Found a weird loophole in Reddit's shadowban filters

I kept getting posts removed from a local gardening subreddit for no clear reason, so I tried typing my city name with a typo like 'Philadelpha' instead of 'Philadelphia' and it went through fine. Then I tested it by posting the exact same advice twice once with the correct spelling and once with the typo, and only the typo version stayed up. Has anyone else stumbled onto a character workaround that beat the bots?

3 comments

3 Comments

black.amy2mo ago

Mods set up keyword filters that trigger on exact spelling, so a typo lets you slip right past them. I ran into the same thing on a travel forum where mentioning a specific airline got hidden, but a misspelling let the whole thing through.

barbara_taylor832mo ago

Haha, yeah, that tricksy typo workaround is a classic. @black.amy it reminds me of this gardening forum I used to lurk on where you couldn't say "Roundup" without getting flagged by some eco-mod. Someone figured out if you typed "Rownup" or even "Rundup" the filter just let it slide right by. We had a whole thread going with increasingly bad misspellings of weed killer names like "Spectricide" turned into "Specktrcide." It was dumb but also kind of fun to see how broken the filter really was.

the_riley26d ago

ngl this is actually a pretty genius find. @black.amy totally gets it - those filters are so strict with exact spelling that a tiny change can break them. i had a similar thing happen on a music sub where mentioning a specific streaming platform would get you flagged as a bot, but if you typed it like "Spotfy" it worked no problem. it's wild how these systems are built so rigidly that one letter off makes all the difference. kinda makes you wonder how much legit content gets nuked just cause of spelling errors from people typing fast. your gardening loophole is proof the bots are way dumber than they seem.