ModRadar

Real-time brigade detection + team consensus votes. Reddit mod triage in one dashboard.

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Inspiration

Mod teams on Reddit are drowning in two problems at once. First, the modqueue overflow problem: high-traffic subs see thousands of reports a day, and triage burns hours per shift. Second, the borderline-call problem: contested removals on subjective rules ("is this really hate speech? is this karma farming?") get hashed out in private mod chats, create friction, and cause inconsistent enforcement.

Both problems get worse when subs get brigaded — a coordinated wave of bad-faith posts and/or weaponized reports — and the mod team has no early-warning system other than "the queue feels weird right now."

ModRadar exists to make the first thing a mod opens at the start of their shift be a single dashboard that surfaces what's hot, flags brigades automatically, and lets the team vote together on the calls they're not sure about.

What it does

ModRadar is a Devvit Web mod tool that lives as a single inline custom post in your subreddit's feed. Two layers:

Triage layer — see what's happening, fast

  • 🚨 Brigade detection. Rolling 7-day baseline of report rate + a 3σ threshold; the dashboard banner turns red the moment the current hour exceeds the threshold. Mods get a single early-warning signal instead of pattern-matching from a noisy queue.
  • Top reported users (last 7d) with one-click "Open" to context.
  • Hot threads ranked by report concentration — the posts and comments generating the most heat right now.
  • Serial reporter watchlist. Surfaces accounts that may be weaponizing the report button against good-faith content. (Many sub mods only catch weaponized reporting after damage is done.)

Consensus layer — borderline calls, decided together

  • From any post or comment, mods open ModRadar: Start consensus vote from the mod menu. They pick a proposed action — remove, approve, or 7-day ban — and a quorum threshold (default 2).
  • All other mods see the open vote in their dashboard with 👍 / 👎 buttons. The action auto-executes when the threshold is reached. A cron job tallies every 5 minutes; votes expire after 24h.
  • Net effect: reduces solo-mod blow-back on contested calls, builds team trust, and creates an audit trail of "we voted on it."

Operational niceties

  • Single inline custom post — no extra navigation tax for mods opening it from the feed.
  • Tailwind-styled, dark-mode aware, mobile-responsive.
  • Auto-refresh every 30 seconds; manual refresh button.
  • "Seed demo data" button right on the dashboard so new installs immediately see what a populated state looks like (not a confusing empty page).
  • "Mods only" gate — any non-mod opening the post sees a friendly explainer, not your sub's internal data.

How we built it

  • Devvit Web (Reddit's current platform, @devvit/web v0.12.24) — Hono server in the backend, React 19 + Tailwind 4 webview client.
  • Redis sorted sets (zAdd, zRange, zIncrBy, zRemRangeByScore) for time-bucketed report storage. Top-users and hot-threads are leaderboards. Hourly histograms drive brigade detection via incremental hIncrBy.
  • Triggers: onPostReport, onCommentReport, onModAction, onAppInstall. Reports flow in via triggers, get stored idempotently, and surface in the dashboard via /api/init.
  • Scheduler: */5 * * * * cron to tally quorum votes and auto-execute when threshold crossed. 17 * * * * to decay counters so old high-volume users fade naturally.
  • No external API dependencies. Nothing hits the Devvit fetch allowlist — no Anthropic, no OpenAI, no third-party services. This means installs are instant and zero-config on any sub.

Challenges we ran into

  • The Devvit fetch allowlist is undocumented and restrictive. Originally we explored AI-powered features (auto-drafted removal reasons), but couldn't guarantee the LLM endpoint would be reachable from inside Devvit's sandbox. We pivoted to a 100% local-compute design.
  • Native overlap. Reddit shipped native AI removal reasons, scheduled posts, and Post Guidance in March 2026 — which killed three of our original five candidate ideas. We zeroed in on ModRadar's combination because no native or third-party tool covers brigade-triage + team consensus in one surface.
  • Triggers can deliver more than once. All write paths (recordReport, castVote) are idempotent or use atomic Redis ops to handle replay.
  • Time pressure. Concept-to-deployed-and-installed in a single sprint. We cut scope ruthlessly from the bottom (audit log UI, settings form, serial reporter UI) to make sure the top two features — dashboard + vote — were polished and demo-ready.

What we learned

  • Devvit Web's "single custom post = inline UI" pattern is shockingly powerful for mod tools. You get a stable surface mods will actually return to, instead of a forgotten settings panel.
  • The Redis sorted-set primitives are the right abstraction for almost any mod-side analytics ("top X by score over time"). The 30-second per-request budget keeps you honest about not doing O(n) sub-scans live.
  • Polish > scope. A demoable dashboard with three solid features beats a half-finished app with eight.

Project Impact

ModRadar is built for mod teams who are drowning in reports and burning energy on borderline calls. Three concrete communities that would benefit:

  1. r/AskReddit (40M+ subscribers). Report volume is unmanageable manually. Brigade detection + hot-thread ranking turns an hours-long triage shift into minutes of focused attention. The serial-reporter watchlist alone would catch weaponized reporting that currently slips through.

  2. r/politics (10M+ subscribers). A constant flashpoint where coordinated vote-brigading is a known operational risk. ModRadar's 3σ brigade threshold gives mods a single early-warning signal instead of pattern-matching modqueue noise during incidents.

  3. Mid-size subs run by small mod teams (50k–500k subscribers — niche hobby, community, support subs). This is where the consensus vote feature shines. Small teams (3–7 mods) resolve borderline calls in private chat today, which creates friction and inconsistent enforcement. ModRadar gives the team a structured 👍/👎 quorum with built-in audit log. The "we voted on it" outcome is significantly harder to politically attack than a solo mod's call.

Time savings estimate

For a 20-mod team on a high-traffic sub: roughly 30 minutes saved per shift per mod from triage prioritization, plus an estimated 5–10 contentious mod-team debates per week resolved faster via consensus voting. Brigades that previously took 10–30 minutes to identify (and a hundred-message mod chat to coordinate response) get flagged automatically with the response action a single click away.

What's next for ModRadar

  • Audit log custom post showing every vote-resolved action with the participating mods (full transparency for mod-team accountability).
  • Per-mod weighting — let lead mods configure higher vote weights for senior team members.
  • Cross-sub brigade correlation — when several subs get hit at once, surface the overlap (with mod-team consent) to identify coordinated attacks.
  • Settings panel to tune the brigade σ threshold, quorum default, vote duration, and serial-reporter threshold per-sub.
  • Submit to the Reddit Developer Funds program to fund ongoing engagement-driven development.

App listing: https://developers.reddit.com/apps/radar-mod Reddit username: u/IcyTop4434

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