I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
That’s pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I’m being notified about them now as “new” comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.
This is why Power Delete Suite edits the comment before deleting it. If Reddit is keeping a record of deleted posts and comments, then theoretically they’d only be left with a bunch of comments that say nothing. But I’m pretty sure that if they’re keeping deleted comments, then they’re also keeping edit histories.
I imagine they have full offsite backups they can pull data from. That’s why we have documentary shows like Mr. Robot, never forget 5/9!
Yes, comments are being restored, but what they’re saying is it’s not something they’re doing deliberately. The scripts people were running were basically failing and comments got restored automatically. That message literally encourages you to run them again or try different ones
That doesn’t even make sense. How could a script failing to delete a post have this outcome?
Yeah… My comments which were restored were deleted for several days before they started reappearing. That doesn’t sound like a flaw on the scripts, but a flaw on how reddit handles bulk comment deletion.
Mine weren’t bulk deleted (I manually deleted weekly) and still respawned weeks after deletion.
It doesn’t. A Reddit script just sends a request to delete the comment. At that point if the comment is deleted and then restored due to a timeout it is 100% on them.
It would be different if they would send back an error code without any changes being made, but the fact that the comment was first deleted is proof enough that their system received and at least started to process the call.
Fwiw this is not necessarily a new problem. As a mod I’ve seen it before, if you go through hitting “remove” on a whole bunch of comments in a row often some of them will be visible again when you refresh the page. Something similar could be what’s happened here. Reddit’s backend has never been very good.
I can understand seeing them after a refresh, but visiting my user profile not logged in from Tor and showing everything deleted then having it all come back 2-3 weeks later is a little shady. I just checked my account again after my 3rd powerdeletesuite run since the shutdowns and I had one single comment restored (despite shredding before delete but maybe that failed)
Yeah that’s quite a bit more sus. If it’s showing up as disappeared after a couple of minutes, it should stay removed.
I wouldn’t be surprised. This is the kind of problem that would usually only affect a small number of users. They should probably have done something about it before it had a chance to come back and bite them…
Detect incomplete user tables and restore from older storage.
If you ran those scripts while subreddits were dark, the script can’t see those comments you made in those particular subs, (they’re hidden along with the sub) and can’t delete them. Then later when the sub comes back to public mode, your comments will appear as well. So comments you thought you wiped were simply hiding.
Just to add, also check the other sections on your comments when deleting (eg: hot/controversial) because sometimes those ones get missed by the scripts as well.
Not to say that’s the only thing going on… wouldn’t surprise me if they are bringing back some stuff considering their history of shenannigans.
The issue is reddit doesn’t store all the data in one indexed and centralized location. It was pointed out that “hot” and “top” sorting aren’t just a sort, but literally TWO LISTS that are constantly being updated and adjusted. So if you remove a comment from one list or location, it still might exist in other places. Then when reddit software gets around to reconciling these differences, the copy that still exists gets pushed onto the other lists and returns.
I’m not trying to justify the system; it sucks and reddit is directly responsible for that. But it does seem like they’re not intentionally restoring content, it’s just a side effect of their bungled system.
Except that’s crap, because I have been manually deleting my Reddit comments weekly at minimum for years, and I’ve had several that repopulated a few weeks ago, after being deleted for multiple weeks.
Some of them have respawned more than once even.
So Reddit is entirely full of shit.
I’m a web developer, that is absolutely not how any of this works.
Their claim that the scripts are failing causing comments to be restored is not possible. When you make a request to a website the site returns a success or fail status. The scripts are getting success statuses, the users are manually checking and seeing that their posts are deleted and then they reappear later. This means there is a mechanism between step 2 and 3 being run by Reddit affecting an already completed action.
Don’t comment on stuff like this unless you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Why do you assume that reddit saying that’s the explanation, means that that’s the explanation? Christian’s done a pretty good job of documenting multiple instances of Reddit lying about what’s going on, and spez has been observed editing other people’s comments, so I wouldn’t assume that they’re telling the truth in this instance either.
they are likely terrified of being sued under GDPR
That makes absolutely zero sense. The scripts issue individual delete requests for each comment. If a comment is deleted, it should stay deleted, even if the script ultimately fails.
I deleted mine by hand, they still returned. I’ve taken to editing them and replacing the text with [deleted]. Seems to be working better for now.
Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own database is… inappropriate.
Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.
Sounds like a reddit admin posting on Lemmy spreading misinformation mischief to me! Is meat back on our menu boys?
