I’ve received this message on my inbox just a few hours after deleting my posts (all of them) last night.
I’m just glad to know where they stand.
And yes, I know that a lot of people have unsavory views about that subreddit, but I guess there’s just no accounting for taste.
I went to their wiki and looked at their commenting rules. I don’t think I see anything about comment editing and deletions:
However, I might have run afoul their “absolutely no bots” policy. I have set my deletion tool to edit my posts before deleting. It might have been detected by their own bots and have flagged my account accordingly.
Getting “caught” as a bot is pretty likely. The first time I mass-edited my posts I got spam asking me to “not spam the subreddit” for every edit in AskReddit. When I re-ran it a few days later they must have fine-tuned that because I didn’t get any more from them. But it seems likely that another sub could have had an auto-ban tied to similar bot detection.
It’s more likely they muted you. Afaik editing has sort of a timeout for API calls so if you do it too quickly, so your tool needs to delay each edit for a few seconds or it would cause issues. I know Power Delete Suite has not added this feature yet unfortunately.
This version of power delete suite added the feature. Each edit happens after 5.1s, the exact time to ensure no API timeout.
Thanks for this. I am not in my daily driver (where I’ve set things up) right now but I’ll be checking this out (and whether or not I’ve used the version without the 5.1s delay) once I come back.
Yeah, I think so too. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.
I understand the spirit of the rule, they want to keep spambots away from their subreddit. However, the fact that they’ve never participated in the protest, and that they never have ever thought “hey, this bot has edited and deleted their comments,” or even considered what might be the situation, in a subreddit that I’ve considered to follow both the spirit and the letter of their rules makes me feel a teeny bit salty.
I guess that makes me miss that subreddit a little less, if at all.
It’s likely that you tripped the auto-mod. The same thing happened to me with YouShouldKnow after setting power delete to edit all my comments.
Yeah, that’s what I think happened, almost certain now.
Anyways, barring any more subreddits going public, I think I’ve already dealt with most of my stuff over at Reddit. I’d only be coming back to check up on the state of my posts, and to make sure everything has been, and stays deleted.
- Hashtags
r/polandball when they copy&paste a URL with an anchor:
Note how they simply said “because you broke this community’s rules” without saying which. It’s a type of kafkatrapping, a scummy but rather effective way to enforce hidden rules - if I don’t tell you what you did, you can’t prove that you didn’t, so everybody else will assume that you did.
The admins in special really like this, with some ban messages being like “you broke the content policy” or “multiple, repeated violations of the content policy” (even after you did one thing). Perhaps not surprisingly some mods more “in-touch” with the admins do the same.
TL;DR: even if Reddit wasn’t going down, see this as a blessing disguised as a curse. You’ve avoided shitty mods.
Kafkatrapping is something that I’m somehow vaguely aware of, but it’s the first time I’ve heard of it by name. Thanks for the link. It was a good read.
Now, for the main point: yes, I am somehow glad this happened. To be honest, while I don’t align that well with most of their userbase, I’ve always respected the content the contributors over there put out, and I’ve felt that it’s one of the things I’d sorely miss upon leaving. However, this has basically made not turning back at all a lot easier.
Polandball’s always been a garbage sub. It wasn’t too long ago that you would get banned for mentioning the sub on others.
Had we been having this conversation a while back, I might have respectfully disagreed with you. I respected their mod team and thought that they’re just doing what they can to keep submission and comment quality high.
However, I don’t know why editing and then deleting my posts in their sub constituted a rule break, and how prohibiting users from doing so would be detrimental to sub quality.
In case anyone is interested, here is an alternative.
There is an absolutely massive history of polandball comics that are only on /r/polandball, though. Some were pretty good.
If one were to keep things really legally correct, it’d be nice to get the original submitter’s approval to repost them here, and maybe this time around establish that on [email protected] that the stuff that gets submitted has to be a Creative Commons license or something like that, so that if something like this happens again they can be reposted.
There is an absolutely massive history of polandball comics that are only on /r/polandball, though. Some were pretty good.
Perhaps someone could scrape the content into new communities.
There are people who are banging together a Reddit subreddit -> kbin magazine bot, which apparently was made initially functional in the last few hours, but I think it’s aimed at new stuff, rather than dredging up old stuff.
I’m not actually sure if there’s a reasonable way to fully-iterate over all old content on a subreddit. Given that Spez appears intent on monetizing old content that he’s locked up, I’d kind of assume that even if there is, Reddit is probably aiming to make it as difficult as possible.
I’m checking it now. Based on the configurations it seems to be able to pull all old content; it’s just that it prioritises highly upvoted one.
Reddit is probably aiming to make it as difficult as possible
Agree, but the only way to make it impossible would be to prevent site usage altogether. If you can see it, you can scrape it off.
Ah, apparently a lot of Reddit history has already been archived.
The historical submissions to /r/polandball:
https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/files/polandball_submissions.zst
The historical comments on /r/polandball:
https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/files/polandball_comments.zst
That will have the list of submissions, albeit not the actual images.
Could probably script something up with gallery-dl or similar on that submission set to pull down the images, though. At least the ones that are still online at the submitted locations.
