TL;DR: even if your delete script confirms a full wipe and your Reddit profile page shows zero comment, there may still be comments left over (that you can find through a search engine and delete manually on Reddit).

Weeks ago, I used redact.dev to delete all my Reddit comments (thousands of them over 10+ years). Redact.dev confirmed a full wipe, and my Profile > Comments page on Reddit confirmed I had no comment left.

Yet, as of today, Google still returns dozens of results for “$myredditusername site:reddit.com”. It’s not just Google’s crawler lagging; when I follow those links, those comments are still visible on the Reddit website, under my username, where I have the ability to manually delete them.

Thankfully, I hadn’t yet nuked my account, because I knew of other users whose deleted comments got reinstated (although that was thought to be caused by the deletion script exceeding the API rate limit; supposedly a different case, as those missed comments would still show in the Profile page).

spez: edited for clarity.

  • @elboyoloco@lemmy.world
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    41 year ago

    Is this something you would be able to share with others when it’s finished. Or put it on Github and people can make suggestions or changes?

    • cassetti
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      41 year ago

      So I’m not a traditional programmer - I don’t use a lot of the common software and such. I have a lot of prior experience using AutoItScript automated software so I’ll probably use that to mimic keystrokes and clicks on my computer screen once I have programmed exact positions for things - it’ll likely be a very specific set of code for my computer.

      But I may create an account on github and share if there’s enough interest lol