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posted by on Monday December 18 2017, @08:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the stupid-blue-bird dept.

So, apparently around November 5th we stopped posting to Twitter. We didn't find out until around the end of that month and when we did nobody had the time and/or ability to look into why until this past week.

Now how we get our headlines over to Twitter is overly complicated and, frankly, idiotic. It's done by one of our IRC bots pulling headlines from the RSS feed and posting them on Twitter as @SoylentNews. The bot was written back in 2014 with hand-rolled (as opposed to installed via package manager) Python libraries and hasn't been updated since. This was breakage that should absolutely have been expected to happen. Twitter's penchant for arbitrarily changing their unversioned API means you either keep on top of changes or expect things to break for no apparent reason.

Here's the question: do we even care? We can either find someone who's willing to rewrite the bot to a new Twitter library, do it the sane way as either a cron or slashd job, or just say to hell with it since we only have two hundred or so followers on Twitter anyway. What say you, folks?


[TMB Note]: Twitter's who-to-follow algorithms really impressed me this morning when I logged in to manually post this story. How did they know we were all huge @JustinBieber and @BarackObama fans?


[Update]: We're again annoying Twitter users by spreading relative intelligence across their platform of choice. Credit goes to Crash for wisely pointing out that we don't have to code everything ourselves.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @12:20PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @12:20PM (#611350)

    So nobody complained in 1.5 month of this "service" not working properly... seems like a brain dead answer to me.

    I use the RSS service, that just works as it should. Why overcomplicate things?

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 18 2017, @12:23PM (5 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday December 18 2017, @12:23PM (#611352) Homepage Journal

    Two weeks and change but yeah, you do have a point.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by DavePolaschek on Monday December 18 2017, @02:02PM

      by DavePolaschek (6129) on Monday December 18 2017, @02:02PM (#611383) Homepage Journal

      I noticed. But I've been sick and didn't have the energy to go figure out what was up. I just spent two weeks not reading SN.

      If I'd gone another two weeks, I probably would have shut off the recurring donation I have set up. Not saying this is a reason to fix the twitter feed, but in my case, it probably will make the difference between me checking SN once in a while and deciding that SN is something I don't really need to waste my time on.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Monday December 18 2017, @09:42PM

      by frojack (1554) on Monday December 18 2017, @09:42PM (#611582) Journal

      Actually I'd vote to get off twitter, even if that took more work than staying on twitter.

      No reason to feed that poisonous creation.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday January 11 2018, @05:30PM (2 children)

      by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday January 11 2018, @05:30PM (#620989) Homepage Journal
      Is this a bad time to mention that the Twitter feed is broken again? No stories since last night. I was about to try to share the newest story.
      --
      ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 11 2018, @08:14PM (1 child)

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday January 11 2018, @08:14PM (#621063) Homepage Journal

        Yeah, turns out zapier is a stingy bitch about how many items they'll post for you per month without paying them twice as much as it would cost to rent another server to do nothing but that, so we're not using them any more. I wrote a temporary perl script to handle it again until I can get something done up properly and stuck into the code base.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:19PM

          by jdavidb (5690) on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:19PM (#621143) Homepage Journal
          Weird. Thanks very much.
          --
          ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
  • (Score: 5, Touché) by TheRaven on Monday December 18 2017, @01:10PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday December 18 2017, @01:10PM (#611369) Journal
    Twitter: RSS meets AOL.
    --
    sudo mod me up