If you’re a subreddit moderator, chances are you’ve received requests from community members to delete an inappropriate comment or ban an ill-mannered user. But it’s 2018 going on 2019 — we’re in the midst of the biggest tech era and spoiled with things like AI, automation and bots. We no longer need to perform menial tasks like monitoring subreddits. Together, we’re going to build a Reddit bot that will automatically check a subreddit for flagged comments in 3 easy steps.

Community members can use “!delete” (shown above) or “!ban” to request bot moderation

Whether you have no programming knowledge or 15 years of professional experience, you’ll be able to deploy this bot with Standard Library, the API development and hosting platform, in under 10 minutes.

If you’re not familiar with Standard Library, we’re a serverless platform that enables everyone (yes, everyone! Calling all PMs, designers, marketing teams, sales people, oh and engineers… 🙋) to build, ship, and integrate scalable APIs in a matter of seconds. With the help of our online editor, Code.xyz, you can do all of this right from your browser.

Requirements

Reddit moderator account (for the subreddit you’d like to monitor)

Standard Library account (free)

Step 1: Get the Reddit bot template

Estimated time: 30 seconds

Head over to Code.xyz in your browser and select reddit-moderator-bot by @eileenzhong (that’s me! 🤓👋) in the Community API Sources tab:

Name your API:

Once done, you’ll conveniently land in Code.xyz (Standard Library’s in-browser text editor) with the Reddit bot project code.

Step 2: Copy and paste

Estimated time: 2-5 minutes

This next step involves expert knowledge of the copy-and-paste skill to set some required environment variables. You’ll notice there are three sets of variables listed in your env.json file: local , dev , and release . We’ll be deploying our code to the dev environment, so we only need to worry about the dev variables for this tutorial!

All fields are found in env.json :

To retrieve your STDLIB_LIBRARY_TOKEN , right click between the quotation marks and select “Insert Library Token…”:

Right click to access this context menu

Keys prefaced with REDDIT_ -* can be found on Reddit ( REDDIT_USERNAME and REDDIT_PASSWORD are your moderator account’s username and password, respectively).

If you don’t already have a Reddit app, register for one here with your moderator account: