Patreon won't work - "veto: can view"

[NatParable]

The Patreon downloader has suddenly stopped working for me, giving me only a "veto: can view" error whenever I try downloading anything. I've imported my cookies from Patreon, and I have tried removing and reimporting said cookies, and i've also tried updating to the latest version of Hydrus just in case, but no difference.

[NatParable]

I tried fiddling with the parser, and if I do manage to get past "veto: can view" I just end up with "0 new urls found in [number] subposts", even when the parser successfully gets download links when previewing it in the parser editor. I am completely at a loss for why it won't work.

[NatParable]

Ok, i've noticed something weird. If I view the API version of a NSFW patreon post in my web browser (both Firefox and Chrome), the "current_user_can_view" attribute is always "false" despite me being logged in and subscribed to the creator. So this doesn't seem to be a problem with the parser at all, but rather a problem with Patreon's API. It seems to only affect NSFW posts, so perhaps the API no longer supports NSFW creator pages?

Is there any chance someone could make a hacky workaround that doesn't involve using the Patreon API?

[NatParable]

Well, scratch that. I've checked and rechecked again, and it seems to be completely random whether it says "current_user_can_view" is true or false. Some days it'll say false when i'm logged in, other days it'll say true. On those latter days, it'll appear as true when previewing the parser in Hydrus, but come up as false (vetoed) when actually trying to download the exact same link. Removing the veto check entirely just gives me the aformentioned "0 new urls found in [number] subposts". There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason behind it.

The way the Patreon API behaves seems to be completely inconsistent nowadays, and i've now completely exhausted my limited mental faculties trying to understand it. 😩

[roachcord3]

This is happening to me too, but it's a relatively recent phenomenon (only seems to have started this week, as far as I can tell.) It's also inconsistent in how it behaves in different parts of Hydrus as well as my browser. The only consistent thing is that if I'm logged out of Patreon, it's false for paid posts. Duh.

The actual veto part of the parser should stay in place; the problem is with Patreon itself. If we don't veto posts, then subscriptions will remember them as not having anything to download, which is worse than viewing them as ignored (since you can retry all ignored URLs with a couple clicks, but have to go digging in the logs to retry specific URLs that you know will produce a different result if retried.)

The API we use in their parser is their old V1 API, which is no longer documented and will be phased out someday, IIRC. Maybe there's something that's been broken for a while and they're just not fixing it because, well, it's a long-since-deprecated API. We might have to give up and just use hydownloader, since the V2 API requires OAuth and that's not in scope for Hydrus parsers.

[NatParable]

Thank you for mentioning hydownloader! I had never heard of it before, and after getting it and systray set up (with some difficulty) I was finally able to import some Patreon posts into Hydrus!

[roachcord3]

Good to hear that that's working. I was going to set it up myself, but now the website is showing me some pages that I definitely have unlocked as if they are locked, so I contacted Patreon support and let them know I think some backend thing regarding permissions is broken. I get the sneaking suspicion that if even the website is busted for some posts, then the OAuth-based V2 API that hydownloader uses will be broken for some posts too. (Fewer than the V1 API is, of course.)

If you happen to run into any posts that hydownloader can't download and/or any posts on the site that show as locked even though they shouldn't be, then please also contact Patreon support. I think us asking about the V1 API being busted would probably get us nowhere, but if the site and/or V2 API are busted, they should react to that.