The Universal Scammer List is the system supporting a collection of subreddits who agree to work together to limit the impact that those who have scammed or have shown the intention to scam can have on members of Buy/Sell/Trade communities.
This document assumes that you are a moderator of a subreddit participating in the Universal Scammer List (USL). If you are looking to see if a user is banned, please check the main search page instead. If you are interested in having your subreddit join the USL, please check the Getting Started page instead.
If a user needs to be banned from your community and you want that ban to carry through to the entire USL, ban the user as normal but be sure to include a "usl tag" in the MOD NOTE of the ban. A tag is a # character, followed by a single word (like #scammer). These tags tell the USL bot that it should propagate the ban to the list and issue corresponding bans to the subreddits that subscribe to the relevant tag.
Note that bans can include multiple tags! If you feel that someone is worthy of multiple descriptive words, you can include multiple tags in the mod note of the ban.
If you wish to remove a ban, you can simply unban the user. Any tags assigned by your subreddit will automatically be removed from the USL. If you wish to have finer-grained control over which tags are removed, please send a message to your subreddit-specific USL bot with the following text in the body:
$unban u/test_account #usltag
Where u/test_account is the name of the user you wish to unban and
#usltag is the tag you wish to remove. Doing so will remove the tag(s) in
question from the user on the USL. If the tag(s) removed result in the user not having any
tags to which a subreddit is subscribed, that user will be unbanned from that subreddit.
For example, if a user is banned from r/FunkoSwap with the tags #scammer and #sketchy, the user will be banned on all subs that subscribe to either of those tags. However, if the moderators of r/FunkoSwap decide that the user is, in fact, not a scammer, but still sketchy, the mods of r/FunkoSwap can remove the #scammer tag with the above command. When this happens, any subreddits that subscribe to the #scammer tag but NOT to the #sketchy tag will have this user unbanned from their community.
Please note that ONLY moderators of the subreddit from which the ban originated can remove a USL ban in this way.
If you wish to ONLY allow unbans to happen via DM to the bot, set the
local_unban_is_usl_unban value in your subreddit config to false.
This will disable the feature and enforce that only unbans issued via DM to the bot will be
accepted.
If you wish to add another tag to a banned user, you must first locally unban the user (aka through subreddit config, NOT via PM to the bot) and then reban the user, including ALL tags that you wish to apply to the user.
The following tags are common tags which can be used to ban a user in any subreddit:
If you wish to add more tags, please contact RegExr either via Reddit or Discord with your request.
Some communities use the USL to propagate bans between communities that are unrelated to scamming. Considering this is the Universal SCAMMER List, these bans are not relevant to the majority of users. As such, these bans will be tracked by the system but will NOT appear in the action log, the ban list, the USL site search bar, or the USL browser extension. The bans are still being tracked and working as intended, but they are not visible to anyone outside of the moderation team.
If you wish to use private tags in your communities, please reach out to RegExr to get set up with a new tag.
If you wish to subscribe your community to a new tag, please edit your community's
configuration located in your community's wiki page. Please view
https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditname/wiki/usl_config/
where subredditname is the name of your community. From here, you can edit the
config to add or remove tags.
Once you update and save the config, the bot will send you a PM indicating the status of your update. If the update was successful, no further action is required from you. However, if the update was unsuccessful, the bot will reset the config and ask you to try again.
To correctly update the config, please add new tags to the line starting with
tags:. Each tag should be separated by a comma. You can have whitespace on either
side of the comma and the # character is not required. The bot will do its best to parse your
changes and modify it to a format it expects. If, for any reason, you cannot get your change
to go through, please contact RegExr for assistance.
Occasionally, moderators make typos when issuing bans. If you want the USL to spell-check you,
please enable the 'typo_checking' feature by navigating to your sub's config page at
https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditname/wiki/usl_config/
where subredditname is the name of your community. From here, you can edit the
typo_checking value from False to True. This will enable the typo checking
feature.
Once the feature has been enabled, the bot will start to check for typos in ban notes. If the bot identifies an unknown tag in a ban note, it will send a PM to the moderator who issued the ban informing them as such. The bot will only issue bans if a known tag is present in the ban note. So if the moderator did, in fact, make a typo, they should issue a local unban, then reissue the ban with the properly spelled tag in the ban note.