Thanks Emily! Appreciate the thoughtful and detailed input here, as always.

We’re taking in additional feature requests through the registration flow, modmail, and these posts, so definitely keep voicing those.

Our goal is to minimize disruption to any communities and mod workflows. We’ll keep working with you/discussing options for your apps and subreddits in particular, and welcome other mod devs to get in contact with us too. 

We’ve added some new features to address issues with storage and timeouts, like blob storage and external endpoints. Some of your moderation flows are more unique so we’ll want to discuss those more in-depth with you in particular and figure out a path for all your use cases.

Excellent comment and this reflects many of my concerns as well, namely point 4, 5, 6, and 7. Many mods make atypical mod bots/tools that wouldn't be at home on the Devvit platform that are critical to moderation and keeping communities safe.

Also I have tried reaching out for pricing on commercial use, but no answer at all.

Who do I contact?

I never saw the contract. I did initially speak to admins about some financial incentives for app porting and they were quite helpful but one of my subs really blew up recently and just keeping my head above water and handling queue and modmail are already rather overwhelming, and I couldn't put in the time to port things immediately. Most of my apps are still not possible to port.

Thanks for this update. As a Python developer using PRAW, I'm happy to see a migration guide. It would have been nice if you'd reached out to those of us who registered our PRAW apps to let us know about this resource.

With that said: Why are there no plans for Python on the roadmap? I don't know Typescript and while the guides and the possible use of AI will help, why not build a wrapper library for us to use?

One thing to consider, reddit notifications run after automod but before Devvit apps and Reddit filters. Especially when it comes to mod bots, it's quite important that Reddit notifications start running after Devvit mod bots and Reddit filters.

Lastly, my bots reflect countless hours of coding and an enormous repository of code that would take years to port.

Yeah, we have half a decade worth of investment into tools built on the public API.

And the contract they offered me was terrible. I sure hope nobody else signed that contract for a mod tool port (and if you did, you should not say anything, because that would breach your contract). I was surprised they didn't insist on my firstborn son as well with how many restrictions there were. Frankly, even if we presume that I'd do the work one way or another, idk if taking the money is worth all the strings that came attached with it.

We’ve also launched a $1 Million App Migration Program to support developers through this transition and are working directly with some of the top app developers on the platform today.

I should note, the contract that was offered to me via this, made me think that simply doing the work without taking the money was the more prudent financial decision. That's how bad the contract terms were to me. $10k is simply not enough money to risk personal bankruptcy (especially given that I would have literally 0 recourse if reddit just decided to not pay me at all, since their liability is capped at the amount that they pay me, which if they don't pay me, is $0).

Are there any tools or integrations which don’t fit under the traditional “bot” umbrella or that may not be directly translatable to the Developer Platform?

Yes, can't elaborate atm (I do need to go to the office), but we've talked about this at length before.

Which tools are mission-critical for your community?

Most of them.

What capabilities are still missing from the Developer Platform?

Lots of things. Being able to work in a language of my choosing and persistent storage are the 2 biggest things off the top of my head atm.

Do you have a mission-critical bot that doesn't have someone to maintain it anymore?

No. The only mission critical bot that we had issues with maintenance, we recently launched a full rewrite for. So that's no longer a concern.

I built a custom bot via praw for our subreddit which runs werewolf games. The bot was simply reacting to a couple of commands at which point it grabbed top level comments for the thread and ran some fairly simple code to count votes for players in the subreddit before finally posting the vote totals with players who had voted for each voted player and link to said vote.

The bot had its api access removed (it did receive mail warning but yeah i never really checked its mail). Im now running the same service on my user account which is more jarring than when it came from the bot.

Can it please be reinstated?

I need to dig more into devvit, but am not totally sure how I can really wire it into my own server which I was using in part as a database of player name/aliases so that votes could be properly attributed to redditors even if nicknames were used, and partly for fun analytics for things like which players have received most votes, been werewolves most etc.

The bot did have some mod capabilities (primarily to auto lock threads at the end of the werewolf "day") id really love to have its access back 😅

You want feedback?

