creating a new post which is always welcome. Anyway.

Yesterday crowd control or some other filter caught a new comment on a post that was posted on 25 September 2025, meaning one year and almost one month ago. The post should've been archived, and we have no way of checking logs or anything. So far we haven't seen it happen again.

If it wasn't for crowd control we wouldn't have known about it and thus help to this person. We worry this could happen to other old posts.

Has anyone experienced this? Is there a way of knowing what's going on? Can we check unarchived posts somehow? Is there a manual unarchiving function we're unaware of?

I can provide the URL to an admin on request. Thank you!

12 Upvotes

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6

u/QuiteBearish 1d ago

Does that September post display the archived icon? My guess is, a temporary glitch in Reddit's systems but hard to say for sure. I'd report it over in r/bugs

In the meantime, if your sub has full auto-mod, this should work to catch anything that slips through the cracks in the future:

```

type: comment parent_submission: past_archive_date: true action: remove

action_reason: "New comment on a post older than six months"

```

Not sure if the above works in Automod Neo

3

u/fsv 9h ago

Neo should be able to work with that, even if the subreddit doesn't have archiving enabled (it just goes on the basis of the post being over 6 months old).

3

u/QuiteBearish 9h ago

Oh hey, the dev himself! Love your work.

And awesome, thanks for the confirmation.

1

u/YourUsernameForever 1d ago

It does not show the archived icon.

I was not aware of that Automoderator variable. What's the use case for that?

3

u/QuiteBearish 1d ago

it was introduced around the same time additional archival options were put in the hands of moderators

They were experimenting with opening up archived posts and wanted to give mods the ability to be notified when older posts received activity

3

u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago

Probably a glitch at one time.

Spamlinkflagger can report any comment on an old post (even if it doesn't contain a link)

auto lock post can lock post after a custom set time if you want that to be quicker then 6 months)

3

u/YourUsernameForever 1d ago

u/seedless0 check this out and let's talk in the next meeting

1

u/WalkingEars 21h ago

If a user is shadowbanned and the ban is later lifted, sometimes weird stuff can happen with their old comments/posts reappearing all at once. Not sure if that could have been the case here.