MOD Pulse

One install. Real-time community analytics and automated spam detection — built for the mods who keep Reddit running.

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Inspiration

Moderating a Reddit community means juggling a lot at once — watching for spam, tracking community health, understanding what content is resonating, and doing it all without a proper command center. Most mod tools are either standalone scripts that require technical setup, or basic Devvit Blocks apps with limited UI. We wanted to build something that felt like a real product: a unified dashboard that gives mods the visibility they need and automates the repetitive enforcement work that burns them out.

The dashboard started as a Devvit Blocks app on r/snoo_central_dev. When Devvit Web launched, we saw the opportunity to rebuild it properly — with a full React UI, live data, and a real bot running alongside it.

What It Does

MOD Pulse is a two-part app:

1. Analytics Dashboard — a 7-tab live command center for your subreddit. Mods can see member counts, trending posts, top contributors, content mix, engagement rates, community health scores, and growth predictions — all from a single post in their subreddit. The dashboard updates in real time and includes a report generator that posts a formatted summary directly to the subreddit.

2. Smart Spam Shield — a rule-based spam detection bot that runs automatically on every new post and comment. It scores content across 7 detection rules (account age, activity history, blocked domains, spam phrases, excessive caps, suspicious patterns, posting frequency) and takes configurable action: remove, report to mods, or post a warning comment. Mods get modmail alerts for high-confidence detections and can test any content against the rules before going live.

How We Built It

MOD Pulse is built entirely on Devvit Web — Reddit's latest developer platform. The frontend is a React 19 single-page app styled with Tailwind CSS 4, served as a custom post webview. The backend runs on Hono (a lightweight server framework) with tRPC providing end-to-end type-safe API calls between the client and server. All persistent state — bot config, spam detection history, operation logs — lives in Devvit's Redis store. The spam bot hooks into Devvit's onPostSubmit and onCommentSubmit triggers so it runs automatically without any mod intervention.

The splash screen (the public-facing entry point visible to all users) fetches lightweight community stats and personalises the view per user — showing flair, member-since date, and a mod-only button to open the dashboard.

Challenges We Ran Into

  • Devvit Web is new — the platform was still evolving during development. Some patterns (REST vs tRPC routing, trigger wiring, Redis sorted sets) required working through undocumented edge cases.
  • Windows file watcher bug — the Devvit CLI's internal chokidar watcher would crash on Windows after each upload due to a file lock on a static asset. Tracked down and resolved by removing the unused asset.
  • Keeping it focused — the temptation to build more bots was real. We scoped down to the dashboard and Smart Spam Shield to ship something polished rather than something sprawling.

What's Next for MOD Pulse

  • Comment Mop — bulk recursive comment removal tool (built, held back for post-hackathon polish)
  • Flood Assistant — per-user post quota enforcement with configurable removal messages (built, held back for the same reason)
  • Notification system — proactive modmail digests summarising daily activity
  • Export — download community analytics as CSV or post a formatted weekly report
  • More bot rules — link karma thresholds, shadowban detection, new account burst detection

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