Expose Reddit account lock status to Devvit apps

[CR29-22-2805]

Summary

Expose Reddit account lock status to Devvit apps so moderation apps can distinguish accounts that are temporarily locked by Reddit as a security precaution from active accounts when that information is available in Reddit's user payload.

Motivation

Bot Bouncer processes a large volume of ban appeals. A significant number involve accounts that Reddit has temporarily locked after detecting suspicious activity.

Today, moderators must manually open each profile on sh.reddit to determine whether an account is currently security locked. This does not scale well when reviewing hundreds or thousands of appeals.

If Devvit exposed this state, moderation apps could:

• Automatically identify appeals from accounts that are currently security locked.
• Periodically recheck those accounts without moderator intervention.
• Detect when a previously locked account later becomes active again.
• Automatically unban accounts that were banned while security locked once they are no longer reported as locked.

Rather than requiring moderators to repeatedly review the same accounts, the app could perform routine background checks and surface only accounts whose status has changed. This would substantially reduce the Bot Bouncer appeal backlog and allow moderators to focus their attention on accounts that may now be eligible for review.

Proposed API (one possible design)

interface User {
  accountStatus?: "active" | "locked" | "suspended";
  isAccountLocked?: boolean;
}

This is one possible API shape. The important capability is allowing apps to distinguish Reddit security locks from active and suspended accounts.

Expected behavior

When Reddit's user payload includes account lock status:

• isAccountLocked is true for accounts currently locked by Reddit as a security precaution.
• accountStatus reflects the current account state (active, locked, or suspended).

Apps could compare previously observed state with the current state to determine that a previously locked account has become active again.

The API would not need to determine why an account became active again or verify that it was reclaimed by its original owner—it would simply expose the current account state supplied by Reddit.

Example workflow

For Bot Bouncer, this would enable an automated workflow such as:

1. A ban appeal is received from an account that is currently security locked.
2. The appeal is deferred while the account remains locked.
3. The app periodically rechecks the account.
4. Once the account is no longer reported as locked, the app automatically places it back into the moderator review queue.

This eliminates repeated manual profile checks and makes it practical to process large numbers of security-locked accounts with minimal moderator effort.