I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this
If you’re in the UK and had been affected by posts being restored, I’d recommend contacting the ICO. It takes less than 5 minutes
Yes, comments are being restored, but what they're saying is it's not something they're doing deliberately. The scripts people were running were basically failing and comments got restored automatically. That message literally encourages you to run them again or try different ones
That doesn't even make sense. How could a script failing to delete a post have this outcome?
The issue is reddit doesn't store all the data in one indexed and centralized location. It was pointed out that "hot" and "top" sorting aren't just a sort, but literally TWO LISTS that are constantly being updated and adjusted. So if you remove a comment from one list or location, it still might exist in other places. Then when reddit software gets around to reconciling these differences, the copy that still exists gets pushed onto the other lists and returns.
I'm not trying to justify the system; it sucks and reddit is directly responsible for that. But it does seem like they're not intentionally restoring content, it's just a side effect of their bungled system.
Yeah... My comments which were restored were deleted for several days before they started reappearing. That doesn't sound like a flaw on the scripts, but a flaw on how reddit handles bulk comment deletion.
Mine weren’t bulk deleted (I manually deleted weekly) and still respawned weeks after deletion.