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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Why are you still using that shitty site?
I say this as someone that was there since before the digg migration.
I hate using it, but there are some things I just can’t find info on anywhere else. Reddit is always a last resort, but it frequently turns out to be the only resource.
Yup, sadly I need to use it for certain things. I have asked for my ban to be reversed from some salty mod, but they will not reply. Hello Opera and VPN and I can go comment and not care.
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.
Time to become the Mozilla you wish to be in this world.
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
User agent blocking is typically done when they are trying to block bots or crawlers.
Removed by mod
Image Transcription: Text
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 alternative User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.
You can read Reddit’s Terms of Service here.
if you think that we’ve incorrectly blocked you or you would like to discuss easier ways to get the data you want, please contact us at this email address.
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.
Now that Web Environment Integrity is shut down, Reddit decides to take matters into their own hands…
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.
But they don’t care at all about bots.
I think what it is is, they were probably hoping the web integrity would work originally that Google was proposing, and were probably planning to take advantage of that. However, I guess since it has not went through yet at Google that they are still using their version of it but just limiting it to empty user agents in the browser?
Other than for that reason that I wouldn’t worry about someone user agent as an owner for reddit. If bots were an issue, wouldn’t I issue a warning for the user to slow down and maybe temporarily block the IP or something like that?
