r/AskModerators • u/AssSpelunkingAtheist • 9d ago

What causes a post to be archived?

So I was just randomly going through my history and I was looking at one post of mine from a good 6+ months ago, and I saw it was archived.

On the other hand, I’ve seen posts from YEARS ago when searching for information on something and you could still like or comment, I’ve seen people revive a 5 year old post, etc.

Is it just an automatic thing that some subs do at a certain point?

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u/goldensavage2019 9d ago edited 9d ago

Subreddit owners can make it to where posts automatically get archived after 6 months, otherwise they can manually archive a post

Edit: apparently you can’t manually archive posts, I’m dumb

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u/AssSpelunkingAtheist 9d ago

Ok that makes sense. Like I’m not having a problem over it lol I was just curious.

As a moderator yourself what would you use as criteria to manually archive a post?

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u/westcoastcdn19 9d ago

There’s no manual archive. It’s a setting so if you turn it on, all posts in the sub get archived after 180 days

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u/AssSpelunkingAtheist 9d ago

Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying!

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u/Lilogy 9d ago

We started auto-archiving posts due to spam. Sometimes our posts show up in google results when googling those products. Which led to companies / bots spamming years old posts about their products, or trying just combat negative reviews they had gotten with positive bot comments. And with them being old posts sometimes original poster was not active in reddit anymore or they had deleted account so no one was even reporting those. I do not have time to actually check myself if old posts showing up in google get spammed or not. So automatically archiving it is (and yes we have automod setup for spam too, but there are lot of spam trying to bypass everything we set)

I have also locked posts where comments have escalated to drama / arguments / disrespectful behavior. At that point there is rarely no new comments that actually contribute something worth keeping post unlocked. Instead it is just lot of work with no benefits.

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u/AssSpelunkingAtheist 9d ago

Thanks for the response! Yeah this post had no mean comments or controversial anything so it probably just was an auto-archive.

I’ve definitely seen deleted posts because the comments section got out of hand… I don’t know how you guys can deal with such stupidity at times lol

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u/goldensavage2019 9d ago

Personally I don’t archive posts, as I never saw the need for it in the subs I moderate.

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u/LeftOn4ya 6d ago

There is Mod Topic on Archiving posted yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/s/rAN5xgPF16

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u/lilfunky1 9d ago

A subreddit can be set that once a post is 6 months old it's automatically locked to new comments.