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Hey all, just wanted to share that we'll be updating our general moderation guidelines and tooling for the community soon.
A lot goes on behind-the-scenes that's a combination of manual moderation and automated spam detection. There is a lot of nuance here that requires constant adjustment and rebalancing.
I'll note that there are hundreds of mods with the ability to send messages via Sloan, so not all of it has fallen on Francis's shoulders - though we deeply appreciate his dedication to the the community, and he is by far one of our most active volunteer moderators.
We'll share a more substantial update on community moderation and our perspective on AI-assisted content in the next few weeks.
This is a big priority for us going forward after lots of work to catch up with new demands of moderation in this age. I think we'll land in a really good place.
Thanks @jess and @ben! If you believe if there is something I can do to improve, do let me know in the meantime!
Thank you, as someone with next to no creative writing skills 😅 I beg for leniency when it comes to technical posts, so I dont have to spend hours writing a MD table for the benchmark results and run Grammarly to make sure it makes sense. Never in comments though, just in my posts. It would be a mess if writing a post takes me longer than developing the thing does.
Do keep up the good work, I did mention to Francis a tool I saw 4 years ago on LTT for YT comments, I looked into it a bit, last update was about a year ago, but I'll fork it and spin up the foundry to expand it into a fake-follower detector too and let y'all know when it's ready if it helps?
Thanks for the transparency, Jess. It's reassuring to know there's a thoughtful, human-in-the-loop approach behind the scenes. Looking forward to the fuller update, especially your perspective on AI-assisted content, which feels increasingly relevant.
Hi thanks for opening this up I have a question about AI use and disclosure.
I've been writing on DEV for about 6 months My typical workflow is I use AI for about 10% of the writing mostly for structure, research, and organizing thoughts. The remaining 90% is my own voice, my experiences, my tone.
Sometimes I add a disclosure at the bottom of my posts (e.g I used AI to help structure this post. The experiences and opinions are my own.).
My question is - is disclosure required even for minimal AI use like this 10%?
I want to make sure I'm following the guidelines correctly and not risking any flags or suspension. I've seen some people posts get flagged recently and I want to stay on the right side of the rules.
Thanks for your time.
Hey Harsh! Thanks for reaching out and clarifying! It depends.
There is cases where I saw that a person will write in their own words and they use AI to fix the grammar and such. The problem becomes when they start re prompting it to make it more refine to the point it is no longer their words, which will become fully AI.
With that said, I wouldn't worry too much. For example, @sylwia-lask uses both her own words and uses AI to fix grammar and other stuff, which she did not get flagged for. It is both used as a mix of both, it is a good sign to me. If it is near 100% fully AI, it is an issue.
Hope this makes sense Harsh! If I made an error on your posts, do let me know and I can rereview it! I try my best and even I make mistakes, which is why I made this post as transparency and being able to reach out easier than waiting for Jess and Ben to respond since they are busy. :D
Thanks for the detailed response this is super helpful I appreciate the clarity on the 10% vs 100% distinction, and the reminder that disclosure is still the safest approach I Will keep doing what I've been doing use AI lightly for structure and research, keep my own voice for the substance, and always add a disclosure at the bottom.
And thanks for mentioning Sylwia as an example good to know that mixing AI assistance with your own voice is both acceptable and common.
Really appreciate you taking the time to explain this. 🙌
To add on, either way, it is best practice to do so just in case. I have to do citations on using AI when I code at my University. Absurd? Probably, but it made sense since it is the same as looking up sources to write your paper. Same thing different context.
I feel like I got it entirely wrong 😅. I honestly thought Sloan was an actual person. When I got a Sloan message about a formatting issue on one of my posts, I assumed you had asked Sloan to comment under my post. Since you mentioned in the P.S. of your comment that you had sent a Sloan message, I completely misread that part. My bad 😅
I didn't realize Sloan was more of a moderation system/persona and that the moderator was actually the one sending the message. Thanks for clearing that up!
Yea for sure! I knew Sloan was a bot that Mod can control. It would be crazy if Sloan just say "Hi" and go from there. I would be scared for my life lmao.
I do appreciate it. It seems that people are open after the Sloan message, which is good!
