Finding every comment that's ever featured on Reddit's Bestof
March 27, 2014 2:23 AM   Subscribe

I like reading Reddit's /bestof comments and have been following for a while. However, the /bestof page only keeps a month or so of history. Is there a way to find every comment that's ever been bestof'd?
posted by guy72277 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Have you thought about subscribing to r/bestof's RSS feed?
Usually when I subscribe to a feed, I can keep hitting "more" or whatever term your reader is using and go back a great deal farther than the default number they choose to show.
posted by John Kennedy Toole Box at 3:54 AM on March 27, 2014


Also, The Internet Archive might be the way to go.
Here's Best Of's page.
posted by John Kennedy Toole Box at 4:03 AM on March 27, 2014


Sorting by best of all time doesn't work?

(This is usually how I find the disco ball thread when I need to.)
posted by Punctual at 4:15 AM on March 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Punctual is right, if you choose to sort by "Top" and then choose links from "all time" you get this page, which goes back as far as the posts go.
posted by Partial Law at 6:01 AM on March 27, 2014


Response by poster: Partial and Punctual, I just tried that best of all time page and it only shows 1000 comments - (this is the penultimate page) which is great but only a fraction what's been bestof'd, I'd imagine.

I'll check out the internet archive - good idea JKTBox . Bestof holds about a month's worth and the archive is updated monthly I think So it might be pretty easy to do. I'll also look into the rss thing, but I read text only internet (heavy on the element hider/adblock, no colours, no pictures and autopager to skim through tonnes of pages) and I'm not sure if an RSS reader will let me do that.

Thanks for suggestions - Internet archive looks most promising if its not too complicated.
posted by guy72277 at 6:29 AM on March 27, 2014


Have you tried the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser add-on? This should enable the "Neverending Reddit" option and let you scroll down a good long while.
posted by davidvanb at 6:38 AM on March 27, 2014


Response by poster: Davidvab thanks, handy to know about that (and I will use it), but I think it's for very long threads, rather than for multiple pages (where autopager on Firefox comes in really handy).
posted by guy72277 at 6:45 AM on March 27, 2014


Where it says count=1926 in the URL you posted for the penultimate page, just manually increment that number by 25 or 100 or however many links you're set up to view at a time and you'll get more pages.
posted by Jacqueline at 9:32 AM on March 27, 2014


Best answer: A follow-up if anyone researches this in the future...
Internet archive didn't work - very spotty archiving (like one bestof comment a month) and very fiddly to do.
Bestof sorted by "all time" comes to an end at a certain point after which there's nothing
Manually Incrementing the count in the URL past the ultimate page did not work for me

How I did it:

Google search "site:reddit.com/r/bestof"
"Search tools" > "Any Time" > Custom range...
then Sort by date.
You have to click on the link at the top of the page to single out the bestof'd comment, otherwise Google just finds the entire thread and the comment is not highlighted.

Combine this with specific autopager and element hider settings on the google search results page and it's simple to browse through months of bestofs pretty quickly. Just one extra click to single out the bestof'd comment in the thread.
posted by guy72277 at 1:15 AM on April 10, 2014


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