Unedit and Undelete for Reddit

Creates a link next to edited and deleted Reddit comments and submissions to show the original post from before it was edited/removed.

The unedited comment will be displayed inline, right below the current comment or submission's text.

This script is compatible with both Reddit's Redesign and Old Reddit.

The Pushshift Reddit API is used for fetching the comments as they will be archived soon after they have been posted.

How to use

Installation

As a Userscript

This script can be installed on most browsers using userscript browser extensions such as Violentmonkey, Tampermonkey, among others using the green button on Greasy Fork.

Alternatively, you may copy the contents of script.js into a new script using any userscript browser extension.

As a Chrome Extension

Install from the Chrome Web Store, or alternatively, download or clone this repository, enable "Developer mode" at chrome://extensions/, and load the folder unpacked.

As a Firefox Addon

Install from Mozilla Add-ons, or alternatively, follow these steps to build and install from the source:

To sign the extension for use in Firefox, you will need credentials from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/api/key/. Create a copy of .env.example named .env and replace the placeholders with your API key and secret. Install web-ext with npm install -g web-ext and sign the extension with make sign-firefox. The generated extension will appear as a .xpi file in ./web-ext-artifacts. This file can be opened in Firefox to install the add-on.

Known issues

The following are known limitations that cannot be fixed:

• The fetched comment may occasionally be the edited version instead of the original. This is because the Pushshift archive may take more time to archive the comment than it took the user to edit the comment, therefore causing Pushshift to archive the edited version and not the original. Additionally, comments that are several years old may also show the edited version since the original versions of comments edited before the first archival will not appear in Pushshift.
• Comments that were posted within the past few minutes may occasionally not be found since Pushshift can take some time to archive all comments.
• Comments in private subreddits will not be found as they are not able to be archived by Pushshift.
• Comments deleted by Reddit's spam filter will not be found as the text is never available for Pushshift to archive.