Logged-out Old Reddit access is “significant source of abusive scraping."

Reddit will start requiring people to be logged into Reddit to use old.reddit.com.

The new requirement will take effect “over the next month,” a Reddit employee going by the username boat-botany announced on the social media platform today. The person claimed that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “tighten how automated systems access Reddit.”

The Reddit employee wrote:

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.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    13·
    5 hours ago

    It’s the mlmym frontend, rather than just a theme.

    Some instances run it locally as an alternate at a different URL; lemmy.world is one such.

    • mschae@discuss.mschae23.deEnglish
      12·
      4 hours ago

      Keep in mind that rystaf/mlmym has been last updated years ago. old.lemmy.world uses the FHF’s fork, which has had a few fixes made to it.

      self promotion

      I actually have a fork of that fork at mschae23/mlmym which is significantly different (in terms of new features and bugfixes) from the others by now. In fact, this is what’s deployed by your instance at old.lemmy.today :)

      Though it unfortunately seems to be having issues with rate limits at the moment.

    • Dymonika@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Wow, I only knew of the p. subdomain, haha. This is great, thanks! That’s hilarious that they copied the same subdomain, even… I wonder how to tell if an instance supports it apart from just blindly trying.

      I love how the GitHub entry just calls it “a familiar desktop experience” and nothing more. Perfect. 👌🏻

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        I wonder how to tell if an instance supports it apart from just blindly trying.

        They don’t have to stick it at the same prefix, so there’s no reliable way to check by just guessing the name.

        It looks like p.lemmy.world is running the Photon frontend. On lemmy.today, we have it at photon.lemmy.today.

        Lemmy.today lists the alternate frontends in the instance sidebar, but there’s no requirement for an instance to do that.