API 140 character truncation change?

[James Tymann]

Has anyone else noticed a change in the way that the 140 character
limit is enforced via the API? I noticed a change sometime between the
13th and the 16th that is now causing all my 140+ character posts to
be rejected by the API. As of the 13th and earlier if I posted a 140+
character message to twitter, the urls would be truncated using
bit.ly, and then if they were still over 140 characters an ellipsis
would be added to the end of the message, and by clicking on the
ellipsis you could see the entirety on the message. I have a service
that posts to twitter, and in the messages it contains links. My
service aims to be under 140 characters once the url(s) are shortened
by twitter, however none of my posts are going through now.

Also a side note is that the api is not returning errors, they return
proper responses however they are the proper response for the current
status of the account, not the new status that was just attempted to
be posted.

I am using C# and the Twitterizer API. Has anyone else noticed this,
is it a permanent change? a mistake? I am currently trying to learn
more about why this happened and what my proper response should be.

Thank you

[Josh Roesslein]

This is the new intended behaviour from what I have been told. All
tweets > 140 in length will be silently ignored.
I'm guessing they don't throw an error here yet to not break any
existing clients until they have upgraded.
Eventually I'm sure we will be some sort of 400 error in the future.
For now I'd recommend enforcing the 140 limit
in your software and warn the user if it's too long rather than going
ahead and posting it.

Josh

[Dave Sherohman]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 07:37:03AM -0700, James Tymann wrote:
> Has anyone else noticed a change in the way that the 140 character
> limit is enforced via the API? I noticed a change sometime between the
> 13th and the 16th that is now causing all my 140+ character posts to
> be rejected by the API.

> Also a side note is that the api is not returning errors, they return

> proper responses however they are the proper response for the current
> status of the account, not the new status that was just attempted to
> be posted.

My users first reported issues arising from this on the 15th, although I
didn't identify the cause until the 17th, at which point I asked about
it in #Net::Twitter and Marc Mims brought the question here under the
subject line "Bug? Updates > 140 characters return success with prior
update payload". See the discussion under that thread for more on it,
but the overall upshot is:

- This is an intentional (if poorly-announced) change, not a bug.
- Status updates are known to be getting silently rejected in this
manner both due to exceeding 140 characters and due to violation of
the expanded "no duplicates" policy.
- Twitter has not stated whether there are any additional circumstances
beyond those two cases in which updates will be silently rejected.
- Twitter has not stated any plans regarding adding an indicator for
when a "200 OK" status update has, in fact, been rejected.

I am attempting to compensate for this change by checking the returned
status ID against the previous highest-seen ID to determine whether the
status returned with the "200 OK" response is a new one or the user's
pre-existing status. This seems to work, but does not indicate the
reason for the silent failure, so I can't report the cause to my users.
Andy Freeman has mentioned that, in the case of rejection due to
duplication, this is also unsatisfactory in that it does not allow him
to identify the original status which was duplicated.

--
Dave Sherohman

[Naveen]

Here are two threads related to this issue.
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/cd95ce07be341223/66c66de585383868#66c66de585383868
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/3d6a727892710d5e#

It is an inconvenient change, not because they changed it, but because
they did not announce that the change was happening.

[AJ Chen]

I noticed this behavior a long time ago (may be a month) and reported the problem on this list, but it did not get any response from the api team. I thought it was a bug, but just realized yesterday that the api probably ignores 140+ chars status update intentionally. but' I'm not sure this is the policy or temporary tactic to reduce workload on api. it would be good that api team can clasify on this issue. to check if this happens or not, you can compare the status sent to api and the status returned from api in your application code.
 -aj

--
AJ Chen, PhD
Chair, Semantic Web SIG, sdforum.org
http://web2express.org
Palo Alto, CA

[Dewald Pretorius]

You cannot compare the status sent with the status returned when the
status contains an URL. The returned status contains Twitter's own
bit.ly shortened URL instead of the URL your status sent had.

Dewald

On Oct 23, 6:24 pm, AJ Chen <cano...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I noticed this behavior a long time ago (may be a month) and reported the
> problem on this list, but it did not get any response from the api team. I
> thought it was a bug, but just realized yesterday that the api probably
> ignores 140+ chars status update intentionally. but' I'm not sure this is
> the policy or temporary tactic to reduce workload on api. it would be good
> that api team can clasify on this issue. to check if this happens or not,
> you can compare the status sent to api and the status returned from api in
> your application code.
>  -aj
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Naveen <knig...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Here are two threads related to this issue.
>

> >http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread...
>
> >http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread...

[AJ Chen]

then, comparing the front part (without url at the end) of the status is probably sufficient. -aj

[Dewald Pretorius]

Instead of all of us having to do fancy tap-dances, the proper
solution is for Twitter to issue an error response when a sent tweet
is rejected for whatever reason.

Dewald

[Naveen Ayyagari]

+1 agreed

[Dave Sherohman]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 04:20:36PM -0700, Dewald Pretorius wrote:
> Instead of all of us having to do fancy tap-dances, the proper
> solution is for Twitter to issue an error response when a sent tweet
> is rejected for whatever reason.

Yep, exactly. That's my big gripe about the whole thing. Failing
silently is *never* the right answer in an API or other library code.

--
Dave Sherohman

[Dave Sherohman]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 02:24:53PM -0700, AJ Chen wrote:
> I noticed this behavior a long time ago (may be a month) and reported the
> problem on this list, but it did not get any response from the api team. I
> thought it was a bug, but just realized yesterday that the api probably
> ignores 140+ chars status update intentionally. but' I'm not sure this is
> the policy or temporary tactic to reduce workload on api. it would be good
> that api team can clasify on this issue. to check if this happens or not,
> you can compare the status sent to api and the status returned from api in
> your application code.

Note that duplicate statuses are silently failing in the same manner as
those over 140 characters. Aside from the already-mentioned issue of
Twitter doing automatic bit.ly shortening on URLs, comparing the
submitted status to the received status will also produce incorrect
results when the submitted status is rejected for being identical to the
user's most-recent previous status. Depending on your application,
failure in this scenario may or may not be relevant.

--
Dave Sherohman