If you’re using a script to do so, make sure it’s handling API limits specifically for “edit” calls. I realized after I tried overwriting mine that it was quietly skipping a bunch of comments, presumably because there is (allegedly) a 1 edit call per 5 second rate limit. Since adding a 5 second delay between each re-write, it seems to be working for me.
I ran into this issue with u/j0be’s Power Delete Suite, I ended up writing my own script to do the job.
There are a couple ways to handle this.
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This happens with PowerDeleteSuite’s main version, but one of the forks has a 5 sec pause between deletes that does work. It’s very slow (~1000 comments edited in 2 hours), but works reliably.
https://github.com/deestan/PowerDeleteSuite -
This userscript will manually overwrite comments manually. You go to your comments page, scroll until there are no more comments to load, and run it. It’ll go 1 by 1 - edit, new text entered, save, 3 sec pause. By default the replacement text is a link to the script, but you can just edit that to be whatever you want (and you should edit it to make it harder for Reddit to batch restore).
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/468337-so-long-reddit-thanks-for-all-the-fish
Note 1: Method #2 doesn’t use the API, so should still work on July 1. PDS does use the API, so might not.
Note 2: Both methods allow you to continue to use the browser in another tab or window (at least in Firefox). Some browsers and extensions will suspend or unload tabs if they haven’t been viewed in a while, so best policy is to do this in a separate window.
Note 3: The default PowerDelete Suite should be fine for exclusively deleting comments if you run it several times. Just keep running it until nothing shows up under comments. To be sure, once your comments are all gone, wait an hour, and check again. If anything remains, use method #2.(Overwriting account #7 right now! Using PDS with 5 sec pause has worked flawlessly.)
Pass this along to anyone having trouble!
That second one is incredibly handy for those of us waiting until the API is shut off just in case. Kudos!
The API should still work for scripts like this in theory, though I wouldn’t put it passed them to fuck with it anyway
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I found a new issue.
All of my comments on my profile are gone. All posts. Everything.
I can google my username and still find comments out there. Yes, I can go in and manually change/delete, but they’re not showing up on my profile for, let’s just say, ease of removal.
I understand the protests but why are people deleting their comment history? Can’t you just delete your account?
I’m not fully aware and up-to-date, but I’ve seen a few posts suggesting that Reddit is keeping your data on their servers, a few users have said some of their stuff got undeleted.
Yes, they keep the comment history forever. The idea is that as long as content is not publicly visible nobody will find it via Google and visit Reddit to be exposed to their ads.
Deleting your account doesn’t impact all the content you generated, meaning Reddit can still profit off of it.
Oh, I see 👍 thanks for clarifying
𝚄𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚘𝚍. 𝙷𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚊 𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝚍𝚊𝚢.
If you just delete your account your comments are still there and it’ll say [deleted] instead of your user name.
