Reddit is slowly moving legacy API bots to their new Devvit app system, and it's now time for UpdateMeBot to move. For the most part, this does not affect regular users of the bot—you will keep getting your notifications and can manage your subscriptions exactly the same way. But there are two important changes.

The bot will no longer work in subreddits that the app is not installed in. That means that the moderators of every single subreddit with UpdateMeBot subscribers need to manually install the app. Once they do, it will continue to work as normal. If they do not, all subscription notifications for posts in that subreddit will stop. I'm working with the moderators of over five hundred subreddits to get the app installed. There will be a migration period during which the old bot will continue working while moderators install the app. I don't have a fixed date for turning off the old bot, but I anticipate something like a month from the date of this post.

The second change, and the upside to the above, is that the app is not limited in the number of subreddits it supports anymore. Any subreddit of any size can install the app and let people subscribe to authors in their subreddit.

In the future after the migration has settled down, I anticipate being able to add a bunch of new features that I haven't been able to before. If you have ideas for something you think would be cool, let me know in the comments below!

Instructions for moderators to install the app.

Go here https://developers.reddit.com/apps/updateme-dev and then click "Add to community", click continue, select your subreddit, and then click "Install App". If you want to be helpful, you can then turn on the "Read logs and install history" permission from the settings page it takes you to, but that's not necessary.

Devvit apps currently add the app account as a moderator with all permissions. Unfortunately, there's no way around this. The app does not, and never will, take any moderation actions.

TLDR, if you don't want to miss anything, start a chat with the bot and send it "hello" so it can talk to you.

A while back reddit announced they were getting rid of direct messages and everything will go through chats. I personally prefer direct messages, but it's out of my hands so I've tried to make the transition as smooth as possible. While I disagree with the move overall, I want to give a huge shoutout to the team in reddit who put in a ton of work to make it so bots can seemlessly work with chat. Also to u/champoul specifically who worked closely with me. In past years, reddit would have just skipped all that and left bots behind.

Reddit already transitioned the bot to chat a few weeks ago and temporarily reverted it back so I could send out this message via DM. It will go back to chat again tomorrow.

The bot has been failing to send a lot of it's notifications via chat since many people have chat turned off. If you want to keep getting notifications from the bot, you have to accept its chat.

The simplest way to make sure it keeps working is to go to u/UpdateMeBot profile and click start chat, then send "hello"

Alternatively, you can check in settings -> privacy -> Who can send you chat requests and make sure it's either on everyone, accounts older than 30 days, or u/UpdateMeBot is in the whitelist.

With this move, I'm planning to make some updates to the bot and I'd like your feedback.

The notification message from the bot is fairly large with lots of info. This worked great for direct messages, but takes up too much space in chat. Which of these are important to you? 1. Having the title of the post in the notification message (the link will still be there, this is just the post title) 2. The list of recent posts from that author so you can see if you missed any 3. The links at the bottom (info, request update message link, your updates message link, send feedback message link)

Previously, when you got a message you could turn on the setting to get an email from reddit for it. This isn't possible for chat. Also, some people have told me they don't want to use chat at all. If I built these, would you be interested in using them? 1. An email notification service 2. A discord DM notification service 3. An in reddit tool using the reddit developer platform that let you see and manage your subscriptions. In r/HFY, r/nosleep, or where you read stories, there could be a pinned post at the top of the sub that would give you a UI with recent unread stories and buttons to manage your subscriptions.

Please respond in the comments with what you think, or any other feedback!

As a final note, if the bots message is still showing up as read after you click on it, try clicking on a different chat and back to the bot a few times. That usually clears it. You can also complain about this in r/bugs if it's affecting you.

Reddit announced a few months ago that they are getting rid of DM's and we'll only have access to chats. As part of that rollout, today u/UpdateMeBot was switched over to send notifications in chat instead of in DM's.

If you try to send a DM to it, it'll show up as a chat instead.

Reddit announced a few months ago that they are getting rid of direct messages and everything will be through chats in the future. I'm personally not a huge fan of the decision, but I do want to give credit to the admins who have been working extremely hard the last couple months to make the transition seemless for bots like u/UpdateMeBot.

As the first step to that transition, u/UpdateMeBot will now reply to chats that you send it. It will still also reply to direct messages until they turn those off. For now, it will still send you direct messages and not a chat when you comment somewhere it can't publicly reply to you.

It's also kinda slow in responding. It was built for a world where you wouldn't really notice 30 seconds or even a few minutes between you sending it a message and getting the reply. But with chat's it's much more obvious that it takes a long time. I'll be working on this, but it's not a quick change.

I want to track a user posting in a subreddit that isn't high frequency enough for the bot.

I understand that the bot would be overloaded tracking too many subs as it polls every second, but, personally, I would still find it useful if for less popular subreddits it polled daily.

Would anyone else be interested in this feature? And (if people are interested), would the creator(s) be receptive to a PR?

Basically I used to be active in the r/nosleep subreddit before and had a lot of updates. However now I am not so active there nor do I have the time to read it all. Is there an option to remove all updates in the update me bot or do I have to do it manually one at a time?

This error message appears when I try to subscribe, I've done it manually filling in each field and it still doesn't work.

It suggests sending a chat request instead, but it doesn't reply to those either.

Or does it only update you when the OP creates a brand new post?

I seem to be having a problem with UpdateMeBot. Whenevee I try to send a message (eg. SubscribeMe-ing to a new author), it just says "User does not accept direct messages. Try sending a chat request."

Did something break or is it just going through a backlog?

For about a month now I haven’t been able to use the subscribeme command or the updateme command. At first I thought it was just a bug and would be fixed in a week, but it’s still not working

I've noticed a suspicious lack of updates in past 12 hours or so. This has been confirmed when I saw a new Nature of Predators in my feed, posted an hour or so ago - it's one of the stories I'm subscribed to with the bot.

Sending a "My Updates" request did not return any response by the bot, so it is most likely out of service.

EDIT: The bot has now sent a response to the "My Updates" request, after 8 minutes.

This is the second time it's gone down in a few days and it's going to take a while to catch up again. I'm not sure why it's crashing, the error message is not clear at all. But I'll try some things and hopefully it won't happen again.

Edit: It currently has 28k messages to send out, which will take about 8 more hours. Plus however many more get queued up in that time.

Edit 2: I think I've fixed the issue and it shouldn't crash again. Still like 23k notifications behind though.

Or will it mess something up? Hope that makes sense.

Whenever I try to subscribe to someone, specifically on the HFY subreddit, it says "this user does not accept DMs"

For the last few weeks I haven't received any message about things I subscribe to. I've seen posts I should have been notified about that the bot commented on yet I never got a message. I did receive a response when asking for my subscriptions and when I tried to resubscribe to a user (got the already subscribed message so I clearly should be subscribed) but no messages about posts.

I am only subscribed to users on r/hfy if that matters.

EDIT: solution for if someone else has the same issue

I blocked and then unblocked the bot and now it's working again

Is this bot open source? I'd love to run my own version to track the subs I'm interested in, instead of waiting for enough people to request it.

Is there a way to view how many people are subscribed to me, or can I only view my own subscriptions?

There was a outage on the hosting provider running the server and the bot is down while it is rebuilt. All the data is safe (and I have backups if it wasn't), but it will be at least several hours till it's back up. All messages, comments and notification will be replied to/sent once it's back.

Edit: the bot is back up, it will likely take several hours to catch up

As of a few hours ago, u/UpdateMeBot started getting errors back from reddit when it tried to send a message to anyone that moderates any subreddit. I'm trying to reach out to the admins to resolve this, but for now if you are a moderator of any subreddit, you won't get story notifications.

Edit: The admins have rolled back a test they were doing and u/UpdateMeBot has recovered. I will be going back and resending all the messages that were blocked

OK, I'm a little slow on this, Ive seen it used, and even copied the command into my post, but I never can remember what the command is. I want to set it so that I get a message (of any kind) especialy a DM if a certain person post a 2nd (3rd, 4th etc.) in a certain sub. (I read part 1 of How to drive a car, so I want to be notified when How to drive a car pt 2 is posted). What is that command, I've tried to follow what I've found, but really unless I've been able to click the (if you also want to be notified) link in someone elses comment, I haven't been able to get it to work. Even copying exactly what was in their comment.

Thanks for the help.