Shreddit

User Login deprecation

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 if you intend to use this program in the future.

Description

Shreddit is a Python command line program which will take a user's post history on the website Reddit, and 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!

It allows you to maintain your normal reddit account while having your history scrubbed after a certain amount of time.

Installation (Click here for Windows instructions)

1. Clone the repository
2. Run python setup.py install. Usually this is run in the context of a virtualenv or with administrative permissions for system-wide installation. virtual environment)
3. Copy shreddit.yml.example to shreddit.yml and edit it to your liking.
   • Make sure you specify your credentials in the file.
   • See the OAuth2 instructions if you don't want to use username-password based authentication.

• 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 && shreddit See below for more.
• Adding your password to the praw.ini and adding the additional output line can provide extra debugging help.

Cron examples

• Run crontab -e to edit your cron file. If you have access to something like vixie-cron then each user can have their own personal cron job!

• Run every hour on the hour 0 * * * * shreddit -c <full path to shreddit.yml>

• Run at 3am every morning 0 3 * * * shreddit -c <full path to shreddit.yml>

• Run once a month on the 1st of the month 0 0 1 * * shreddit -c <full path to shreddit.yml>

If virtualenv was used, be sure to add source /full/path/to/venv/bin/activate && before the command. For example:

0 * * * * source /full/path/to/venv/bin/activate && shreddit -c <full path to shreddit.yml>

For Windows users

1. Make sure you have Python installed. Click here for the Python download page.
   • Note: Install either python 2.x or python 3.x, not both.
2. Clone the repository (or download and extract the zip file)
3. Open command prompt to the folder with the zip file (Shreddit-master.zip), and type pip install -U Shreddit-master.zip
4. Open shreddit.yml.example in the zip edit it to your liking, and rename the file to shreddit.yml.
   • Make sure you specify credentials in the file.
   • See the OAuth2 instructions if you don't want to use username-password based authentication.
5. Type shreddit in the open command prompt window to run the program.

OAuth2 Instructions

1. Visit: https://www.reddit.com/prefs/apps
2. Click on 'Create app'.
   • Fill in the name and select the 'script' option
   • Under "redirect uri" put http://127.0.0.1:65010
3. Copy from or rename praw.ini.example to praw.ini and open it. Enter the values from the Reddit page.
   • oauth_client_id = { The ID displayed next to the icon thingy (under "personal use script") }
   • oauth_client_secret = { The secret }
   • oauth_redirect_uri = http://127.0.0.1:65010
   • Save the file.
4. Run python get_secret.py in the command prompt.
5. Your browser will open to a page on Reddit listing requested permissions.
6. Click 'Allow'.

Caveats

• Certain limitations in the Reddit API and the PRAW library make it difficult to delete more than 1,000 comments. While deleting >1000 comments is planned, it is necessary right now to rerun the program until they are all deleted.

• 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.