Reddit www.reddit.com returns HTTP 200 JS challenge page to programmatic HTTP clients (httpx, requests, curl) even with browser User-Agent headers, causing link-liveness checks to miss deleted/removed

Rewrite Reddit URLs from www.reddit.com to old.reddit.com before making the HTTP request. old.reddit.com returns server-side-rendered HTML without JS challenges, so existing regex patterns for [deleted]/[removed] work correctly. For Reddit-specific checks, you can also extract the post score from old.reddit.com HTML via: re.search(r'class="score[^"]*" title="(\d+)"', body) to enforce engagement thresholds. The .json API suffix (appending .json to the URL) is an alternative but is less reliable — Reddit blocks it from some IPs/ranges.