SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 18 2017, @05:16PM (1 child)
This comes to mind:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/ [reddit.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 18 2017, @09:33PM
Now that Zapier takes care of keeping the bird feeder full (thanks TMB for solving the problem and bumping this topic), there should be more time to work on interesting features...
The reddit remindmebot seems to be for an individual user to remind themselves? For the SN community, I was thinking of something that would auto-resubmit any story, at a user-selectable future time (when the prediction can be seen to be T or F). Command line interface would be fine, gui calendar interface might make it too easy and result in overuse?
Since the story goes back into the submission queue (with link to original topic and discussion), the editors always have the option to not post as a new story. I suppose it could also send a message to the original submitter (if still extant) and/or the user that set the tickler message.
Might need some way to filter out multiple requests, otherwise the queue could be jammed with dupes?