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 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.