The allowance was derived from the adaptive trust level with no way to
change it, which made the dashboard's "1 / 2 today" unexplainable and
left no way to slow an account down or push one along.
`dailyLimit` is null by default, keeping today's adaptive behaviour. A
whole number between 1 and 50 overrides it and is enforced verbatim in
either direction — it can raise an account above what it has earned or
hold it below. The trust level keeps being tracked underneath and is
reported as `adaptiveAllowance`, so the earned figure stays visible next
to the override, and clearing the field hands pacing back to the ladder.
Raising the limit above the earned allowance does remove the adaptive
backoff after a bad comment, so the dashboard says exactly that where the
limit is set. It does not touch the pause on two consecutive removals, a
comment the public cannot see, or a captcha challenge: those are safety
stops rather than rate controls and no limit setting can disable them.
Also correct two things the page was saying badly. The allowance is now
labelled "used in last 24h" with the trust level shown as what it earns,
because it is a rolling window and not a midnight reset. And a
per-community cap above the account allowance now states how much of it
is actually reachable — "1 of 10 today" beside an account limit of 2 read
as far more headroom than existed, since caps distribute the allowance
rather than adding to it.
Verified against a local instance: override above and below the earned
allowance, unrelated saves preserving it, clearing it through the UI,
rejection of 0/51/2.5/non-numeric, and a limit failing to clear a pause.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A new Reddit account cannot start chats until Reddit considers it
established, and nothing in the app previously did anything about that.
Account growth posts a small number of AI-written comments per day on
active threads in an operator-chosen list of communities, per account,
so the history that lifts the hold actually accumulates.
Growth is account-scoped rather than part of the shared outreach funnel:
karma, comment history and pacing all belong to one identity. It runs as
the lowest-priority work in the account runtime, after inbound replies,
and deliberately keeps running while an account is held out of outbound
messaging.
Comments publish without operator review, so the guards are the feature:
- Both screening stages fail closed. A deterministic gate rejects links,
contact solicitation, user tags, filler and any text that reveals the
generator; the classifier must actively approve with confidence, and
an outage stalls growth rather than publishing unreviewed text.
- Thread text reaches the model only as fenced untrusted data, since
Reddit posts do contain instructions aimed at automated readers.
- The daily allowance is adaptive, not configured: it starts at two per
day and rises only while comments survive and earn upvotes.
- Posted comments are swept at ~15m/2h/24h with one batched info.json
request, plus a single signed-out probe that detects a comment the
public cannot see. Two consecutive removals, an invisible comment, or
a captcha challenge pauses the account until an operator clears it. A
failed probe never pauses anything.
- One comment per thread across every owned account, enforced by a
unique index, because two of our accounts on one post is the easiest
pattern to correlate.
- A comment interrupted mid-post is abandoned, never retried: we cannot
know whether the write landed and a duplicate cannot be withdrawn.
- Reddit's refusals are authoritative — a ban disables that community
for that account, a throttle backs off at the scope Reddit named, and
a signed-out response invalidates the session.
Comments are submitted through the account's own browser session against
the old.reddit form endpoint, which returns machine-readable error codes
and needs no credentials beyond the cookies already imported.
API-first: /api/growth exposes state, settings, the community list and
pause/resume, all verified against a local instance. Route responses are
parsed with the shared contracts in tests so the server-side mirror
cannot drift from what the dashboard expects.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Missing conversations: recipient Reddit accounts that are deleted or suspended
left conversations unaccounted for. A new RecipientAccountStatusService polls
Reddit for the users behind cached conversations and records their account
status durably, with progressive backfill and delta-media fixes in ChatService
so history and images are no longer dropped mid-sync.
Media: attachMedia now surfaces download failures as MediaAttachmentError so the
sync cursor can be retried instead of silently losing an image, recognizes image
bytes when Matrix returns a generic content type, and keeps separate gallery
occurrences when the same asset appears in more than one event.
Manual inbox tab: the conversations list now carries the reply-loop status, so
the inbox can separate conversations the operator is driving by hand from the
ones automation is still handling. A Manual filter pill and a per-row chip
explain why each conversation was handed over.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Split monolithic chat service into modular structure with Matrix client
support, extract web server into per-resource route modules, introduce
bootstrap/main-loop separation, and add comprehensive vitest coverage
across services, repositories, and utilities. Adds project docs and
CLAUDE.md agent instructions.
Jamie Brunton
jjbrunton