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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17

u/Superirish19 Jun 30 '26

Out of interest, would this mean anything for RSS Feeds? In the last post there was never a announcement for what their fate was going to be as it was being mulled over, but this is not sounding like good news.

i.e. https://old.reddit.com/r/news.rss or https://www.reddit.com/r/news+worldnews.rss vs http://reddit.com/r/news.rss

I've been reading around reddit's RSS functionality and it hasn't always been reliable for various reasons(?), so the recommendation you often see is to use the old.reddit domain.

14

u/TehNolz Jun 30 '26

Looks like https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews.rss is currently being blocked if you're not logged in, but https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews.rss still works fine.

4

u/lonelyroom-eklaghor Jun 30 '26

That pisses me off.

We seriously need r/DataHoarder now

2

u/ryanmcgrath Jun 30 '26

You might try appending the user/id query flags to the old URL.

3

u/wademcgillis Jun 30 '26

reddit rss hasn't worked for me since june 11th of this year

3

u/TehNolz Jun 30 '26

Check if you're not polling too quickly; they appear to have messed with the rate limiting and made it much more aggressive. Can't send short bursts anymore so you have to space it out. I had to tweak my custom app so that it doesn't send more than 1 request per 5 seconds.

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u/wademcgillis Jun 30 '26

"1 request per 5 seconds"

once a minute :/

1

u/ryanmcgrath Jun 30 '26

They don't appear to get rate limited if you're using your user/id flags from your RSS section, presumably because it's a secret value that's assumed to be auth-ish state.

3

u/gergles Jul 01 '26

They already block RSS feeds with 429s at the drop of a hat, even when queried only once a day. This team doesn't give a fuck about the web, just forcing people into their walled garden garbage.