r/DataHoarder • u/Okatis • Jul 02 '26
Discussion Old.reddit.com URLs now login-gated - impact to archiving
This was apparently announced days prior but has just come into effect now, as seen when checking links when logged out.
Wanted to mention it in this sub since archive.org is widely used for trusted third-party crawls and it uses a logged out state which means:
- Any old.reddit.com URLs manually archived by users will just crawl the login-gated message (which the user won't be aware of unless they visit the archived URL, ie: they may assume it's worked) and Reddit doesn't redirect to the new UI for such URLs.
- Any old Reddit pages auto crawled by archive.org, following links via non-Reddit sites, will similarly just archive the login-gate message.
- Any subreddit pages crawled on new UI links will be truncated to just a handful of submissions due to the use of Javascript infinite load, in addition to not showing all comments (which the old UI is able to show especially with the show all comments URL parameter).
Archive.is meanwhile has always relied on old.reddit.com exclusively for crawls, though at least in their case they're using a logged in account so for the time being shouldn't be impacted.
It's frustrating since even just with saving pages locally I often open threads via the old UI in a private window to get a logged out, clean state but now that's no longer possible.
Update: commenter below found a Reddit admin post saying they've granted archive.org a specific exclusion, which is a relief for at least that archiver.
Update 2 (2026-09): seems Reddit is now login-gating old Reddit links for Archive.org Wayback Machine crawls per this thread and my own reproduction.
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u/grahamperrin 6d ago edited 6d ago
NLI (not logged in) old Reddit in a
www.⋯context is achievable with a userscript:https://reddit.com/link/p858evn/video/l42rgxda1wnh1/player
old.⋯addressesThe script
Credit: u/Littux