“Welcome to gaslighting 101! Please take a syllabus from the pile you will [not] find by the door, which will [not] include your instructor’s contact information and office hours.”
Right? Make sure you trust your script? Who’s broken the trust here?
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
Link it or put the email address in your post if you want people to actually do it
This is nothing more than reddit pushing their luck with european data laws, and finally relenting and going “OMG if your stuff wasnt deleted it was your fault, not ours, We promise it’ll totally work this time if you do it again, since we’ve turned off our desperation measures after being threatened by fines by the EU”
The founder of Tildes, Deimos, is a former Reddit backend engineer who believes this is a technical issue rather than a case of Reddit purposefully subverting user intentions:
Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn’t the standard way you’re thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of “cached” listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that’s stored permanently and kept up to date individually.
There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.
All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.
This isn’t really a good excuse though. Right to be forgotten doesn’t me the right to be forgotten except in a cache loop. Sometimes this stuff is time sensitive.
If you added a 5s delay between deletes, they don’t come back. Not a caching issue
Oh, so we all got the same bs copy pasted response at the same time? Mine took over a month, so I’m referring it to ICO.
Oh so it was literally a co-incidence I got it a few minutes after the ICO email?
Apparently so. It’s impressive how it took them 1 month+ to come up with this from their “Legal Team”.
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They’d come back after a few days. I’d remember the first few comments at the top of the list, and they’d get deleted for a day or two then re-appear
Yeah I think people are looking for a conspiracy here when this seems like much more of a technical thing. I think the person that put together one of the scripts even acknowledged that comments being “restored” were because the script was bad and needed a delay of some kind? Because Reddit has safeguards against mass deletion or editing in this manner in the event of trolls or compromised accounts and so on.
Like, comments were never meant to be mass deleted in this fashion, and we don’t actually know exactly how reddit handles the requests on their end, so it makes sense some of them got kicked back automatically.
Reddit is doing more than enough terrible shit we can point to at the moment, don’t need to wind this particular thing up into something it isn’t.
I definitely do not believe any of these stories of comments intentionally restored. Not one piece of concrete proof of it happening has been submitted by anyone. It’s definitely one of those “do your own research” things.
But also, Reddit is responsible for this situation by not having a first party tool for self-service full account deletions. They deserve all these conspiracies hitting them for omitting such an essential feature.
Your comment misses the very important point that nobody who experienced this issue had the clairvoyance to screenshot their cleared profile on Day A to prove that their comments were restored on Day B, C, or D. You’re expecting someone to have explicitly predicted that exact circumstance and deliberately documented it before it ever happened to them. That’s like complaining to your neighbor they they can’t prove the scratch wasn’t already in their car door after they watch you hit it with your own.
These rumors of restored comments have been going on since the start of the reddit blackouts. And they’re largely not happening anymore now that the blackouts are over. It was the blackouts. I checked my comments and deleted new ones almost every day during the blackouts, and whenever they “came back” they were all on a previously-private sub and they “came back” as a bloc. It was private subs having comments be private, then turning public/restricted and “restoring” the previously-inaccessible comments.
Literally just one confirmed case of someone who knew about the “restorations” and took some kind of backup before deleting to prove it happening. Just one case. But there isn’t.
There is absolutely zero chance Reddit would be restoring only certain comments. It would be widespread if they were doing it. They aren’t going to send out one of the professional sitewide mods with admin tools to review deletions and randomly restore only certain comments.
Spot on. Even when they’ve been caught doing things most people thought was shady (e.g., last year’s /r/place manipulation), they tend to not outright deny it, but rather admit it and offer a half-assed explanation and end the conversation at that.
They wouldn’t do something that flagrantly disregards EU/CA privacy laws. If they did it, they’d have have a justification they thought would hold up in court. If they had a justification that held up in court, they’d happily plop it in a comment that’s pinned with a few dozen rewards and ignore any responses after that.
Regarding PowerDeleteSuite it’s because it hasn’t been updated in multiple years and since then (like a year after the last PDS update) Reddit added a cooldown for editing comments. I assume the same exists for deleting.
So when you run the script, occasionally you hit the 5-sec cooldown but the script just keeps moving, thinking everything is okay.
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I just used the tool last week and it deleted 3500 comments successfully. A couple of times it encountered errors, but it stopped and asked what I wanted to do before proceeding.
