Are you talking about the links when someone copies a url from a google search? I'm not entirely sure, but I think Archive.is will automatically follow any redirects before archiving the page. So the link in the sticky comment would still say "archive.is/.../www.google.com/...", but it the archive should be for the correct page.

I'm not sure if our current AutoMod rules even allow for those to be posted (reddit I think blocks them, but we have some things reddit blocks automatically approved.)

Can you try making a post with such a URL? If it's a problem, I can tweak the code.

My guess is it's precisely because of how many people try to just copy links from the google results page, and that google.com doesn't really host any of it's own content. Imagine having that type of post hit the front page: google just got hundreds of thousands of data points of who's visiting what site from reddit. Not that reddit's above tracking users, but they're not about to give that information to google for free.

Oh, damn, I forgot to mention it. Most of the credit should go to /u/ju5tin_hergina, who's been pushing for something like this for months. He wanted something a bit stronger, a full ban on MSM articles, but I prefer this method, and it has the side effect of encouraging us to archive pages that might "mysteriously disappear" from the internet.

Corbett not even so much, as he doesn't use any ads (I'm pretty sure), but does depend on subscribing members. But for the other good sites out there, yeah I hope people do visit their actual sites.

I'm not sure what you mean by a baseball site. Like I said, if the page has never been archived, the first person to visit the archive.is link has the option to archive it. I just did that for the link you showed, and now the AutoMod link for it redirects to the most recent snapshot. Would you mind checking to see if it works for you now?

Hmm. I see what you mean. It does it for me, too, and on other pages as well. Maybe try asking on /r/Enhancement or submitting an issue to their github?

Why should we trust Archive.is to not eventually censor or erase critical content online? Do you know who owns and controls it?

Do I trust it? No. I think it's owned by some Russian guy. The primary purpose of this is to give our users an easy way to view links without giving traffic to sites they may not support or trust, the archiving ability is a side effect. It's useful to the extent it's a trustworthy archiving service, which no site can ever truly claim in perpetuity. Archive.org is even worse for this. But if you have a better archiving service, I'd certainly be willing to discuss it and add it.

Does the bot have to create sticky comment as opposed to a regular comment. Is the comment going to be above all else at the top of the comment thread?

I would say yes. The purpose is to make it easy for people to find these links. If a thread blows up and the archive link gets buried, no one is going to want to search for it. Again, this is up for debate, but I think the utility is mostly lost if it's not stickied.

Can the bot be programmed to actually create the archive.is link instead of relying on a human to do that after clicking on the link?

It's not a bot, it's just vanilla AutoMod, and only a few lines at that. We considered using /u/snapshillbot which does automatically archive, but as far as I know, they're not accepting new subreddits, and it doesn't sticky the link. We could fork snapshillbot to make it sticky posts, but then we'd have to run that bot somewhere. If someone is willing to host it, I wouldn't be opposed to writing the necessary code, but we'd have to get approval from the rest of the mod team.

I had originally intended to use archive.org, but there's a few issues that complicate it. For one, it obeys robots.txt, which disallows webcrawlers from accessing sites who use it. It also appears to not follow redirects, meaning if someone uses a link shortener, it won't archive the correct page.

I'm not opposed to adding it, but it will work on far fewer links out of the box.

They use snapshillbot, which we considered, but there'd be no way to sticky the comment at the top of the post, which would make it somewhat unsuitable for people to be able to easily find the link.

Unfortunately not, at this point.

Are there front page subs who do this?

I somewhat agree with you regarding the r/politics sticky, but I think that's more a consequence of their message than the mere presence of the comment. It sets a tone (in combination with the general tone of the mods and userbase) which I do believe affects the conversation.

This sticky is just offering an alternative way to consume content. It's not there to dictate or inform the discussion. If I could make the sticky comment auto-collapse, I would, but I don't think that's possible.

No problem. I appreciate the critique, and I'd certainly like to revisit this at some point in the not so distant future to evaluate whether this has or hasn't been a net positive.

IMO the red Archived tag is a bit distracting.

I was thinking that too now that I see it in the wild ;) The idea was so that people would know that there's an archive link in the comments, but I'm going to turn it off for future posts.

