this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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PowerDeleteSuite only gets the comments shown in your profile, which is limited to 1000 comments in each list: New, Top, Hot & Controversial. You need to do a data request which contains CSV files with links to all your comments, then you can feed that into something like shreddit, in order to get everything.
If one was to delete the top 1000 comments, then would the older ones be visible?
I had separate accounts for pretty much every community, so they didn't have too many comments.
No, the list will appear empty.
At least, until reddit restores some of the comments some time later. That's also been happening a few times over.
I wouldn't hurry to delete your account, so that you can supervise this.
Edit: if your accounts have fewer than 1000 comments each then you'd probably see everything on your profile page.
My accounts only had a couple of hundred posts each, so that didn't turn out to be an issue. I haven't yet deleted them, but the edited comments haven't been restored after a week or so.
That's good then. I've had comments popping up in the different lists over time. I either ran PDS again or just manually edited them.
I haven't seen anything restored from the GDPR files I used with shreddit, but then I've only grabbed a handful out of something like 76,000 comments over 12 years.
Consider selling them? 🤷♂️
I'd rather delete them than sell ad space.
Yes. For instance using a tool like Redact you can mass delete ALL requests as it simply pulls a new 1000 comments since it deleted the last 1000.
That's not what I've seen. You run PDS, it deletes each 1,000 comment list, then the list appears empty.
Okay? I don't know what PDS is... so I definitely don't run it. I have absolutely deleted more than 1000 items in one go. The app can run delete the first 1k then pull the next 1k automatically in the same singular button press. If you're app isn't doing it, then I would presume it's poorly coded. Here's a screenshot example of me deleting >2000 items in one go.
https://cloud.saik0.com/s/jcXewsLYQRSHXCT/download/Signal_VUIEMCUac4.png
PDS is PowerDeleteSuite, which is the one most people seem to know about.
There are 4 lists on your profile, New, Top, Hot and Controversial. Each of these has a 1,000 comment limit, so while there may be some overlap you can access well over 1,000 comments from your profile.
For me, the easy ones to find that it missed were my replies underneath some of my older top comments. The top comment was deleted, but replies underneath with <50 karma remained. These were too old for New, not popular enough for Hot or Top and not Controversial, so they didn't appear in the lists.
And Redact is not PDS... It missed no items. I'm still completely unsure why you're bringing up something that nobody was talking about nor has any of the deficiencies that you mentioned.
Redact uses the same method, it only gets the comments from your profile. It has the same deficiency.
The only way to get everything is to use GDPR files, or the Pushshift archive of all of reddit, with links to every comment. At least, that's the case if you have a significant number of comments over many years, if your account isn't as big it can be possible that everything will be on the profile.
Edit: the insidious thing about it all is that you can't easily find the comments it misses, not without the links. Reddit lulls you into a false sense of security by showing you a blank profile, letting you think you've got everything.
And yet... I provided evidence that it worked just fine. And even explained how it could be done.
And I explained how that doesn't mean you've got everything. You're still just getting the comments from your profile, not every comment you've ever made.
You're being hostile now, when all I'm doing is explaining it to you.
As I described 5-6 posts ago.
You claim I'm being hostile... But you're the one droning on and on about a topic that you're clearly not versed on. I've shown you it can be done. And affirmed that I've done it correctly. You're the one that keeps telling me I'm wrong when you have no evidence of it. Wanna talk about hostile? You're the one sticking words in my mouth about a script that wasn't brought up in this thread. You didn't even approach how what I stated couldn't work (because it does work).
Yes, and I explained that it does 1k in New, then 1k in Hot, then Top, then Controversial. In theory, it can get up to 4,000 comments, assuming there are no comments in multiple lists. You got ~2,500.
Maybe that's everything for you, I don't know. However my account was ~76,000 comments and it defintiely missed most of those. I know this because I opened some of my old Top comments before deleting - the script deleted the Top comment, but the replies underneath were left untouched. I've got them now, but I had to use a script that takes GDPR files and scrapes the links from there.
Erm, no. You're the one who came in talking about your favourite tool, unprompted. Literally the first comment I replied to, the second one in this thread, was talking about PowerDeleteSuite.
>One could just mass edit all their comments to contain some garbage with power delete suite.
In any case, which tool/script you use doesn't much matter. They all work the same way on the basic level - even shreddit will just use your profile if you don't feed it something else.
PowerDeleteSuite got 1495 of my comments. Double checked from multiple devices while logged out, it definitely worked
Same experience here with 2k+ comments processed, but I did use one of the forks that waits 5s between each edit/deletion to avoid getting rate-limited
Alternative to using a forked version is to use inbuilt browser dev tools to throttle the connection within a tab. In firefox eg: ctrl+shift+c -> network->throttling. That way it can't flood the server with requests.
BTW: where did you find the fork?
That sounds useful, built-in stuff is nice, although I don't know for what else I could use it lol anyway I didn't know about that, so thanks!
In the early days after people started noticing that some comments weren't being edited/deleted I stumbled upon a comment, don't remember whether on here on on Reddit, that suggested using this fork.
Here's the link https://github.com/pkolyvas/PowerDeleteSuite
Yes, because there will be older comments that aren't in your New list but are in the other lists. However, if you'd saved a link to one of your older Top comments, you'd probably find there are still replies of yours underneath with low but positive karma.