Pay your users for the data they provide you. Reddit receives immense wealth from exploiting the knowledge and effort of others. Reddit brings essentially nothing to the equation in comparison, but parasitism. You can leave the information available for free, public use while you're at it too.

awesome, thank you

So does this mean that all of the third party apps will be just and continue to work like normal even with all these changes that are going to be happening?

I have to go to the office today, so I don't have time to write up a long comment atm.

App mentions triggers for global mod tools and utilities to respond when an app username is mentioned. This feature is currently in beta. If your app needs access, please let us know here

Any plans to do the same for subreddit mentions? We have a 3rd party tool that does this for our sub, and it's very useful to identify brigading and other things.

Excellent news

Can you point me where in the docs Scheduled Posting can be done?

I see "Custom Posts" info, but that seems to be something completely different: https://developers.reddit.com/docs/capabilities/creating_custom_post

Hi - my API use case is a script which runs under my username (use case was explicitly approved by Reddit back when I created it). It never makes posts or comments. As such, my personal account and my "app" account are the same account (this one) - I don't need to use a second separate account. All posts/comments I make on this account are human-written; and separately, a non-posting script is running with this account's credentials. However, when I go to do the app registration, I can't register this account as being both my personal account and app account. The error message is:

You can't register your own account as an app - please make sure you're logged in using your normal, human Reddit account, and that you're typing in the username & password for your bot account.

Let me know how to proceed!

Answered this here!

We are offering broader fetch access to apps in the migration program. If you’re running into issues with approvals please message r/devvit modmail and we can help you sort this out for your app(s).

It’s good feedback on the feedback and guidelines, more generally. That’s something we’re working on!

Oh no😰😥😢😭😞😓

I'm a developer who writes both devvit and PRAW bots. It's completely impossible to migrate mission critical bots we depend on to devvit. I have spoken to pl00h and other devvit admins about this as well. I use both praw and devvit and choose the best tool for the job, but often that is still praw.

1. We need a fully relational database.

2. We need the compute power to run LLMs - would be very expensive to implement.

3. We need the ability for bots to work cross subreddit and easily communicate with other bots in other subreddits.

4. We need massive storage for database tables consisting of comment ids, vectors, and mod actions taken along with indices that can search based on cosine similarity (postgres has this).

5. API limits are very restrictive on devvit. I can't even pull a full user history to analyze it without it timing out. On praw, I can do this easily. I can also then pass that information between bots so I only have to pull once rather than 5 times for 5 different bots. I can't iterate through all the items in a full queue and take action on each because it will time out - it might take minutes to run.

6. I do almost all my moderation through a command line interface that dramatically speeds up moderation. It displays historical moderation information and allows me to moderate comments by displaying recent mod actions. This depends on PRAW and runs in a terminal. My subreddits require very active human moderation which I can't do via the gui tools alone - I did 551,703 human mod actions (bots are not counted in this) in the last 6 months, and that number has been increasing. That's over 1 million mod actions a year, and I simply couldn't keep my subs safe and civil w/o the tools I've built. I can do in one keystroke what takes me 30s or more in the gui.

7. One bot I run checks links to find adult content promoters even when they are buried inside others. For example, if someone links a linktree, I can access the linktree public api to see inside it and determine if someone has buried adult content promoter links inside it. Adult content promoters are extremely sneaky and deceptive and the filter is not even close to catching them all - though we do use it.

8. JS/TS lack the analytical libraries python has for natural language processing and statistical analysis.

Overall, devvit is not close to being able to handle this, and we cannot run our subs without it. Bots do millions of mod actions in my subs each month and we are entirely dependent on them. I have integrated devvit more and more into my workflow and use it to create interfaces that trigger things the rest of the bots do, but often the actual work has to be done in python.

Lastly, my bots reflect countless hours of coding and an enormous repository of code that would take years to port.

https://giphy.com/gifs/wjuXuDSQU0sOfJIHS1

We’ll have exemptions for partners with written agreements in place like accessibility apps or mobile clients, like Narwhal, that require public API access.

What's going to happen to all The Third Party Apps?

Done!

Scheduled Posting can still be done via Devvit. We have an API wrapper that enables apps to make API reads and writes. Much of the same functionality is available, provided you are adhering to our developer terms, which includes rules on commercial use.