Unlike many different platforms, Reddit’s earned a repute for embracing the numerous weird and wacky bots its customers have created to run wild on the platform. And whereas a few of these bots have gone to that nice Github within the sky, studies that two beloved video-downloader bots had been getting the axe this week apparently jumped the gun.

In a post revealed Monday afternoon, the creator of two bots, aptly named “savevideobot” and “redditsave,” claimed that they should shut down the service after only some months of operation. The creator additionally mentioned that somebody—it’s not clear who—was threatening them with a lawsuit in the event that they refused to conform.

“It has been a great pleasure to serve you all in the past few months. However, as they say, All good things must come to an end,” the creator wrote. “The gods of reddit have reached out to us. They do not want us to continue this service any longer. I am obliged to obey or risk a lawsuit. Thank you all for making my fun project what it is today.”

According to the bots’ creator, the bots “will no longer be functional in the next few hours.” Nearly a day later, nevertheless, and the bots nonetheless seem to work. And the location the bot saves movies to, RedditSave.com, continues to be on-line as of Tuesday afternoon. Not solely that, however the bots’ creator up to date the unique put up on Tuesday afternoon to say, “We are back.” A peek on the bots’ Reddit historical past exhibits they had been buzzing away since the unique put up went dwell on Monday.

While many speculated that Reddit itself is behind the lawsuit risk, a spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that they really had nothing to do with it—however declined to supply remark past saying that the corporate is “currently investigating this issue.”

The downloaders in query are just some of the bots that redditors have whipped up with a purpose to repair one of many platform’s most annoying options: undownloadable content material.

Reddit’s at all times given its customers the choice to add multimedia content material in one among two methods: both externally or regionally to Reddit’s personal servers. In the latter case, as soon as that image or video is uploaded onto a put up, the platform doesn’t provide any type of native method to let anybody looking the location obtain it for themselves. This signifies that, through the years, we’ve seen artistic coders take issues into their very own palms, creating bots that may try this downloading for you. Savevideobot was possibly the most well-liked of the bunch, with thousands and thousands of redditors frequently utilizing the service.

These kinds of bots have had a tricky go these days. Other standard bots like VRedditDownloader and SaveThisVideo had been each unceremoniously suspended in current months following a slew of copyright infringement claims from creators that discovered their content material being downloaded utilizing these instruments.

Less than 24 hours after this whirlwind of a saga began, the creator has promised that extra information on the supposedly doomed bots would come “soon.” We’ve reached out to them for an replace on all this, however hopefully, these bots are again for good.