MAN, I THOUGHT SLOAN WAS A PERSON TOO!!! 🤯🤯
B r u h
Based on the Moderation page (dev.to/community-moderation), 'Community moderator' is a term used for multiple types of moderators (ike tag moderators).
However i've been a tag moderator for years and I feel like your 'Community Moderator' role cover way more responsibilities. Is it right?
Hey Gérôme! Hope you are well. That is correct. I want to note that the role "Trusted Member" covers more base as a moderator than Tag Moderation. I say Community Moderator because I cover both bases as a Trusted Member and Tag Moderator. Let me know if anything else :D
Ok I see, just discovered Sloan was a specific Trusted Member feature, I felt like I missed something.
That is interesting to hear. I would assume if you get one or the other, you will get Sloan. Was wondering what Tag Moderation you are covering?
the 'angular' one. Sloan is mentioned only for the Trusted Member role in the moderation docs.
I'll ask the first question. How many Sloan warnings does it take before an account gets flagged? And will there be a notification when that happens?
Great first question! and appreciate the communication we had on @dannwaneri's post for this concern.
In my opinion this depends on the user's activity and how they are using DEV. For example, let's say a person has never been caught but their profile shows the following:
If this was the case, it will be either a single warning message before flag or flagged the account entirely.
However, if it was a genuine mistake and did not know before hand, I usually go with a few warnings before hand. Of course, I make mistakes and it could vary.
There are other deciding factors based on how long they are on DEV and other things, but those are the most common.
I never been Flagged from Sloan before, but I would assume it would be like any other comments (though sometimes dev.to email notification is slow. One time I got an email notification that someone commented on my post 3 days ago lol). Can you clarify to me?
Thanks :D
One more thing — my article "I Spent 3 Months Training An AI. My VP 'Reallocated' It. Then I Got Two Calls At 1 AM." (dev.to/xulingfeng/i-spent-3-months...) still can't be found in search. Could you take a look? The latest article is fine now.🤣
Yea I did and it wasn't there...
I would recommend re posting it. Nothing on the article is flagged or anything I have done on my end. Sometimes, articles doesn't popup. Happens to me as well and not sure why.
Feel free to repost and let me know if anything!
Got it, I'll republish and test it. I'll let you know how it goes either way.
Update — it worked! I didn't delete the article. I just edited it — literally removed one empty line and saved — and now it shows up in both the feed and search. So a simple re-save re-triggers the search index. Thanks for the help! 🙌@francistrdev
Great insights! It's always interesting to hear about the experiences and challenges that come with being a community moderator. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
One question: What's the most common mistake new community members make, and how can they avoid it?
Hey! Hope you are well :D
I believe the most common mistake is not reading carefully before commenting/posting. There were instances where people believe that "the most likes in a DEV challenge = Win", which is not the case. According to the rule, it is only use as a Tie breaker situation and not the overall result.
My tip is reading the full post before making conclusions. Right now, there is assumption that the project me and @codingwithjiro did was use to determine if the article is AI or not, which is not the case. It would been best to clarify the practices on how I determine the articles instead of assumptions. In other words, ask questions!
Thanks! :D
On @francistrdev advice, I'd like to summarize here my thoughts from previous threads about AI usage in writing posts and add a critical consideration about technical communication.
The Central Problem: Confusing Tools with Substitution
We continually shift the focus to this policy without addressing the real problem. We're confusing the use of a tool with the substitution of human thought.
In my specific case, the tool overcomes a language barrier: although I can express myself very well in Italian, translating technical nuances into fluent English without losing the desired tone is a different challenge. AI acts as a linter and language compiler for my original thoughts. The analogy is to putting a badge on an application that says "created with the help of the gcc compiler."
However, this isn't just for non-native speakers. Even for a native English-speaking developer, the fundamental principle remains the same. Writing production code or designing systems requires a completely different skill set than technical writing.
When we speak face-to-face, we rely on body language, tone of voice, and expressions to convey empathy, charisma, and to truly engage—or "seduce," in the best sense of the word—our audience. Written prose lacks all these channels. It's incredibly easy for a crude technical text to come across as cold, unappealing, pedantic, or unintentionally arrogant.