Yeah, I've removed it for all future posts.

I'm in favor of lifting the CNN ban (I was never a huge fan of it in the first place) but that would have to be a full mod team discussion. I'll bring that up.

As to the other banned sites, are you referring to any specifically? Many of them are hoax sites or sites with malware, which would not be allowed. But I'm open to reviewing others.

/u/publicmodlogs is not our bot, so I'm not sure if it would be possible, but I would assume not. It kind of goes against the principle of that bot. I do agree it's somewhat unfortunate, though.

If there were a way to make it smaller, I would. I do feel the message below the link is somewhat necessary so people aren't confused when an archive link appears dead.

Yeah, that would be ideal. Imagine it won't even take that long for the majority of our users to get used to it.

If you use RES, you can easily hide it by going to RES Settings>Appearance>Stylesheet Loader and adding this snippet:

div[data-author="AutoModerator"].comment.stickied {display: none}

and restricting it to r/conspiracy. Remove .stickied and never see AutoMod anywhere on the sub. Or apply it everywhere and never see automod again.

You're still getting notifications when you uncheck the inbox notifications box? That seems weird, but I could see reddit doing it because reddit assumes users would want to know if the post was removed and automod left a message, or possibly it's for all mod-distinguished comments. I can look into this for you.

I've looked into this and can't find a way around it short of setting a bot up for yourself to automatically mark the message as read. Sorry.

If you look at the self.text, I've edited to show you how to hide the comment in the thread, and could even hide it in the inbox, but it won't do anything about your icon turning orange which is I think your main issue (or at least this main issue).

I've looked into this and can't find a way around it short of setting a bot up for yourself to automatically mark the message as read. Sorry.

If you look at the self.text, I've edited to show you how to hide the comment in the thread, and could even hide it in the inbox, but it won't do anything about your icon turning orange which is I think your main issue (or at least this main issue).

I still respectfully disagree. The r/politics sticky is long and speaks to how users should interact, while I've tried to make this sticky as brief as possible, and plan on shortening it even further after users get used to it, to the point where it will only be the link and AM's disclaimer.

First we couldn't publish cnn.com articles

I disagreed with this from nearly the start, and hopefully this feature will help me get the ban lifted.

which is the main news source of our society

Is this a joke? It's not even the main cable news source of our society if we go by numbers. But I'll concede to the other point.

now we have bots occupying the top comment space in every thread. To me that's a bad direction to be headed in from where Reddit was originally intended to be used as.

I know this isn't ideal, but it's the only cross-platform way of providing two services a lot of our users seem to want: an easy way for users to avoid giving traffic to certain domains of their choosing and increased archiving of relevant material. I see it less as the top comment spot and more as an extension of the title area, even though I'll agree that's not how it looks from a UI perspective. (There's a few tweaks I could make on our CSS, but that would only affect desktop users who actually use our stylesheet. Would you want me to do that?)

And reddit itself is moving away from it's core design intentions far more than this is, with their userpages, chat, avatars, etc. making it look more and more like Facebook every day. To me, this actually supports two original intentions of reddit (or at least Swartz): open access of relevant content, and activism against censorship of the internet.

Apple of Discord. It's a reference to my namesake.

If you use RES, you can easily hide it by going to RES Settings>Appearance>Stylesheet Loader and adding this snippet:

div[data-author="AutoModerator"].comment.stickied {display: none}

and restricting it to r/conspiracy. Remove .stickied and never see AutoMod anywhere on the sub. Or apply it everywhere and never see automod again. There, I just fixed your r/politics problem.

Can't do anything about the message notifications. I use a separate RES rule on a toggle that I use to block AutoMod in modmail, but it doesn't stop the icon from turning orange.

Wow, this is very interesting. Do you have a link that shows this? I'm not doubting you, but I'd like to have something concrete so I can edit the main post to warn people.

If I'm understanding you correctly, would it still be "safe" (at least from the perspective of the destination site not seeing your IP) for users who just follow the link, but "unsafe" for users who actually click through to archive it?

Thanks. I had just found it on my own and updated the self.text.

