Inspiration
Moderators often know who the valuable community members are: the regulars who answer questions, the people who helped build the culture, the quiet contributors who deserve approval, recognition, or a little more trust. The problem is that Reddit spreads those signals across many different places: user flair, approved contributors, ModNotes, modmail, moderation logs, wiki contributors, invite history, and sometimes external spreadsheets.
Community Roster was inspired by moderator feedback asking for a way to organize trusted members and export that data to Excel. Reddit does not expose a full subscriber database to Devvit apps, so this app focuses on the closest practical version: a roster built from moderator-accessible signals.
What It Does
Community Roster creates a moderator-only dashboard inside Reddit. It discovers known users from:
- user flair assignments
- approved contributors
- wiki contributors
- manually imported username lists
- scanned post and comment activity
- moderation log history
- community invite actions
- recent modmail participation
- ModNotes
- subreddit-specific karma
The dashboard lets moderators filter and sort the roster, inspect flair and flair emoji usage, see approval status, review ModNote labels with dates, identify users who interacted through modmail or invites, and export the data as CSV or TSV for spreadsheet analysis.
Moderators can also approve contributors and add predefined recognition ModNotes such as HELPFUL_USER or SOLID_CONTRIBUTOR directly from the table.
Why It Matters
This helps mod teams recognize the people who make a community healthier: helpful answerers, long-time regulars, local experts, country/community representatives, event organizers, and users who should be considered for trusted status.
It is especially useful for communities with complex flair systems, many approved contributors, or older moderation history scattered across tools.
Community Roster does not claim to list every subscriber. Instead, it makes the visible moderation data usable, searchable, sortable, and exportable.
How We Built It
The app is built entirely on Devvit with a React dashboard rendered inside a Reddit custom post. The backend uses Devvit’s Reddit API access and Redis storage to scan, cache, and enrich roster batches.
The app combines data from Reddit moderation surfaces, normalizes it into one roster model, and exposes it through a dashboard with filters, sortable columns, pagination, and spreadsheet exports.
Challenges
The biggest challenge was working within Reddit’s privacy and API boundaries. A full member database is not available, so the app had to be honest about what it can and cannot discover.
Another challenge was turning scattered signals into something moderators can actually use. A user might appear because of flair, another because of modmail, another from a mod log invite, another from a manual import. The app has to merge those identities into one row without pretending the data is more complete than it is.
Rendering Reddit flair was also surprisingly detailed, especially custom emoji references and emoji image URLs.
What We Learned
We learned that “trusted community member” means different things in different subreddits. For one community it may be karma and helpful answers. For another it may be country flair, approved contributor status, or a clean history after an old warning.
That pushed the app toward flexible signals and exports instead of a single hard-coded score.
What’s Next
Next steps would include better guidance for large communities, richer import/export workflows, more configurable recognition labels, and more ways to help moderators define what “trusted” means for their own culture.
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