Reddit Enhancement Suite extension development is in maintenance mode

The Reddit Enhancement Suite addon for Firefox and Chrome has entered maintenance mode. The popular plugin that made the platform usable, for old.reddit.com users, could be coming to an end if things don’t change.

Why is Reddit Enhancement Suite in maintenance mode?

The developers of the open source extension have made an announcement on the plugin’s subreddit, saying that several members of the core team of developers are either busy or have moved on to other projects. The plugin, abbreviated as RES, has been around for a decade and is available from all the major plugin repositories, including Firefox AMO, the Chrome Web Store, Opera Plugins, and the Microsoft Store. Despite its popularity, the project did not receive many donations, which can be a bit demotivating for a team that is working on the development of the plugin. There are currently only 2 developers working on RES.

It’s always sad to see good software die, but it’s not dead yet, RES will be in life support mode for the foreseeable future. This means that the extension will not add support for website changes or redesign. The good news is that the plugin’s developers have said they can provide patches to fix bugs or release new options if the source code was merged with pull requests from other users. Essentially, it relies on the developer community, with limited support from core developers.

Since it is an open source project, there is also a chance that other developers will fork the plugin and take it from there. If you read the comments from Reddit Enhancement Suite developers, they blame the platform for being closed source and not being developer friendly. The push towards the new Reddit is also a cause for concern.

New Reddit – The Redesign No One Asked For

Reddit is one of my favorite sites, introduced to me by a friend when I was looking for information a decade ago. I found myself visiting it frequently to learn more, stay up to date on tech and gaming news, and provide help when I could.

A few years ago, when I logged into Reddit, something didn’t look right. Enter the new design of Reddit. It’s a hideous monstrosity with wasted space on both sides of the screen, it has links to promote other discussions right in the middle of the current thread, and even the subreddit sidebar is more or less in the middle of the screen. I could go on and on about how bad the design is. The interface is like the Facebook news feed, pure crap, which makes navigating and searching for things a real pain.

I was stumped by the design and immediately looked for a way to fix it, which wasn’t hard to find. Other users upset by the design changes recommended using https://old.reddit.com/ instead of https://www.reddit.com/. Some users pointed out a setting that users can enable from their profile, to make the old Reddit the default layout. Wow, that was a relief.

It was during that time, I found some comments on a gaming sub, where a user had created a table and recommended a plugin called Reddit Enhancement Suite, to sort the table. That was incredibly useful, but the plugin did more.

Some subreddits disable various elements like upvote and downvote buttons, subscriber count, and in rare cases even admins/mods hide the search bar. I don’t understand the logic behind such decisions. Reddit Enhancement Suite allowed me to disable a subreddit’s custom layout, giving me the original, which has always been perfectly usable. This is, in my opinion, the best feature of the extension.

To this day, I haven’t seen a website with a worse design than the new Reddit, although the new Twitter comes second for me, but that can be easily fixed with the GoodTwitter2 script.

I’m not sure I’d still be using Reddit if they ditch the old design entirely. The only alternatives would be to use third party clients that provide a different experience, similar to the previous design.

Redreader, Infinite for Reddity Slide are great open source Reddit client apps that you can use on your android phone. Apollo (you need an IAP to create posts) and Slide are the only iOS apps I’ve found that are of the same quality as their Android counterparts. Windows 10/11 users may want to search for ReddPlanet, but according to some recent feedback from the developer, the PC app is no longer updated. On the bright side, ReddPlanet for iOS was recently released, and an Android version is currently in closed beta.

The biggest problem is Reddit itself, when the admins decide to take the old site offline and leave, you will suffer from our new design and its atrocities, where do we turn then?

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