Reddit answers a throttled client with a large HTML 403 interstitial. To
the comment client that was indistinguishable from a logged-out session:
the body would not parse, so no modhash was found, so it reported
"Reddit did not return a modhash for this session" and returned
session-invalid — which calls auth.invalidate() and so could disrupt
outreach and chat for an account whose session was perfectly healthy.
That matches what prod is doing. u/Saira_Makimad posted successfully 25
seconds after boot and every later attempt failed with that message,
which is the shape of Reddit starting to throttle rather than a session
going bad.
A response is now only treated as a verdict about the session when it is
actually JSON. Non-JSON, at any status, is Reddit refusing to serve us
and stays retryable. A genuine JSON 403, or JSON with no modhash, still
invalidates as before.
When Reddit does report a signed-out session, the log and the recorded
reason now name the cookies visible to the write origin — names and
domains only, never values. Cookies scoped to www.reddit.com rather than
.reddit.com would produce exactly this symptom, and this makes that
answerable from the logs instead of by guesswork.
Also clarify the allowance in the dashboard. It is derived from the trust
level rather than typed in, and it is a rolling 24-hour window, neither
of which the page said. A per-community cap above the account allowance
now says how much of it is actually reachable, because "1 of 10 today"
next to an account limit of 2 reads as far more headroom than exists.
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>
Stopping the bot previously halted conversation syncing too. On the
multi-account path the run-flag check sat above both the reply-sync and
response-check branches, so a stop left only MediaSyncService's coarse
30-minute chat refresh. The legacy single-account path did the opposite
and kept syncing while stopped — one boolean meaning two things.
Replace the boolean with an explicit three-way mode:
running — discover, screen, send, automate replies
scan — refresh chats, detect replies, check responses; send nothing
and discover nothing; actionable replies surface as backlog
stopped — everything halts, including background media sync
scan differs from browser.dryRun, which still discovers and pays for AI
screening before suppressing the send.
The mode persists in runtime_state.bot_mode; a migration backfills it
from bot_running, and rows written by an older build still read
correctly. Both loops now gate on the mode, the account runtime loop
reconciles background media sync on transitions only, and the dashboard
and agent API expose all three states.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
New accounts cannot start chats until Reddit considers them established.
Until now the bot would burn a candidate on every invitation Reddit was
always going to reject, with nothing in the dashboard explaining why the
account looked idle.
Two signals feed the verdict. A periodic profile check reads the
account's own age, karma and email verification from about.json and
compares them against configurable thresholds — that is what flags a
brand new account before it wastes anything. A rejected invitation is
authoritative: Reddit has told us directly, so the account is held out of
sending with a backoff that doubles per rejection, and a delivered
invitation clears the flag outright.
An unestablished account takes no new posts (canAcceptPost), raises an
attention item, reports an `unestablished` sending state, and shows its
age/karma evidence on the Accounts page. An unchecked account is always
allowed through, so a first run is never blocked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The `conversations` section was only reachable by editing config.yaml, which
production ignores: config is database-backed and the YAML is imported once,
when the database has not yet been seeded. `AdvancedConfigSchema` is also a
strict object, so a PUT carrying the section was rejected outright.
- Add `conversations` to the advanced config schema and payload, so it appears
in the dashboard's advanced JSON editor and survives a save.
- Apply the edited section field by field rather than replacing the objects,
and read the flags through to the live config from the account runtime, so a
save applies to a running account without a restart.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Seller detection on replies was a case-insensitive substring match over the
configured keyword list, and every hit landed in `human-required` alongside
genuine prospects that need a person. Off-platform pushes were only checked
for r4r policy modes, as were the under-18 signals.
Three layers now:
- New `off-platform-signals` module matches on normalized text (unicode
folding, zero-width stripping, leet mapping, separator removal), so
`0nlyf4ns`, `t3l3gr4m` and `t e l e g r a m` are caught. Ambiguous terms
need context: `snap` on its own stays a photo request, never a kill.
- New terminal `killed` automation status. It records the evidence, sets the
durable seller flag, supersedes the pending claim, and resolves triage to
`done`, so killed conversations leave every actionable queue. Off-platform
kills are independent of `reddit.filterSellers`.
- Optional AI screening of inbound replies behind
`conversations.aiReplyScreening` (off by default). Runs only after the
deterministic gates pass, memoizes per inbound event, and fails open.
Under-18 and in-person/contact-detail signals now apply to every policy mode
rather than r4r only, and remain human handoffs rather than kills.
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>
Conversations were hard to manage because "unread" came straight from
Matrix's notification_count, and nothing in the app ever sends a read
receipt — so opening a conversation in the dashboard could never clear it
and the unread set only ever grew. The list also collapsed three
orthogonal facts into one word, labelling "they spoke last and we have
not replied" as "Up to date".
Read state is now ours:
- conversation_read_state table (migration 19) plus
ConversationReadStateRepository, kept separate from conversation_states
so a read write can never be lost to mergeConversationState. The
watermark is monotonic, so a stale poll cannot resurrect an unread
badge.
- hasUnreadInbound and needsReply are derived server-side and returned on
every conversation. Matrix's `unread` stays on the contract but the
dashboard no longer reads it.
- POST /conversations/{id}/read|unread|status and
POST /conversations/bulk-read, with optimistic cache updates.
Inbox rework:
- List rows are a real grid (checkbox, open button, chip strip) instead of
a full-bleed absolute overlay button, which previously forced a
pointer-events escape hatch for anything interactive in a row. Rows use
aria-current rather than aria-pressed. Not a listbox: options must not
contain interactive descendants.
- Counted filter pills replace the select, independent state chips replace
the collapsed status word, plus a sort control (including oldest
unanswered), a per-account filter, age-coloured timestamps, and an
explicit count of rows hidden by the seller filter.
- Keyboard: j/k/arrows, Enter, u, e, / and Escape. Shortcuts yield to any
open dialog so Escape dismisses the modal, not the conversation behind
it. Multi-select with bulk mark-read and mark-done.
- Detail panel: auto-mark-read on open, a "New messages" divider pinned at
mount (deriving it from the live watermark made it vanish a second after
opening), triage actions in the header, the automation banner moved out
of the composer, day dividers with time-only stamps, and a flex column
so history scrolls in its own region instead of painting over the
composer.
- Row order freezes while a conversation is open, with a "N new — refresh"
pill, so a background poll cannot reorder rows mid-triage.
Two database tests rewound user_version by an offset from the latest
version, which silently re-targets a different migration whenever one is
appended. They now pin absolute versions.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Expired Matrix bearers no longer pause an account until a new extension
dump is uploaded. BrowserMatrixTokenRefresher loads chat.reddit.com in
the account's persistent browser profile (whose Reddit cookies stay
valid), lifts the fresh bearer off the first authenticated Matrix
request, verifies it via whoami, swaps it into the live MatrixClient
and persists it to the account row.
Wired into the per-account runtime at boot verification, the auth-gate
authenticator, and ChatService's 401 retry path. A dump is now only
needed when the Reddit cookies themselves no longer authenticate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
jjbrunton
