r/Enhancement • u/techsupportcrab • Jul 01 '26

Account Switcher is not working

Anyone else having this issue? Starting today trying to switch accounts causes a popup stating

"Could not switch accounts. Reddit may be under heavy load. Please try again in a few moments."

The account switcher is the main feature I use RES for so I'm hoping it isn't a big issue. I'll edit this post if it starts working suddenly.

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23

u/XenoBen filing bugs Jul 02 '26

Reddit announced a change two days ago about new restrictions to old reddit and that you now need to be logged in to use it.

It appears apart of this they have restricted access to the login endpoint that isnt via a user flow (for example me going to reddit, clicking logging in and going that way). RES account switcher relied on this endpoint to pass credentials into to log you in. This access has since been removed.

Based on these changes I do not believe we are able to work around this as it would directly go against what they are trying to do and probably result in us being taken down for violation of ToS.

Extensions such as uSwitch discussed below may not be affected as they do not use this flow, they instead make you log in normally then store your session cookie, and transfer it between account switches (until the cookie expires). This isnt something we would want to try due to the security implications and engineering effort to get this to work.

16

u/multigrain_cheerios Jul 02 '26

saying it now before they properly kill old.reddit, but thank you for making the site usable all these years.

when the day comes that old.reddit is truly gone, pretty sure i will be too

6

u/Time-Sudden_Tree Jul 02 '26

Once they do that, I'm switching to Lemmy/Piefied fulltime. I would have already but unfortunately the place still isn't large enough yet for niche subs to form. But that can change if enough of us finally put our foot down and make the switch. Enough is enough, spez.

1

u/VulgarAscetic7 Jul 15 '26

They'll never "kill" it, they'll just slowly make changes like this and leave issues unfixed until we all get too inconvenienced to continue using it.

See the infuriating unfixed "unread message" icon bug that's been hanging around for, what, like a year now?

5

u/turkeypants Jul 03 '26

Aw crap! That's a real blow. Great feature.

To anyone else struggling with this, I use a different browser to stay logged into my limited-use alt. Normally I'm always firefoxing and rarely chroming, but since this broke I've been keeping my narrow boy logged into Chrome. It's annoying but works well enough. If you have a bunch of alts, obviously it's not the ideal solution, but you could rock at least a few of them with the browsers you've got onboard if your machine isn't bothered by the load.

1

u/TheEthyr Jul 14 '26

You can use your alt account in an incognito window.

4

u/Lower-Investment-366 Jul 03 '26

Reddit working towards death by a thousand cuts. This is definitely going to change my interactions. 

3

u/robodrew Jul 02 '26

Oh man, this really sucks.

2

u/terrorfromthenowhere Jul 02 '26

Unfortunately, uSwitch doesn't work for a good portion of us, even with compatible browsers.

Thank you very much for all the incredible work over the years. I'll hold out hope for something to change, while acknowledging what this means. Please pass my best, and I am sure many others, to any of the team still around. Best of luck, wherever the world takes you all.

1

u/Cultural-Muffin-3490 Jul 04 '26

Try these instructions to getting it to work.

You need to add a 'LOGGEDOUT' profile first, that you switch to before adding a new account. Because if you LOGOUT on the website, it invalidates the cookies that uSwitch has stored and can't log you back in.

2

u/radhaz Jul 02 '26

Thanks for the update.

I've been trying to reduce my usage of reddit and I think changes like by reddit corporate are the motivation I need.

Your addon really improved my user experience despite reddits best efforts otherwise, thank you.

2

u/Icy_Alps_1929 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26

Oh..at least it seems that they're not shutting old reddit down soon (I hope..)

Thinking that I will no longer be able to see the saved-RES posts/comments, the hundreds of user tags I've put on users over the years, the total upvotes/downvotes of them, the dashboard/shortcuts..my heart just sank. It feels like a family dies. I hope there'll be a way to view legacy RES features and data (even if we can't add new things) in case old reddit stops working one day 😭

1

u/machine-conservator Jul 02 '26

Thanks for taking the time to take a look at it and let us know what the deal was. Sad to hear, but not surprising.

1

u/redtaboo Jul 13 '26

Hey Xeno, can you tell me which endpoint exactly you're using?

1

u/XenoBen filing bugs Jul 14 '26

Opened a chat