Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?
Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
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Saw the comments so I thought I would check it out. I’m getting that message as of right now, but I am running a VPN.
I’m getting the same message on mobile Firefox browser
Couldn’t find any explanation on Google so I tried emailing them about this. I got back this lovely gem:
Reddit Support (Reddit Support) Nov 14, 2023, 15:29 PST
Hi there!
Thanks for contacting us! At this time, we are not currently accepting inquiries via email. If you need support with our API or have questions, please submit your request here.
Cheers, Your friends at Reddit
But VPN worked.
- please use something unique and descriptive
Best I can do is “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)”
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0 master race checking in
Glitch or not, fuck reddit
Happened to me as well. Holy shit. Are they trying to nuke web scrappers/robots now? Whatever that is, it’s no good.
I honestly don’t think it has anything to do with that. Scrapers going to scrape. They just want more metadata to identify you and know what propaganda to feed to you based on our online habits. The amount of techniques to identify someone based on JS alone should stir a rebellion, but we just accept it. If you have JS enabled, I can tell you what OS you use, what kind of processor you have, info about your graphics card, monitor resolution, etc. I can even identify you based on how your computer renders graphics. Oh, you’ve disabled JS and opted out of us tracking you based on X, Y, Z… great, now we can identify you based on your privacy settings.
deleted by creator
What is JS?
If you’re on a website and you click a button and something happens other than going to a different page or downloading a file, it’s almost always because of JavaScript (JS)
It’s a programming language that’s built into most browsers that allows for interactive functionality. It’s implemented in a way that typically protects the security of the computer, because it doesn’t have access to the files on the computer or other sensitive things.
Because it can’t directly check a lot of things, browsers often provide a way for people writing websites to check what capabilities they can use.
This means there’s a way to ask "can I do 3d graphics using this particular feature?”.
The intent is so you can let your website handle computers that can’t do what you need, rather than just trying and crashing.Sufficiently determined people can ask for all of the various clues that are provided, and use that to make a pretty unique identifier for the computer, which they can then use to track you around the Internet.
Various ways of fixing this have been proposed, but they all fall short one way or another.
Either by making the web far less interactive than people have come to expect, making tracking easier but at least they’re not misusing the data, or requiring an unrealistic amount of reworking how the entire web works.JavaScript, code that websites can run in your browser when you open them
Javascript
I get this error in the Firefox Developer Edition, can’t acces it from mobile Chrome either…
Edit: Seems to work again
Woah there partner. We noticed we can’t fingerprint you, so we’re not even going to let you in. Please remove your pants, bend over, and try again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/17vbyr8/whoa_there_pardner_error_message/
Text:
Hey all!
It looks like most of you had difficulty reaching the site for about 5 minutes, but those issues should have subsided.
During that time, you may have been shown an incorrect error message that read:
Whoa there, pardner! reddit's awesome and all, but you may have a bit of a problem. Make sure your User-Agent is not empty, is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.To share some additional context on what happened - we pushed a bad code change in our tooling that resulted in a significant amount of users getting blocked without doing anything wrong. So if you happened to see that error message within the last hour, don’t fret! We’ve reverted the code change that caused this error and things should be back to normal very soon if they aren’t already.
“bad code change” describes pretty much every vide change they’ve done over the past 7ish years lol
I also don’t believe them. This was a test.
Or it was just a bug. You know, the thing that happens literally all the time in every codebase in the world
Maybe, but this is exactly the sort of thing I would expect them to do a test run for. They are desperate to stop ad-blocking.
Tests and QA don’t catch everything. From what I can tell this affects a small percent of users, so it’s very likely that it slipped through any testing that was done if that’s the case
RiF just kicked me out. I think reddit is trying to do another sweep to break unofficial apps/plug-ins/etc.
It was still working for you until now? I uninstalled it several weeks ago because I couldn’t get anything. Kinda makes me want to reinstall it and try again.
Infinity works last I checked, it just gets rate-limited really hard, so it’s hard to read comments. You also can’t sign in anymore, so no more interaction.
oh no
anyway
Reddit does a lot to try to track alts, and it still fails. It’s probably impossible to have anything that sophisticated in the fediverse.
All of my alts or any new account are instanta banned because I pissed off the AITA mods by creating an alt AITA_mods_are_all_incels.
They don’t even get the most obvious alts. I used to mod defaults back in the early 2010s on reddit and there were some notorious spammers and trolls, here’s a few notable examples.
One guy in particular chalked up at least 100 alts, there was a whole private subreddit create just to keep track of this person. They talked in a very idiosyncratic way and had a few harassment targets, they’d often go to trans subreddits and find someone to send horrible messages to. Typically when they found a target, they’d create a username for them, like if they found a person who picked the trans name “Jennifer” for instance they’d make a user account “NeverJennifer” then start to send suicide messages, then they’d create alts as they got blocked/suspended etc.
There’s a spammer on reddit called Oliver Gaspirtz/Oliver Markus Malloy/Introvert Comics who used to run a bunch of subs between 30-40 alt accounts, mostly to sell their own content and books, and market themselves as a sort of online guru/politics understander type. They had a persona to sell redpill stuff, another for pro-cop propaganda, another for agreeable liberal takes. They’d have accounts with bios like “I’m a trans woman!” or “I love Ukraine!” for whatever the hot topic at the moment was they wanted to speak on behalf of. Recently they had all their main accounts and subs deleted apparently after harassing co-moderators of other subs. They still run a smaller network of subs though, mostly for self-promotion.
oliver markus malloy is fucking awful and i’m glad to see it was just a grift rather than earnest bad politics
Oh he’s fully earnest in his bad politics and bad history, he just hides inconvenient aspects of his politics depending on the grifts he’s running. Check the communities I moderate on here for some examples. Guy is 24/7/365 posting political spam to reddit. Apart from Olly himself I’m probably the 2nd most responsible for ruining his reputation on reddit, and he’s done everything he can to me including threatening to report me to the FBI for it.
I’ve got Hermit setup for /r/CombatFootage and it’s still loading fine.
I’ve got a custom user agent (‘mobile’) and I block everything that I can.
I would strongly discourage changing your user agent to anything no standard. Doing that makes you extremely easy to spot in a data set
Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
Why hope that? That’s exactly what it is. If anything we should encourage shit like that so the site can crash and burn even more. They deserve nothing. It’s too bad many of the subreddit blackouts only lasted 48 hours, and even worse people gave up and went back to reddit.
Let’s hope they do something really crazy and start requiring ID for all users so more people will get fed up and leave.
I bet it’s a glitch, all of my browsers are blocked on home Internet and on cell data.
