Reddit's gone full dumb with shareable links that look like https://reddit.com/r/comics/s/95j2GYWoSR.

This format seems to come only from their mobile apps, but it's damned useless for parsing in a chat bot. There's no obvious relationship between (any part of) the short "keyword" and the submission/comment ID it links to.

It's possible to handle these by using a Host: www.reddit.com header to skip an unnecessary redirect and then parse the Location header returned by https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/s/95j2GYWoSR for the actual submission/comment ID, but that's pretty obnoxious.

Example 1: Link is repeated unnecessarily for subreddit URLs.

<dgw> https://reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars
<Sopel> [reddit] https://reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars | 4,132,014 subscribers | Created at 2015-10-27 - 02:13:45UTC | When idiots get behind the wheel of a vehicle, shit gets funny.

Example 2: Link isn't given for a user slash-reference.

<dgw> u/keklux
<Sopel> [reddit] keklux | Link: 9 | Comment: 1

Reddit prefers that applications specify a user agent of the format <platform>:<app ID>:<version string> (by u/<Reddit username>).

This plugin uses the default USER_AGENT from sopel.tools.web, which isn't exactly designed for this use case. (It's generally based on some kind of consumer web browser, not an API client. In fact, Reddit's old, now-archived API wiki page says they heavily discourage spoofing popular browsers and might even ban clients for lying about their user agent string.)

Best approach for this plugin is probably to use something like python:sopel-reddit:<plugin_version>, and append (by u/<Reddit username>) conditionally based on an optional config setting.

Should probably remove the default key, eventually, and make both the app ID and username required.

This plugin already allows sopel>=8.0.0.dev0<9, so the current release is Good Enough™ and it's not urgent to make a new version. Eventually™ though, we should repackage everything using pyproject.toml metadata.

Reddit apparently (as of writing; who knows what'll happen in a month or a year) uses a different submission-page layout for anonymous page viewers—neither the classic "old" design nor the oft-maligned redesign they've been working on for the last 5+ years, though the browse views (frontpage, subreddits, etc.) still use the redesign for anon clients.

This logged-out layout comes with alternate clickthrough image URLs for Reddit-hosted images, of the format:
https://i.redd.it/post-slug-with-hyphens-instead-of-underscores-v0-imageID.jpg?s=hexadecimalsignature

Linking one of these images (e.g. https://i.redd.it/my-neighbor-keeps-parking-in-front-of-my-garage-v0-u41q9gy0f5ya1.jpg?s=a902227dd3ec0952a91d214a2d4c086cd283319f) in view of the reddit plugin will (silently) fail to fetch the source post, because the current pattern captures more than just the image ID in the image group:

Presumably the v0 element could be nonzero; maybe they are working on letting people edit/replace images uploaded directly.

While preview.redd.it links from galleries are also affected by this (the s param is added to the other format, resolution, etc. GET args), looking up the source gallery based on the URL of one image from it isn't currently supported, so that isn't (yet) an issue in itself.

If someone who's opted out of the redesign needs to force it for some reason, they can use new.reddit.com to bypass the account preference that makes www.reddit.com use the old site.

Surely the percentage of cases where this would help is vanishingly small, but I very occasionally have to do this since enabling the "use old reddit" preference on my own account, and if the plugin can catch links that are copied under such circumstances, that's probably a good thing.