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>
Growth could never post. Its page is opened with newPage() and was never
navigated, so it sat on about:blank, whose opaque origin cannot fetch
Reddit at all — production logged "Failed to read the Reddit session
modhash: TypeError: Failed to fetch" on every attempt. Confirmed against
real network: the same fetch throws from about:blank and succeeds from
https://old.reddit.com.
The transport now parks the page on that origin before any request, and
re-parks it if the page wanders elsewhere. Being same-origin is also what
sends the session cookies, so the authenticated info.json lookup moved to
the same host rather than www; the signed-out visibility probe stays on
www because it runs from Node, where CORS does not apply.
The unit tests could not catch this: they stub the transport, and the
earlier browser check navigated the page by hand in the harness — the
production path was the one place that never did. The page fake now
starts on about:blank like the real thing and asserts the navigation.
Also stop a transport failure from invalidating the account session. A
modhash lookup that could not reach Reddit returned session-invalid,
which calls auth.invalidate() and so would disrupt outreach and chat for
that account over a network blip. Only Reddit actually reporting a
signed-out session (HTTP 401/403, or a response with no modhash) does
that now; anything else is retryable.
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>
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>
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>
Introduces a tone-profile system that lets the processor adapt outgoing
message style per-subreddit (and per-flair) instead of using one tone
for everything. Profiles act as a "tone mic" layered after the base
prompt and strategy override, so they shape voice without redefining
the whole message.
- src/config/tone-profiles.ts defines the catalog (default, dominant,
submissive, playful, direct, ...) and a resolveTone() helper that
falls back to the default profile for unknown keys.
- config.yaml maps subreddits to tone keys; the schema in
src/config/index.ts validates it.
- src/services/processor.ts threads the resolved tone into the prompt
build, picking based on subreddit and optional link flair.
- src/reddit/api.ts adds link_flair_text to RedditPost so the
processor can use it for tone selection.
- src/ai/openrouter.ts accepts and forwards the tone-shaped prompt.
- public/index.html surfaces the active tone in the dashboard.
- Tests cover the catalog, config validation, and processor integration.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <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.
Add gitignore rules for browser session data, SQLite databases,
media downloads, and build artifacts. Remove previously tracked
runtime files from the repository.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
jjbrunton