How do you manage spam, bots, and brigades effectively?

Spam, automated bots, and coordinated brigading represent three distinct categories of inauthentic activity that moderators encounter regularly, each requiring somewhat different response strategies and tools. Spam management is largely an AutoModerator problem. Well-constructed automod rules that filter new accounts, low-karma accounts, repeated link submissions, and known spam domains catch the majority of automated and low-effort spam before it ever reaches the visible feed. The modqueue then serves as the triage layer for items that need human review. Aggressive spam is often traceable to specific domain patterns or user agent characteristics, and reporting confirmed spam accounts to Reddit using the report function contributes to the platform-wide spam detection systems that the admins maintain. Bots require a different approach. Not all bots are bad — many communities use helpful bots for scheduled posts, karma tallies, and automatic responses. Bad bots, which upvote-manipulate, harvest data, or spread coordinated messaging, are identified by their posting velocity, account age, activity patterns, and posting history. Banning specific bot accounts, reporting them to Reddit admins, and configuring AutoModerator rules that require account age minimums and karma thresholds limits their effectiveness. Brigading — the coordinated arrival of users from another community to vote-manipulate or flood a thread — is the most complex problem to address. Reddit's spam detection systems do flag some brigade activity automatically, but moderators can also temporarily lock threads or switch the community to restricted posting mode when an active brigade is identified. Documenting the pattern of accounts involved and reporting the evidence to Reddit admins through modmail activates the platform's investigation process, which can result in coordinated account suspensions. In the immediate term, locking specific threads is the fastest way to stop a brigade from generating further damage while longer-term measures are pursued.