The "NSFW phase" cleanup, without the awkward archeology.

Most cleanups are about tone or age. This one is about a specific slice of history you would rather not re-read to sort - which is exactly the problem. The whole point is to clear it without scrolling back through it.

So the strategy is to let filters do the reading. You define the era and the kind of content once, review a count, and confirm - no line-by-line archeology.

The Wipe NSFW recipe is the fast start. One click selects NSFW-flagged posts and comments across every year and every score. Karmdit uses a curated list of sensitive subreddits to flag them, so you are not depending on Reddit's own inconsistent tags alone.

That is the broad net. On its own it may catch more than you mean - which is what the next two steps are for.

Add a date bound. If the phase you're clearing was, say, 2015 to 2018, set the range and the selection collapses to just that window. The live count updates as you tighten, so you can see the era emerge as a number.

You're not judging each post. You're drawing a box around a period and a category.

There are usually a handful you actually want to keep - a comment that aged well, a post with a reply you're fond of. Whitelist those. A whitelisted item is untouchable in this run and every future one, so you never have to protect it twice.

This is the part a blunt "delete everything NSFW" tool can't do. The filter finds the era; the whitelist keeps the exceptions.

Confirm from the preview. If you're on Pro, turn on overwrite-before-delete so the original text is replaced with a placeholder first - that's what defeats the archive caches that snapshot on edit.

You never had to re-read the era to clear it. You described it, spared the exceptions, and let the filter do the rest.