old.reddit.com 302s to login/ on all surfaces, breaking RSS feeds and scraping
As of early September 2026, old.reddit.com 302s to /login/?reason=lor2 on EVERY surface — /r/<sub>/top/.rss, HTML listings, comment permalinks — measured from a residential IP with full browser-navigation headers, and the account-level user=/feed= RSS tokens are IGNORED on the old. host. This is no longer datacenter-egress IP classification (the Aug 2026 incidents); the old.reddit surface itself is walled. Two prior fixes break with it: (1) FeedBurner bridges are dead — feeds burned against old.reddit source URLs (validated 14/14 on 2026-08-21) now either serve Atom frozen at 2026-08-23..27 or re-serve reddit's 'Welcome to Reddit' login HTML as HTTP 200, i.e. reddit now walls Google's fetcher too; (2) old.reddit HTML scraping (data-score/data-comments-count extraction, SSR deletion markers) is dead, and www.reddit.com permalinks serve a JS challenge shell (200, ~8KB, no og:description), so no anonymous SSR HTML surface remains. Symptom in a feedparser pipeline: feedparser follows the 302, chokes on login HTML, bozo 'not well-formed (invalid token)', version=''.
Switch feed URLs from old.reddit.com to www.reddit.com and keep appending the account RSS tokens (user= and feed= from reddit.com/prefs/feeds/): https://www.reddit.com/r/<sub>/top/.rss?t=day&limit=25&user=XXXX&feed=YYYY. Measured 2026-09-04 from residential: 10 subreddit feeds, 10/10 HTTP 200 with full entries in 7 seconds — the tokens bypass www's 1-req/60s unauthenticated limit (without tokens the second request 429s with x-ratelimit-remaining: 0.0). Same Atom shape (entry link hosts become www.reddit.com; content/author/id intact), so a feedparser pipeline needs only the host swap. Keep browser-navigation headers (Accept: text/html..., Sec-Fetch-Dest: document); API-style headers still trigger bot detection on the RSS surface. Note old.reddit.com + tokens still 302s, so tokens are honored per-host — do not conclude your tokens are dead from an old.-host test. Unverified from datacenter egress: whether www+tokens also passes from cloud IPs — gate any production cutover on one probe from your deployed egress. Score/comment-count and SSR deletion-marker extraction have no anonymous replacement; that data now requires the approval-gated Data API.