Shreddit

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

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.

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.

Pip Installation

pip install -U shreddit will install the package and its dependencies, and it will add a shreddit command line utility to your PATH. This is typically either run in a virtualenv or using administrative privileges for global installation.

Manual Installation

1. Clone the shreddit repository to a directory.
2. From the directory, run pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Run python setup.py install to install the package and the shreddit command line utility. This is typically either run in a virtualenv or using administrative privileges for global installation.

Usage

After installing the shreddit command line utility, the first step is setting up the tool's configuration file. Simply typing shreddit will print a message with an example config. Copy the message from --- onwards and save it as shreddit.yml. Now, the tool may be used by simply typing shreddit from this directory. Alternatively, if you named the configuration file something different such as config.yml, you may use it with shreddit -c config.yml.

Automating

The easiest way to automate this tool after the first run is by using the cron utility. Run crontab -e to edit your user's crontab settings.

Examples:

• 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>

Command Line Options

$ shreddit --help
usage: shreddit [-h] [-c CONFIG] [-p PRAW] [-t]

Command-line frontend to the shreddit library.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
                        Config file to use instead of the default shreddit.yml
  -p PRAW, --praw PRAW  PRAW config (if not ./praw.ini)
  -t, --test-oauth      Perform OAuth test and exit

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. Follow the pip installation instructions.
3. Open a new command prompt and verify that the shreddit command works before moving on to the usage section.

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.