Failing reddit thread listing and thread collect functions

[bryn-g]

There seems to be recent new issues with the httr and RCurl packages and reddit GET requests.

In package testing all requests are returning 403 error codes indicating the requests are being blocked by the reddit server. This is occurring for both default package (httr) and custom user-agent strings under the R environment. It may be related to package or environment changes with R 4.4.

As blocking is determined by a number of conditions it may not occur for everyone and it may be temporary. It does not appear to be IP related as reddit json could be requested and retrieved using a web browser and curl installed on the same test system with default user-agent strings.

This issue was not occurring a few weeks ago under R 4.3 at the end of April 2024. It now occurs under a fresh R 4.3 install using the latest package versions, previous package versions have not yet been tested.