An LLM helps an engineer, a technician, or a professional formulate their ideas. It doesn't create the signal; it simply packages human experience, analogies, and logic into a form that captures the reader's attention and creates an authentic connection.
If the platform imposes a disclaimer or badge on anyone using an LLM for analyzing and formatting their posts, it signals that we're more interested in the surface appearance of the text than in the true demonstration of the intellectual labour that created it. We need to distinguish between automated bot-based systems (which compromise the integrity of the text) and professional tools (which amplify the human experience).
You can find my other comments on this topic here
Hey Marco. Thanks for summarizing and posting it here! To your concerns,
This is the most common way people have used AI tools, which I am okay with in my perspective. The problem becomes that articles are hard to detect if everyone is using AI. For clarity, the reason for adding a disclaimer is so that it can not only be used as a distinguish between bots and human, but it is also best practice to do so in any writing.
With that said, your disclaimer can be as detail as it can and it doesn't simply has to be "I used AI to assist on writing". Adding clarity to the disclaimer allows the reader to understand that you use the tool in a good way instead of using it in its entirety. Hope this makes sense.
AI has been trained on many articles in order to get the best results to the user, it doesn't formulate ideas on its own (sometimes you may notice an LLM links you various articles it summarizes). That is why citation is important. This is the same way as if a human looks at various articles and paraphrasing them without proper citation. This practice of proper citation in articles has been a thing for a LONG time. Even with fixing grammar, it is important to cite that.
In response to the post you linked:
Same here! I joined this community so that I can connect with other developers. The problem is that bots and AI exist in this age and it is hard to determine who is real or not. It is very common to see articles having a monotone voice every time you read it. I recommend looking at this video where it perfectly captures on what the tone sounds like every time you read an article in this specific way:
Overall, there is nothing wrong adding a disclaimer. The common notion is adding a disclaimer will hurt their credibility.
I am sorry to say this but according to many people I asked that are developers and non developers "If it hurts your credibility, then understand why others does not when they add a disclaimer". For example, I added a Disclaimer to my Gemma 4 article and it turn out just fine. Sure, this varies based on community (because Reddit and Dev.to is WAY DIFFERENT), but understand transparency is important!
Hope this makes sense! Let me know if I miss anything or any additional questions.
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?! excellent disclosure
I didn't even know I was a trusted member too, Idk how it works, but cool.
lol
how to get famous '='
I think Don't think about becoming famous. Focus on creating good content and improving your work every day. When you consistently work on quality, recognition and success will come naturally.
Hey! Similar to @technogamerz comment, I would focus on creating good content. It would come naturally and also try to meet new people and make genuine connections!
The DEV iceberg:
Level 1: Learn Markdown
Level 2: Write blogs
Level 3: Discover Sloan isn't a real person
Level 4: Realize hundreds of moderators can control Sloan 👀😂
Hey Francis, appreciate you opening this up and taking some of the load off Ben and
Jess.
I have a question that has been bugging me. I am sitting at around 2,380 followers,
but my total post views across everything I have written is only about 2,332. More
followers than total views does not really add up, and when I actually scroll
through the follower list, a lot of them look like bot or spam accounts rather than
real readers.
I saw Jess mention that automated spam detection is getting updated soon, so this
may already be on the radar. But is there anything on the user side I can do to flag
or clear out fake followers? Honestly I would rather have a smaller number that
reflects the real people reading the work than a bigger one padded with bots. I want
to follow and engage with the actual humans here, not inflate a count.
Thanks for the work you put into this.
I cant recall the name, but didnt some guy build an anti-bot/spam system for youtube comments a few years ago (think like 3-4), I remember LTT covered it and it worked surprisingly well, might be worth looking in to, as it was a free tool?
Oooou now that’s is insightful and helpful if there is any link or way to find that product id love to give it a try. Thank you!
Here. Like I said, it's quite dated (4 years ago) and meant for YT comments, but it is open source and idk if anyone has been updating it since or maybe forked it for bot followers?
I am not sure if it works well in the context of followers because they are concern about bots following their account.
