Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 17 submissions in the queue.
Meta

Meta: The State of SoylentNews and Twitter

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

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

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.

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Meta: The State of SoylentNews and Twitter | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 128 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:27AM

    by fakefuck39 (6620) on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:27AM (#612150)

    I've registered about 30 accounts over time, as I've forgotten passwords and got sick of low karma posting limits. 7000? yeah retard. there are clearly 7000 uniq users reflected in the comments here. or, you know, it's 10 of you idiots over and over again. the op idiot is literally asking people on the site whether they care about people who read the stuff here outside of this site, and you 10 of course say "no, twitter is useless to us, dump it." that's a loser that not only does not bring any benefit to the site, he is actually damaging to the site, and does not realize he is a retard. you know, like you 10 retards.