this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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They'll just restore them. Comments from seven years ago from people who did not intentionally purge have been coming back.
This is true. I’m about to modify my script to just put in a “this person is no longer on Reddit” disclaimer instead of deleting them.
i don't suppose you'd send it to me when you're done?
i've been looking for a script that adds to comments rather than overwriting them, so i can put "this user has moved to lemmy" without losing any information
PowerDeleteSuite might work for that, I've been using it for awhile to edit all and delete comments. I'll try and see if I can edit all without deleting....
EDIT: Yes you can edit all comments without deleting.
Here's the link to it: https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
EDIT again: There's a new fork of that project that adds a 5s delay to help it work better. The original is now hampered by reddit's bot detection stuff.
newer fork: https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite/
oh nice, thank you. i could have sworn i checked reddact, shreddit and pds, but i guess not
i think i'll be doing this tonight
I purged all of mine and since then every couple of days a few of them would magically reappear in comment history again. I do feel bad for doing that though. I've found so many old gems (answers) on Reddit through Google searches that I wouldn't have found anywhere else.
Mine haven't yet. I think it depends on what you use to purge them. I used the Power Delete Suite fork by pkolyvas which adds a 5 seconds delay to comply with rate limits and so far it worked.
EDIT: yeah I just checked again, I found like ~5 comments that were brought back. Going to do this again, fuck them.
EDIT 2: actually many of my top comments were brought back, seems like they bring back only highly voted ones. Fuck them again.
And dangerous. Sometimes people delete information for a reason.
Not to mention the EU privacy laws touching on the right to delete information posted online, even if a company's terms of service say you don't have that right. I just don't understand why they would bother restoring data that bots already have, since it's been free since it was posted, and will continue to be free until the end of the month. (And even then, it's still going to be possible to scrape the site for free).