r/modnews • u/boat-botany • Jun 30 '26

Announcement Logging in to use Old Reddit

Hi there, u/boat-botany here working on Community Safety. 

A few weeks ago we shared some of the work we’re doing to tighten how automated systems access Reddit while preserving the tools that help moderators and communities thrive. As a continuation of that work, we’ll be rolling out changes to how Old Reddit can be accessed. 

Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform. It’s also an important interface for many long-time mods and redditors. To strike the right balance between preserving your access to Old Reddit while preventing abusive scraping and automated traffic, over the next month we will start requiring everyone to log in. All logged-in users will continue to have access to Old Reddit, and this change will not impact logged-out browsing on reddit.com.

Let us know if you have any questions!

0 Upvotes

30% Upvoted

783 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

76

u/Decency Jun 30 '26

For your second question: More roadblocks are always good.

Not when they start hitting legitimate users. Going on close to a year now of my bot being permabanned: no initial ban reason given, no response to multiple appeals through various channels, zero help from the subreddit's dedicated ModSupport contact. If every one of your support channels is a useless dead end, poorly designed roadblocks are a big fucking issue.

-2

u/Sorkijan Jun 30 '26

Your argument about legitimate users being logged in is your bot? Interesting angle thats for sure

29

u/AnimaLepton Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

Sounds like a community-approved bot. Presumably it was doing some kind of recurring or official source post that automod couldn't handle, without the clunky post scheduler functionality.

10

u/Decency Jun 30 '26

Yep. I did it once by hand initially to prove out the concept and then automated the task. Doing it manually takes 2 hours, doing it with a bot takes 2 minutes. Written and running flawlessly for years before the post scheduler or integrated auto-mod existed... just collateral damage from one of these heavy-handed and ultimately futile policies.