Help center
25 articles on searching archives, reading the results honestly, and what to do when something does not work.
Getting started
- Search a public username
Load the archive records available for one Reddit account.
- Search posts
Find archived posts by keyword, subreddit, author or date.
- Search comments
Find archived comments, including within a single thread.
- Analyze a subreddit
Examine archived activity in one community.
- Keyboard shortcuts
Moving around without the mouse.
Sources
- What is Arctic Shift?
The primary archive Subdex queries.
- What is PullPush?
The secondary archive, and why it may be unavailable.
- Why sources disagree
Two archives of the same site rarely match, and that is expected.
- Archive availability
What happens when an archive is slow, limited or offline.
- Is Subdex affiliated with Reddit?
No. What that means for the data you see.
Analysis
- What "loaded" means in every figure
Most numbers describe the records you retrieved, not the account's history.
- Reading the provenance rules
The thin left border on every figure says what kind of claim it is.
- Why archived scores are unreliable
Scores are snapshots, and some are placeholders.
- Posting times and what they do not show
Hour-of-day analysis is descriptive, not locational.
- What an interaction count means
A precise definition, and what it does not describe.
Workspace
- Save research locally
Nothing is saved unless you save it.
- Delete saved data
What each clearing action removes, precisely.
- Export your workspace
Move saved research to another device or keep a backup.
Export
- Export formats
CSV, JSON and a Markdown research summary.
- Exporting a large dataset
What to expect when exporting thousands of records.
Troubleshooting
- No results found
What an empty result does and does not mean.
- The archive source is unavailable
What to do when a search cannot complete.
- Why a search times out
Some query shapes are expensive for the archive.
- Keyword search needs a subreddit or author
Why an unscoped keyword query is rejected before it is sent.
- Loading a large account
Accounts with long histories need a strategy.