If it isn’t on purpose, then they have a bug that is restoring comments. My main account is 18 years old. Cake Day is December 2005. I deleted it all, and then I checked from multiple devices to ensure when I logged in it was all gone, and it was. Until it wasn’t. I had about 100 random comments from 2013 to 2022 come back. So I manually deleted them all… again. And then a few days later, suddenly different comments are back. I must have repeated this deletion process 4-5 times. Each time, Reddit’s interface (not a third party script or app) showed me everything was gone… until it wasn’t.
They have some automated recovery going on whether they want to admit it or not.
I’d have to dig around for it, but I remember someone posting on here that reddit was restoring their comments. Then they found out that the comments they claimed reddit restored were actually in a privatized subreddit that opened back up. The script they were running to delete comments couldn’t because it didn’t have access to the comments to delete them.
Reddit is doing a lot of shady shit but I don’t feel like this is one of them.
Okay, now that’s a plausible explanation. Some of those subs may have been private and coming back online over several days. Thanks for the insight.
Site is broken enough it may be both not on purpose and automated. The suggestion to use 3rd party scripts says it all. Aren’t they legally obliged to implement that feauture? And yeah, they recently fucked over 3rd party apps, so it’s even more ridiculous. It would be nice if they have a lot of complaints anyway.
I’ve filed my GDPR request a couple days ago and a shreddit session is due after that. Then another GDPR request to check.
If you’ve got an old account and active account, you’ll need to use your export to iterate through all comments to delete. Any script or app not using the export will be severely limited by the way the API (and this website) return comment listings for users.
Shreddit is rate-limiting and takes the GDPR export file as input. It’s written in Rust with executable binaries available.
Oh, I swear I read through those docs before and didn’t see that feature. Well that’s cool.
I ended up writing my own shitty little script bc I couldn’t find an existing one. Glad it’s out there.
Oh, I swear I read through those docs before and didn’t see that feature. Well that’s cool.
I ended up writing my own shitty little script bc I couldn’t find an existing one. Glad it’s out there.
Mine are staying delete now after initially a few popping back up. What’s more concerning is that I requested my data a few weeks after I deleted my content. I was fully expecting to get empty files but nope ALL of my content. Dating back 10 years is still there! It’s not on my Reddit profile but they clearly kept it somewhere and can recall it whenever they want to. They do not delete the data.
Mine are staying delete now after initially a few popping back up.
Something like this happened for me too, but I believe these were comments that I didn’t yet delete, they just weren’t visible anymore. The older ones started to pop up once there was new space for them after deleting the newer ones. (On your profile not all comments you ever made are visible, only the newest/top/most-controversial ones, depending on what you sort for).
For example in my profile my very first post was visible, but none of the comments I made there. Before deleting the posts I went through each one and deleted my comments that way. There probably still are many comments from me laying around undeleted…
Mine were fairly recent and needed to be deleted several times to stay deleted. Seemed really random.
A blatant lie. They’ve restored some of my posts and comments 4 times.
I hate a lot of the things that reddit has been doing but I still think not all of them are on purpose. I ran into this issue myself before it was widely discussed and my first thought was that it had simply failed to delete some comments or deleted only from some cache.
So far every exampe I’ve seen of this can still be explained by bad engineering and I see no reason to think it is “undeleting” stuff by design, since it seems to happen to very random content that has no general value (like restoring 20 random comments out of 900 that were deleted).
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I got the exact same answer.
I kept all my communications with them and I still have to legally wait untill july 28th to report them to my national competent authority.
Please do so, when you can. This is not just about protesting, deletion can be a matter of personal safety for some people, which is why these laws exist.
When the ICO recieve a complaint they usually send an initial notification email to the data controller to advise that a case officer will be assigned in due course.
Well, unless it relates to a serious or ongoing data breach, which tends to be triaged immediately into an active investigation.
Initial notification letters do usually recommend trying to resolve the issue with the data subject in the interim though.
That probably spooked Reddit into moving your case up the priority list as I imagine they’ve got a pretty substantial backlog of SAR, erasure and objection requests, considering the circumstances.
The response window for most of those rights is 30 calendar days + extensions if applicable, so they could also have just been responding as late as allowed, accounting for aforementioned probable backlog.
Do let us know when the ICO gets back to you though, will be fascinating to hear what they have to say.
I very much doubt they’ll get back. I also put about minimal effort into the report as I really don’t expect anything to come of it
You feel that? You feel it slipping?
When you have to be this hands on with your site, manipulating it, it just means your circling the drain… slowly working your way down.
It’s going to get exhausting putting out these little fires constantly. If only they had a group of people that would happily do the moderation for them… for free.
But why even acknowledge it if you’re just going to lie about it. Cringe.
