r/redditrequest: How to Request an Abandoned Subreddit (2026 Guide)

Reddit doesn’t sell or auction subreddit names. When a community’s moderators disappear, the only official way to take it over is to ask, and r/redditrequest is the place you ask. It’s a public subreddit, but the decisions are made by Reddit admins, not volunteers.

Most rejected requests fail for boring reasons: a mod posted a comment somewhere three weeks ago, or the requester skipped the modmail step. Here is the process in the order you actually do it.

How to submit a request on r/redditrequest

1. Check that the subreddit qualifies. It has to be public or restricted, not banned, and not one of Reddit’s default communities. Open reddit.com/r/NAME/about/moderators and note every human moderator. Bots like AutoModerator don’t count.

2. Check each moderator’s last activity. Open every mod’s profile and look at both the Posts and Comments tabs. The rule is about activity anywhere on Reddit, not just inside the subreddit. You want the newest date across all of them to be roughly 60 days old or more. Suspended or deleted accounts count as inactive. If one mod commented on r/nba last week, stop here. The request will be denied.

3. Send modmail to the mod team. Write a short, polite message from the subreddit’s “Message the mods” link. Say you’d like to help moderate and ask if they mind. Copy the URL of the sent message. You will need it.

4. Wait at least five days. This gives the mods a fair chance to reply. If one of them answers and says no, you have your answer (and their reply counts as activity anyway). A week is the safer wait.

5. Post on r/redditrequest. Make a link post. The title is just the subreddit name, like r/example. The link is the subreddit URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/example/. Add the flair the sidebar asks for if there is one.

6. Reply to u/request_bot. Within minutes a bot comments on your post. Reply directly to that comment with a sentence or two on why you want the subreddit and what you’ll do with it, plus the link to your modmail. Be concrete. “I run a weekly meetup for this hobby and want a place to post schedules” beats “I want to grow the community.”

7. Wait for the admin decision. You’ll get a reply on the post and usually a private message. If approved, you’re added as a moderator, often as top mod.

That’s the whole thing. The hard part is step 2, and it’s where most of the effort should go.

What makes a subreddit eligible

The inactivity check is what decides most requests. Admins look at every human mod, and a single active account sinks it. This trips people up because mods who abandoned a small subreddit often still browse and comment elsewhere. They aren’t moderating, but they are active, and Reddit counts that.

A few other conditions matter:

The subreddit can’t be banned. Banned communities sometimes become requestable later (we cover that in what happens when a subreddit is banned for being unmoderated), but you can’t request them while the ban page is up. If you only want to read what was posted there, see how to view banned subreddits. Default subreddits are off limits. Private subreddits are a gray area; admins usually decline them because they can’t see whether the community would object.

If you’re still hunting for a target, our guide on how to find dead subreddits covers search operators and the signals that a community is truly abandoned rather than just quiet.

Who gets approved

Reddit doesn’t publish account requirements, which is frustrating, but the patterns are clear from public request threads. Accounts with a few months of history and positive karma in both posts and comments do well. Accounts that are a week old, or that mostly post links to their own website, do badly.

You can only have one open request at a time, and after a denial there’s a cooldown of roughly 15 days before you can submit again.

Your reason matters more than people assume. Admins are trying to judge whether you’ll run the place or squat on it. Mention what you’ll post, what rules you’ll set, and whether the existing subscribers would care. If you plan to point the subreddit at your business, say so honestly and explain why it fits the topic. Hiding it and getting caught later is how subreddits get taken back.

Why requests get denied

In rough order of how often we see it:

• A moderator was active somewhere on Reddit in the last 60 days.
• No modmail was sent, or the modmail link is missing from the bot reply.
• The modmail was sent too recently.
• The bot comment was ignored, or the reply was one vague line.
• The subreddit is banned, private, or a default.
• The account already has a request open, or was denied recently.

The fix for most of these is patience. If a mod was active 40 days ago, set a calendar reminder for three weeks out and check again.

After you’re approved

Don’t announce anything on day one. Update the sidebar and description, write three to five clear rules, set up AutoModerator to filter brand-new accounts, and post some real content first. Subscribers who haven’t seen a post in two years will notice the subreddit is back when it shows up in their feed, and the first impression should be good.

We wrote a full playbook for this part: how to revive a dead subreddit. If you’re weighing whether a takeover is worth it at all, start with how to take over a subreddit, which covers the strategy before the paperwork.

If your goal is broader than one community, how to become a Reddit moderator covers applying to active subreddits too, which is often faster than r/redditrequest.