What do you do when you realise that the code that you have been maintaining code that does illegal stuff (written by others years ago, but you implemented major changes so that the illegal stuff keeps functioning).

Here, illegal is the violation of terms

Git reset --hard HEAD^1000

Fix it and/or report it depending on your confidence of illegality, personal lawfulness or expectation of prosecution, moral/ethical point of view... whether you think something should be done about it.

If it is just violation some 3rd party's intelectual property and it is unlikely to be prosecuted or expected damage is low - just ignore it as intelectual property is wrong anyways. If it turns cute little kitten into a tasty chicken nugget replacement, that is also fine as long as the complete kitten is turned into valuable products. But if it posts spam on devRant or otherwise serves to harm or annoy humans, that is where i would draw the line. In that case you have to remove that feature completely.

@Oktokolo it doesn’t harm anyone or any intellectual property. It scrapes data that it isn’t supposed to scrape instead of using the free API.

This is prohibited in the terms and conditions.

(The API doesn’t have a few important bits of information).

@nanobot I've done that before. Shhhh. It's very common.

@nanobot Is it personally identifiable data which isn't obtainable through teh API? And isn't it used to harm others (most likely by trying to manipulate them to buy something)?

@Oktokolo the data is personally identifiable. But, it is the user’s own information (the person making the request to our servers is getting only their own data through the scraping that we do)

@chaosesqueteam I knew you lacked common sense, civil sense but you can't even get humour now. 😂😂😂

@nanobot In that case its fine as long as you don't fear anti botting actions from the site too much.