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!
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.
