Reddit intends to disable username-password based authentication to access its APIs in the near future. You can specify your username and password in the `shreddit.yml` or the `praw.ini` to make it work **FOR NOW**. But consider looking at the [OAuth2 instructions](#oauth2-instructions) if you intend to use this program in the future.
Shreddit is a Python command line program which will take a user's post history on the website [Reddit](http://reddit.com) and, after having the user edit a config file, will systematically go through the user's history deleting one post/submission at a time until only those whitelisted remain.
**Note:** When it became known that post edits were *not* saved but post deletions *were* saved, code was added to edit your post prior to deletion. In fact you can actually turn off deletion all together and just have lorem ipsum (or a message about Shreddit) but this will increase how long it takes the script to run as it will be going over all of your messages every run! This should be considered the most secure option with current information.
The way I personally install Shreddit is via a handy tool called `virtualenv` which may come with your package manager or may be a part of your Python package in your distro (have a search if you can't find it). Both Python 2 and 3 are supported.
- The script *does* work with Python versions 2 and 3 but people often get in a mess with pip versions, python versions and virtulenv versions. Make sure that your Python/pip/virtualenv are all the same version. If you ran the above code it *should* work as stated.
- If in doubt try running `python3` instead of just `python` - the same goes for `pip3` and `virtualenv3` (exchange for 2 if you wish, though I advise using version 2).
- It's useful to have it run as an event, you can set this up as you like but I suggest `cron` via `crontab -e` and adding a line such as `@hourly cd $HOME/Shreddit && source bin/activate && python shreddit.py -c YOUR_CONFIG_FILE.cfg`. See below for more.
- Adding your password to the praw.ini and adding the additional output line can provide extra debugging help.
If for some reason you get an error saying `source: not found` in your logs, change `source` to `.`. The source command would become `. bin/activate`. This is caused by your cron jobs running in shell, not bash, and the source command is a dot.
- Only your previous 1,000 comments are accessible on Reddit, so good luck deleting the others. There may be ways to hack around this via iterating using sorting by top/best/controversial/new but for now I am unsure. I believe it best to set the script settings and run it as a cron job and then it won't be a problem unless you post *a lot*. I do, however, think that it may be a caching issue and perhaps after a certain time period your post history would, once again, become available as a block of 1,000. So you needn't despair yet!
- We are relying on Reddit admin words that they do not store edits, deleted posts are still stored in the database they are merely inaccessible to the public.
