r/sysadmin: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

The room assumes you do IT for a living. Posts mention tenants, conditional access, group policy, hypervisors and identity sync without explaining them. Simple questions are pointed to the Moronic Monday and Thickheaded Thursday threads, and the rules expect evidence of basic troubleshooting, so a bare beginner question gets told to search or gets removed as low quality.

• Sysadmins and IT generalists at small and mid-sized companies, often the only IT person there.
• Infrastructure and Microsoft 365 administrators chasing a specific error after a patch or a policy change.
• Managed service provider staff handling many client environments.
• Helpdesk and junior staff asking how to move up, plus career changers with no degree.
• Veterans with decades in the job, who supply most of the war stories and the cynicism.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/sysadmin.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up75%
• Removed by Reddit's filters19%
• Removed by moderators5%
• Deleted by the author<1%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

What happened when we posted here

We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.

Stayed up

95%

Removed by Reddit's filters

1%

Removed by moderators

4%

Period

August 2025 to August 2026

The rules, in the mods' words

1. 1

   Account Age

   * Your account must be 24 hours old in order to post to this subreddit. * Please use your main account to post or comment, or wait 24 hours and resubmit. If the issue is urgent, feel free to message the moderation team.

2. 2

   Professionalism

   * Please treat community members politely - even when you disagree. * No personal attacks - debate issues, challenge sources - but don't make or take things personally. * No posts that are entirely memes or AdviceAnimals or Kitty GIFs. * Please try to keep politically & religiously charged messages out of discussions. * Intentionally trolling is considered impolite, & will be acted against. * The acts of Software Piracy, Hardware Theft, & Cheating are considered unprofessional.

3. 3

   Advertising

   * The reddit advertising system exists for this purpose. Invest in either a promoted post, or sidebar ad space. * Vendors are free to discuss their product in the context of an existing discussion. * Posting articles from ones own blog is considered a product. * As always, users must disclose any affiliation with a product. * Content creators should refrain from directing this community to their own content.

4. 4

   Wrong Community

   * There are many reddit communities that exist that may be more catered to/dedicated your topic. * Requests for assistance are expected to contain basic situational information. - They should also contain evidence of basic troubleshooting & Googling for self-help. - Keep topics/questions related to technology/people/practices/etc within a business environment. * When asking a question or requesting advice, please update your original post with any new information, or solution (if found).

5. 5

   Low Quality

   * Avoid low-quality posts. Make an effort to enrich the community where you can- provide details, context, opinions, etc. in your posts. * Moronic Monday & Thickheaded Thursday are available for simple questions, or other requests that don't need their own full thread. Utilize them as much as possible. * No GPT/LLM created content. This is a user community of professionals. Don't rely on AI to do your thinking for you

These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.

The culture

r/sysadmin has 1.3 million members and close to 60 posts a day. It works as a break room and a help desk at once. One thread is a precise question about an identity sync that started failing this morning. The next is a rant about a manager, a pointless policy, or a vendor who wants remote access. The median thread gets 13 comments, and comments are short, around 28 words.

The technical centre of gravity is Windows and Microsoft 365: tenants, mail, device management, patches that break things. There is a dedicated Microsoft flair. On-prem hardware, storage, backups, networking and security incidents fill out the rest. Heads-up posts about a bad update, a product reaching end of life or an exploited vulnerability are a staple, and people thank you for them.

AI is the argument of the moment. The two highest scoring posts in the sample are both about it: one admitting to finally using an AI assistant for production scripts and documentation, one complaining about how ordinary users handle AI at work. The mood is skeptical and tired, and the rules ban AI-written posts. Career and pay threads are the other big draw, even though the sidebar points career questions to another subreddit.

What lands

• A confession or strong opinion from the job, told plainly. The top post in the sample drew about 450 comments.
• Pay and career posts with real figures, like a salary history over several years without a degree.
• Heads-up and PSA posts: a product going end of life today, new policy templates, a vendor outage that broke firewalls overnight.
• A precise technical question with versions, error text and what has already been ruled out.
• Workplace stories that invite everyone to add their own, such as the dumbest policy you had to enforce.

What gets removed or ignored

• Vendor outreach of any kind: asking for beta testers, offering to help with complaints about a product, or a roundup of tools the poster tested.
• Open questions that read like market research, such as how everyone keeps client documentation current or what small offices want from on-site AI.
• Job listings, surveys, and titles that say nothing.
• News items and nostalgia with no professional angle, even under the Off Topic flair.
• Posts from accounts less than 24 hours old, and plain spam in other languages.

The unwritten rules

• Swearing and dark humour are normal. The professionalism rule is about personal attacks and politics, not tone.
• Include the exact error message and your environment. The comments say so directly, and the rules ask for basic situational information.
• Come back and update the post with the fix. The rules ask for it and there is a Question - Solved flair.
• Links in comments are rare, about 1.4% carry one. A product link in a reply stands out.
• Some ordinary-looking technical questions get removed too. If yours is narrow and short, the weekly simple-question threads are the safer place.

Self-promotion

The sidebar says not to advertise products or services outside approved threads, and the advertising rule tells vendors to buy a promoted post instead. It allows vendors to discuss their product in the context of an existing discussion, requires disclosing any affiliation, treats your own blog as a product, and asks content creators not to send the community to their own content. In practice vendor-flavoured posts are removed, including polite ones that ask for feedback or testers. An Advertising flair exists and a small share of posts use it, including an open-source tool announcement that stayed up. The dependable route is answering in someone else's thread and saying who you work for.

How people write here

Typical post length

144 words

Typical title length

9 words

Titles phrased as a question

30%

Typical comment length

28 words

Comments that include a link

1%

Posts that carry a flair

60%

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/sysadmin.

• microsoft 48 posts
• sysadmin 26 posts
• intune 18 posts
• server 45 posts
• entra 21 posts
• users 52 posts
• admin 36 posts
• user 48 posts
• windows 38 posts
• access 46 posts
• m365 14 posts
• exchange 24 posts
• servers 25 posts
• error 29 posts
• security 36 posts
• company 54 posts
• teams 35 posts
• tenant 16 posts
• sysadmins 8 posts
• environment 25 posts
• support 43 posts
• password 18 posts
• issue 40 posts
• sharepoint 13 posts
• msp 11 posts
• outlook 14 posts
• sso 11 posts
• network 26 posts
• management 31 posts
• issues 34 posts
• helpdesk 9 posts
• service 33 posts
• log 19 posts
• device 22 posts
• dns 13 posts
• microsoft's 8 posts
• exchange online 7 posts
• policies 16 posts
• linux 16 posts
• azure 13 posts

Recurring topics: it, ai, ad, looking for, windows, issue, management, system, microsoft, remote.

Growth

1. 201234k
2. 201359k
3. 201492k
4. 2015122k
5. 2016162k
6. 2017211k
7. 2018297k
8. 2019407k
9. 2020540k
10. 2023845k
11. 2024965k
12. 20251.2M
13. 20261.3M

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Common questions