I'm a bit busy at the moment, but I'll fork it in a few hours and see if I cant mod it to be spam and follower filter. It was designed for YT comments, which is inherently a closed-wall system, which means cant really implement it server-side. But Dev.to isnt Google, so who knows, might work? I have quite a bit of experience dealing with WAF and specifically bypassing bot-detection, so I'll apply some of that to find a decent way to flag spammers/bots and add a 'kill' mode to automatically block them, but off by default so you can atleast test it and review the flagged parties first, so you can know it's safe.
@francistrdev on the whole bot thing again, I noticed this.
That looks like a scraping pattern if you ask me. Could you check your analytics too, to see if you also got weekref.net traffic yesterday, with 0 read time (wish analytics let you drill down and see origin and read times more granularly, I'll have a look at committing an update for Forem for that the weekend). It's quite possible that weekref is being used as a proxy site for redirects for bots, so it looks like legitimate user activity, because it's a 'natural' redirect?
@jess and @ben Worth having a look too on your ends? Cuz if my practically dead account gets 10 bot scrapes in a day, it means it's hitting everyone.
Yea I am not seeing anything from my end on that note...
Back then it was 10, now up to 30. In my experience, round number leads = bots, with the claude ref as an indicator. Worth looking in to. Check how much traffic came from them, if it's always a round number, it's bots.
Round numbers are usually a telltale sign. Though direct/unknown in turn means database-query, so atleast 888 of those views were bots. I cant see how any of my posts would be recommended anywhere outside the community. So 970 views were likely bots. 862 questionable (conservative 60% real), 1 actual. With those numbers, less than half were real people and most people subscribed who read, subscribed. that coincides with the read times too. Please push for DevGuard to get reviewed and implemented, cuz that should put a stop to this kind of traffic.
It does seem like they are busy with other PR and other changes they are needed to be merged. Sometimes, they review quick and sometimes it takes a few months. I would suggest to wait a couple of weeks and check biweekly by pinging @ben
Hi @francistrdev, I have a question about article visibility and moderation.
I have seen articles initially appear under their relevant tags and in Google, then later lose one or more tags or receive a noindex directive without a message or clear explanation.
My latest article received a noindex directive immediately after publication despite others not having the same issue so I'm a little confused as to what's causing this.
Are tag removal, article-quality scoring and noindex handled through the same moderation process, or are these separate automated and manual decisions?
Is there a recommended route for requesting a review of a specific article, or for understanding what may have triggered the noindex directive? Given the time I invest into producing the content, understanding what may have triggered the noindex directive would be very helpful.
Thanks.
Interestingly, I’ve also noticed that the article does not appear anywhere in the main #ai latest feed. That makes me wonder whether it has been excluded from general distribution while remaining visible within some of the assigned tags?
Hey David. Hope you are well.
Tag removal is part of the moderation process. However, if you are granted moderation, you don't get tag moderation unless you apply to moderate the tag of your choice. For example, I applied for the Discuss tag after I was granted Mod and was able to received Tag moderation. The main feature is the add/removal of the discuss tag from posts.
The visibility of showing your article on Google is out of our hands (I believe) since we can't really control what shows on Google if that makes sense. I might be wrong, but that's based on my observation.
For the article not appearing in the #ai tag, I believe it might be a bug since it also happened to me. I recommend waiting a good few days and try to re upload the article again (fresh start). It might fix the issue.
Hope this helps! Let me know if anything else if I am missing something.
Hi @francistrdev,
Thanks for the response.
The issue is that some of my articles will never get indexed as the 'noindex' tag is being applied, which instructs Google and other search engines not to index the content. What I don't understand is that this seems to be selective and sometimes even delayed.
On other posts, the tag hasn't been added at all. As a result, they get indexed, rank and get lots of traffic/visibility. You can see the difference it makes below.
Regarding the #ai tag inclusion, I'm 100% my post wasn't featuring initially but I checked a while later and it was showing. I thought maybe it was some form of caching but I guess it could be a bug.
If you can advise further on the noindex tag, that would be a massive help.
Many thanks,
David
Going to ping @ben and @jess on this if they know anything. If not, I would suggest emailing the team if they have not respond. Thanks again David!
I would believe it's a caching issue, but that's my best guess.
Thanks Francis. @ben, @jess - any support would be greatly appreciated as I can see others with brand new accounts are not having the same issue with the noindex tag being applied.
