Developing: Trouble with /r/undelete bot.

65  2013-11-19 by 4211315

The bot that runs /r/undelete is down. So far the user in charge of it does not know why.

This means, effectively, that /r/undelete is currently not functioning.

/u/FrontPageWatch, the badass who runs /r/undelete, has posted this in his subreddit, a notice that his bot (which makes all the posts) is down for unknown reasons. Looks like the similar bot in /r/longtail is also out of commission.

For those who don't know, /r/undelete is the catch-all for posts that get deleted from reddit's top 100. Recently it has gained a lot of attention as dissatisfaction with reddit's moderation system is mounting.

/u/FrontPageWatch says "Really hope it wasn't the admins....."

2 hours later. It is still down. No comment yet from the mod over there.

5 hours later: It has now been 24 hours since reddit had /r/undelete.

11 comments

We absolutely need r/undelete. It's a public service.

/r/undelete


This is an automated bot. For reporting problems, contact /u/WinneonSword. If this bot fixes a link that is the same as the subreddit, ignore it. /u/WinneonSword is working on this.

LinkFixerBotSnr, if only your brother UncensorshipFixerBot was here...

Please tell your creator to create a more productive bot army.

Wow, I've seen it all now. Taking out the bot that is the watchdog of the frontpage...

Shameful reddit, shameful.

Wow..... Let's hope it gets back up & running soon, since I'm sure we'll be missing some posts that get removed.

/r/ModerationLog and my other bot at /r/POLITIC are still working fine.

It may be that the author was going above the API request limits and they disabled the bot by user agent?

Looks like the undelete bot is back in action now.

Did you ever figure out why your bots were temporarily shadow-banned a couple months ago? Was it that API thing?

the bots inadvertently reposted some personal information which is against the rules of reddit. Some other bots got caught up in that as well. I sorted it out with the admins, and now have some human admins at /r/politic to help deal with that sort of situation.

I've been affected by the request limit as well, but they never shut my bot down; just asked that I throttle it back some. In general the admins have been pretty cooperative and understanding; they just don't want my bot to PM users or monitor non-political subreddits.

Bot authors are required to identify their bot in the HTTP user agent string, so it would be possible for the admins to block a specific bot in this manner without necessarily banning the account.

Anything we can do to help?

Well, let's discuss how to fix this. I'm the least tech savy person I know, so I can only offer the idea that we get this issue to the front page.