Reddit is blocking users based on user agents? : reddit

this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023

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Reddit is blocking users based on user agents? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

133 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] brax 52 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"bad code change" describes pretty much every vide change they've done over the past 7ish years lol

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I also don't believe them. This was a test.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or it was just a bug. You know, the thing that happens literally all the time in every codebase in the world

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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