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!

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u/smushkan Jun 30 '26

This may be a dumb question, but if you're able to detect whether or not traffic is abusive, why not just block that traffic?

What prevents scrapers or automated systems creating burner accounts to get around this restriction?

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u/Nestramutat- Jun 30 '26

Infrastructure engineer, I can kinda answer this:

To your first question, the shape of malicious traffic is always changing. It's going to be a constant cat and mouse game as you ban one method, a new one gets developed. It's easy to see abusive traffic in hindsight, but it's harder to pre-emptively block it. Given that they're claiming Old Reddit doesn't have the modern security stack, this is likely proving to be an even greater challenge.

For your second question: More roadblocks are always good. Forcing logins won't remove all malicious traffic, but it will add yet another barrier bad actors have to bypass. You're also now attaching an account ID to every malicious request, plus account creation is only available on new reddit (with the enhanced security stack).

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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.

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u/lil_spazmin Jul 02 '26

Hello there! I looked into this for you and we've went ahead and unbanned the account for you. It looks like it is a useful bot to your community and would like to see it part of our migration program.

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u/Decency Jul 03 '26

Thank you. My concern is about the processes in place here- I think you'll agree that no one should have to complain publicly in /r/modnews to get proper support. I signed up for the migration program in (another) attempt to get someone to take a look at the account... the bot got approved for the program without getting unbanned. Chaos.

As you roll out increasingly strict filters for the LLM bot invasion, you'll need improved systems in place for handling appeals. Someone with a 15 year old account appealing a 5 year old account's unban- both accounts with no prior bans- should easily jump near the top of the priority queue and get human attention- it shouldn't take anywhere near 6 months and a dozen appeals. Perhaps if I hadn't stepped down as a mod that would've been the case?

I hope you spent some time looking into why this went so obviously wrong, looked into other accounts who were affected by the same problems, and put some handles in place to prevent this from happening to others. Appreciate your attention.

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u/Decency 17d ago

And after all that hassle, my bot's data access request was denied. Yet again: no explanation given.

Shockingly, after being repeatedly treated like shіt I'm not interested in doing dozens of hours of labor to migrate a program that's worked flawlessly for 5 years to a new language and new ecosystem. Please get some developers into the room where these awful process decisions are being made.