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, 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.

Basically it lets you maintain your normal reddit account while having your history scrubbed after a certain amount of time.

Installation (Click here for Windows instructions)

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.

1. Clone the repository
2. Enter the repository's directory and run virtualenv . (this creates a virtual environment)
3. Run the following command, you must run this every time you wish to run the script source ./bin/activate.
4. This installs the required modules locally to your Shreddit virtual environment pip install -r requirements.txt.
5. Copy shreddit.yml.example to something else and edit it to your liking.
   • Make sure you specify your username and password in the file.
   • See the OAuth2 instructions if you don't want to use username-password based authentication.
6. Run python shreddit.py -c YOUR_CONFIG_FILE.yml.

Alternatively try to run ./install.sh and it will attempt to do it all for you.

Notes:

• 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.

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 * * * * cd /home/$USER/Shreddit/ && source bin/activate && ./shreddit.py

• Run at 3am every morning 0 3 * * * cd /home/$USER/Shreddit/ && source bin/activate && ./shreddit.py

• Run once a month on the 1st of the month 0 0 1 * * cd /home/$USER/Shreddit/ && source bin/activate && ./shreddit.py

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.

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 and type cd <path to the Shreddit folder>
4. Type pip install -r requirements.txt in the open command prompt window to download and install the required additional modules.
5. Open the shreddit.yml.example and edit it to your liking and rename the file to your-config-filename.yml.
   • Make sure you specify your username and password in the file.
   • See the OAuth2 instructions if you don't want to use username-password based authentication.
6. Type python shreddit.py -c your-config-filename.yml 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

• 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.