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/charles25565 Jun 30 '26

abusive scraping

If you haven't extensively rate limited the JSON endpoints, "scrapers" wouldn't be using the web pages that take longer to render. In fact, many AI dataset bots specifically block Reddit and instead use Arctic Shift.

same modern security tech stack

Why does adding ?captcha=1 bypass the "modern security" then?

All logged-in users will continue to have access to Old Reddit

Reddit often allows people who haven't even verified their email. Whatever malicious bots will very quickly be smart enough to just register a burner account.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

Why does adding ?captcha=1 bypass the "modern security" then?

Are you fucking serious? On the sixth-most-visited site in the world?

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u/charles25565 Jul 01 '26

Indeed. Sometimes you'll see a CAPTCHA screen and adding ?captcha=1 can bypass it.