BTW, that makes it possible to archive snapshots depending on geography, so we can prove a certain site looks different in US than in UK or something O I like the/feature!

Yeah, it would be pretty useful for that. You could even do it if you had a VPN that let's you pick between different regions.

What, and deprive the community of archive-ception?

^{Should really be archive-cursion, but I'll let reddit keep their silly meme.}

Nah, but good call. Done.

This isn't possible. Reddit hides the score of sticky comments by default and there's no way to turn it off.

What's not working about it? As the announcement post explains, it links to the landing page. If you (or another user) follows through and archives the post, the link from AutoMod will then redirect to that snapshot. It can take a minute or two for archive.is to update it's backend database and properly redirect, but I just checked it and it works as intended.

For now, we're just using reddit's built-in AutoModerator feature, which unfortunately doesn't have that capability. Ideally, I'd like to write a bot to do this which would automatically archive all links, but we have to work out how to host it.

Yeah, I can write the bot (or rather fork a bot that does a lot of what we want already), we're just seeing if we can find a good solution for hosting.

It's a RES issue. I'm working on a patch for RES, but it will take some time.

It's just archiving link posts. Everything posted here gets logged and archived by at least a couple people I know of personally, plus by reddit themselves, plus by government agencies and private intelligence firms. This just makes it easier for us, the users of this sub, to be able to see this content ourselves in the future, should any of these sites go down or pages be removed.

I don't voat; are you saying this is a good thing or bad?

---

# AutoMod Archiver
type: link submission
comment_stickied: true
~domain: [youtu.be, youtube.com, archive.is]
comment:  |
    [Archive.is link](https://archive.is/2020/{{url}})

    [Why this is here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7dvxxb/new_feature_automod_will_create_sticky_comments/)
---

As far as I know, it's still working as intended. What doesn't work is the RES preview expando. If you follow the actual link to the page, you'll either hit the landing page, which gives you the option of archiving the page yourself, or if someone has already archived it, it will redirect to the actual snapshot.

This just uses stock AutoModerator, and as such, cannot automatically archive the page. It just offers the link to easily archive it, and if the archive already exists, that link redirects to the snapshot itself.

It works exactly as the post describes it as working. It doesn't automatically archive the link, and I never claimed it does. It links to where the snapshot would be if it exists, or to a page where the user can make the snapshot if they want to. The RES expando doesn't work because of how RES's code works.

Archive.is can't archive youtube videos. It will archive the page, but not the video content itself.

Yeah, I have it turned off for the entire youtube domain.

Why should we trust Archive.is to not eventually censor or erase critical content online? Do you know who owns and controls it?

Do I trust it? No. I think it's owned by some Russian guy. The primary purpose of this is to give our users an easy way to view links without giving traffic to sites they may not support or trust, the archiving ability is a side effect. It's useful to the extent it's a trustworthy archiving service, which no site can ever truly claim in perpetuity. Archive.org is even worse for this. But if you have a better archiving service, I'd certainly be willing to discuss it and add it.

Does the bot have to create sticky comment as opposed to a regular comment. Is the comment going to be above all else at the top of the comment thread?

I would say yes. The purpose is to make it easy for people to find these links. If a thread blows up and the archive link gets buried, no one is going to want to search for it. Again, this is up for debate, but I think the utility is mostly lost if it's not stickied.

Can the bot be programmed to actually create the archive.is link instead of relying on a human to do that after clicking on the link?

It's not a bot, it's just vanilla AutoMod, and only a few lines at that. We considered using /u/snapshillbot which does automatically archive, but as far as I know, they're not accepting new subreddits, and it doesn't sticky the link. We could fork snapshillbot to make it sticky posts, but then we'd have to run that bot somewhere. If someone is willing to host it, I wouldn't be opposed to writing the necessary code, but we'd have to get approval from the rest of the mod team.

---

# AutoMod Archiver
type: link submission
comment_stickied: true
~domain: [youtu.be, youtube.com, archive.is]
comment:  |
    [Archive.is link](https://archive.is/2020/{{url}})

    [Why this is here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7dvxxb/new_feature_automod_will_create_sticky_comments/)
---