reddit-search VS Pushshift API

When I quit reddit (over irritation at being banned from too many subreddits for not aligning properly with the hive mind), I used this tool to extract and save all my comments locally before manually deleting the lot:

https://github.com/camas/reddit-search

...aaand Github has disabled the repository for 'Terms of Service' violations. Go figure, maybe there's a mirror somewhere.

The GitHub has been officially disabled again for ToS violations.

RIP https://github.com/camas/reddit-search/issues/new

#1: Camas reddit-search "has been disabled by GitHub Staff due to a violation of GitHub's Terms of Service." | 130 comments #2: What happened to removeddit.com? #3: Online Removal Request form for removal requests. Please put your removal request here where it can be processed more quickly.

From the repository (https://github.com/camas/reddit-search):

Access to this repository has been disabled by GitHub Staff due to a violation of GitHub's Terms of Service.

Actually, I was referring to the notice posted right on the repo:

Man I'm almost smart enough to do all that... I got to this website and couldn't figure out the rest. I will keep trying. Is this what hacking feels like? Glad people have a better memory than I do!

As an average user, you may not notice much difference in your browsing experience. For those using external moderation or accessibility tools, though Reddit has announced that tools/apps focusing on accessibility and moderation will not be negatively affected by the pricing changes, many of these tools are already provided by third-party apps that will be affected. Sites such as Unddit (for tracking post/comment edit history), which run on APIs like Pushshift, that are not quite covered under the vague criteria of being “legal, non-commercial, and helpful to mods,” are likely to no longer work as intended going forward.

Pushshift also supports other query parameters, such as specifying a time range using 'before' and 'after' or sorting the results by 'score', 'num_comments', etc. You can find the full list of query parameters in the Pushshift documentation: https://github.com/pushshift/api

The thing to look at is Pusshift: https://github.com/pushshift/api

Rule 3 says I can't link directly, but I can link to this. Pushshift is absolutely amazing for things like this. Just enter a url like http://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/comment?q="\[START OF COMMENT TEXT]" and you should be able to find it quite easily.

In the meantime, the third party tool Pushshift can accomplish pretty much the same thing, just with some effort. It's a database of (almost) every comment and submission on Reddit, and you can filter the results based on things like the author and keywords in the body. You can write the queries yourself, but it's much easier to just use a webpage designed to make it easy. For example, if you wanted to find old KITTY pings, you could just enter "groupbot" in the author field, and "KITTY" in the "search term" of https://camas.unddit.com/. The result is this:

It has, https://github.com/pushshift/api code behind the api server here.