I’ve seen a few reports of the “exclude replies” feature not working in the 1.6b1 release. This appears to be due to a change in the data returned by the Twitter API. The tweet data used to always include a message being “replied to” if the tweet started with @username. This is no longer the case.
What appears to have happened is that Twitter has refined its concept of a reply (probably factoring in duration of time between your tweet and the tweet being replied to, etc.).
While Twitter has made this conceptual refinement, the Twitter users don’t seem to have made the same mental adjustment. Twitter Tools used the data from the Twitter API – specifically the “in reply to” property – to determine if a tweet was a reply or not; then acted accordingly. So Twitter Tools is looking at the data and saying “Hmm, Twitter doesn’t think this is a reply” and the userbase is saying “Yes it is”.
After thinking about this, I’ve decided to change Twitter Tools to reflect the behavior the Twitter user base is expecting. You can grab the new version from SVN (see Download link at the bottom of the page) if you want this change immediately, or you can wait for the next release (probably sometime next week).
Feature Requests
I’m also getting a variety of feature requests for this plugin. These will likely not be added any time soon unless people are willing to fund the necessary development for them. Unfortunately I don’t have any free time to spend on building these right now.
This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
Thanks so much for this fix! It makes sense to me to go with the most predictable way of determining a reply.
Totally understand the thing about feature requests. Maybe if you put a list of the potential feature requests up you might stimulate some people to pay a bit to see their favorites?
I appreciate these fixes as well.
I like the idea about posting potential features.
Thank you very much Alex! 🙂
Thanks for the update, the feature list is a good idea.
Is there a way to let users who are ‘editors’ be able to Tweet from the admin?
Posting Tweets from WordPress is allowed by anyone who is allowed to publish posts to the blog.
Alex thank you for a great plug in and for fixing this bug.
Alex, the replies change you talk about is discussed on the Twitter API Google group. A reply will now only be marked as a real reply if the user has clicked a reply button on a specific tweet. This means that you’re saying a reply is a direct response to what someone else said.
This fixes the old behaviour that manually typing “@JoeBloggs” would automatically assume you were replying to his most recent tweet, which often wasn’t the case.
Hmm, I’m not sure about that – it doesn’t address “replies” sent by 3rd party clients. I typed @username yesterday for a reply using Twitteriffic and it got hooked up correctly as a reply.
http://twitter.com/a[...]s/1213711312
I think there’s more to it than that.
If you need only publish a blog link article on twitter, you can use social bookmarking reloaded plug-in (http://www.valent-bl[...]ng-reloaded/)
[…] fixed this, along with the “exclude replies” issues from the weekend, and things are looking pretty good in our initial testing. We’d love to have some further […]
Alex, I have several of your plugins installed and love them…
Just included Twitter Tools in my list of The Top 85 Twitter Tools
http://www.thedailya[...]itter-tools/
Hi Alex,
Strange – in my install only admins can – any other types don’t get the ‘tweet’ option.
Hmmm… the latest version isn’t working for me after clicking the box to exclude the @replies (in other words, we want only our own “normal” tweets to show up in our blog).
The plug-in deactivates and when I try to reactivate it, I get an error saying as follows:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in [PATH]/twitter-tools.php on line 751
Ugghhh… Never mind. I found the syntax error (my fault). Funny how that happens when you’re looking at code for too long. 🙂
[…] are determined. no longer using Twitter’s definition as many Twitter users thought differently and considered this a […]
[…] fixed this, along with the “exclude replies” issues from the weekend, and things are looking pretty good in our initial testing. We’d love to have some further […]
[…] are determined. no longer using Twitter’s definition as many Twitter users thought differently and considered this a […]