Requiring a Version in the Foursquare API
David Hu
Greetings Foursquare developers!
Today we are officially announcing that versioning will be required moving forward with the API. Starting on January 28, 2014, all requests (including POST’s) made to the API without a version parameter will return errors. Hopefully your reaction is less like this but more like this because of previous warnings we’ve given in API responses.
If you already use a version param in all your requests, huzzah! Skip this paragraph. If you don’t, getting ready for this change is easy: simply modify your Foursquare API requests to include a v=YYYYMMDD parameter. When you make this addition, note that the format of the responses you see from Foursquare may have changed. We will also conduct an API brownout test between 16:00:00 and 17:00:00 UTC on January 7, 2014. During this time period, API requests sent without a v parameter will return 400’s instead of actual responses.
While we have your attention, you should be aware that we also plan on dropping support for API requests before 20120609. This change will happen in early 2014, and we will confirm the exact date in a future announcement.
Versioning allows us to make changes to the API while giving developers enough time to update their integrations; however, we never intended to support old versions indefinitely. As always, we recommend regularly updating your versions to take advantage of the latest from Foursquare, such as advanced justifications in Explore and menu item search, which were recently added.
Please let us know if you have questions about this. This mailing list will remain announcement-only, but as always, for the latest news and updates related to the API follow @foursquareAPI on Twitter and look to our community on StackOverflow for technical support.