I don't know; it's been a while since I posted here, but my recent posts have been bad in terms of visibility. Funny, it made me question if I have been shadowbanned due to the fact that I have a large following (6000 followers) and a total post view of 200k+.
But my last 2 posts have been around 40 views, and I'm not used to that. Is there something I'm doing wrong as regards the platform updates, or can anyone point me to things to know because I'm really confused?
last post : dev.to/miracool/ai-made-coding-eas...
@jess
Hey Makanju! Hope you are well. It doesn't seem anything to be wrong your profile since I didn't flag you completely. If anything, I would prefer to comment more than posting since I know DEV has changed overtime quickly and it helped me a lot!
Sorry if this isn't the news you are looking forward. Do note that are others like me out there, so it is possible that one of them flagged you for a specific reason I wasn't there. Was there any discourse back then you can recall that may have caused this? Thanks again!
Many thanks @francistrdev for the feedback. I'm genuinely surprised that someone flagged me. I'm not sure of any discourse where I violated a community rule personally, maybe people under my post.
For context this is my last popular post with a lot of comments in February.
dev.to/miracool/do-people-still-ge...
Is there a way one could appeal this, or at least can I know what leads to the flag?
I would recommend emailing the DEV team on this since moderators doesn't have the ability to see who flagged it (maybe an admin can, but not sure).
Great initiative Francis — love seeing this kind of transparency from the community team.
Question for you as a mod: what's your take on posts from companies or product teams that are genuinely trying to add value to the community (tutorials, honest product breakdowns, open discussions) vs. straight promotional content? Where's the line, and what makes a company post worth featuring vs. flagging?
Asking because we're a small team at twRty Software Services building Blogboat (twrty.org/blogboat — AI writing + multi-platform publishing) and we want to make sure our DEV presence is adding to the community, not just broadcasting.
Hey! Thanks for the question!
This depends on the company itself and if it is harmful or not. As long as you are not scamming, spamming in some way, I think it should be fine. Each company is different and it depends on how it is structured and how reader friendly the content is.
I suggest looking at other companies on dev.to and see how they post content that is successful. It might give you insights on patterns and ways you can stand out!
I recommend creating an org if you are a company. That way, your employees can join the org and document it under the org instead of sharing one user.
Hope this helps :D
What are the responsibilities of a user like you in the DEV Community? Are there any requirements regarding how much interaction you need to do in the DEV Community?
Hey Tyler! Great you see you again :D
There's not a requirement to how much you can interact with the DEV community. Like any social media, you are free to post and comment as much as you like! Though keep in mind the amount you are posting per day since it can raise skepticism if you were to post 50+ articles a day in which people think you are a bot.
Hope this helps :D
Thanks for your response! Sorry it took so long for me to acknowledge—I was away at a sleepaway summer camp for a month!
No problem. Hope you had fun on the sleepaway camp!
So...is dev a good platform for highschoolers who are interested in programming? though all they know is some QBASICS they have forgotten and basics of HTML and Python _ _
Hey Manjeeta! Good question! DEV is a great space for all skill level whether you are an experience programmer or just a person interested in programming in some way regardless of knowledge. Hope this makes sense!
Hey Francis hope you are doing well
I have just joined Leetcode, can you tell me something about it?
Hey Divyanshi! What is there you want to know about Leetcode specifically?
That is, what questions should I solve daily in this?
For learning Datastructures and Algo, go with LeetCode 75 to get a broad sense: leetcode.com/studyplan/leetcode-75/
I mainly use it for that and learning Ruby as well.
I am curious about something. You mentioned you work at Microsoft. Was wondering what role do you work as?
Software Engineer (L59/L60)
Whose organization is this DEVengers?
wym? Like who owns it?
Yes!!
Me lol
Oh! Great
Hello👋
Good idea having a direct place for questions.
Way easier than guessing from docs.
Thank you so much for the great work ☺️
Hello everyone, I enjoy seeing these posts.
hello everyone
hello hi iam new here i work as a genai trainee engineer i want to learn and post about genai stuff
hello
Hello
Just officially submitted GitHub “Finish-Up-A-Thon” Challenge,
Good luck to everyone who submitted their projects!
hello