2741 Twitter API will no longer be free - server tweets will stop

[Docterchese 1,570]

In one week, all of Wurm's Twitter integrations will stop working unless Wurm pays money for them.  This means:

 

• No more deed founding/disbanding announcements unless you're online to see it
• No more rift time estimations
• No more unique death announcements

 

since these features on fansites like Wurmnode are all powered by a) Wurm's access to the Twitter API (allowing for free posts to Twitter accounts) and b) free fansite access to the Twitter API (allowing for free scraping of tweets, a feature that they seem most bothered about monetising.)

 

In addition, deed Twitter accounts will stop working.

 

Free access to the Twitter API will end seven days from now on February 9th (this only got announced this morning, with one week of notice):

 

 

It will become much harder to track things like rifts, deeds and uniques seven days from now unless another solution is put in place. This is bad.

 

The new Twitter management has been known to reverse decisions just as quickly as they make them. However, given that they currently aren't even paying their rent properly for office spaces... I think it's safe to say that Twitter is very, very shaky right now, and it's probably not a good thing to have so much Wurm functionality tied in with this third party service.

 

 

Suggested quick fix

 

It would be possible to pay for Twitter API access, but that feels like a waste of money (especially given how many servers Wurm has = paying for it at least 17 times over), plus fansites would have to pay for the API too to be able to scrape tweets, which is a shame for people like @Drogoswho already put a lot of free time and effort into running them.

 

As it stands, all Wurm servers already publish data to the web elsewhere. This data is tied in with the server graphs of things like player count and creature count. This goes to raw data pages that I (assume?) are hosted by the servers themselves given the subdomain, e.g. here's the one for Independence.

 

Instead of sending tweets, a new "announcements.log" file could be made, where each line is simply a copy of the text that would have been sent in a tweet (with a timestamp too, please! The tweet timestamps are essential for calculating when rifts will happen next.) This announcements file would be easy to download as necessary to scrape the server information we traditionally got from Twitter. The code that sends tweets would just need an addition/replacement to append the string it would have sent to Twitter to the announcements log file instead. Could set a reasonable line limit on the announcements log file of e.g. 100 or 1000 lines so it doesn't get too big.

 

As for deed Twitters, it's not easy to replace private Twitter accounts for now with a free feature. Long-term, if there's community demand for it, the best solution might be a Discord integration (since a lot of people use Discord now, it has a free API, very good bot support, and is much, much more stable than the current Twitter situation.)

[Oblivionnreaver 5,174]

maybe we can finally enter 2011 and get webhooks instead of twitter integration

[Pandalet 1,848]

Moved to suggestions.

[Tomatoes 276]

Lets face it - Twitter is probably going to go the way of the do-do, and its time to find alternatives: While webhooks could be a solution in the long term, are there any alternatives to Twitter that we could use in the short term? would publishing to Reddit work? ( i did see that Discord was mentioned, just wondering what else there might be)

also, all the history in twitter would need to be saved at some point - its nearly 20 years of tweets for some servers, and that sort of info loss would be tragic

 

Edited February 2, 2023 by Tomatoes

[kochinac 1,395]

2 hours ago, Docterchese said:

No more deed founding/disbanding announcements unless you're online to see it

this actually doesn't seem like a bad thing... would make disbanded deed looting much more fun...

[Ausimus 755]

4 hours ago, Docterchese said:

In one week, all of Wurm's Twitter integrations will stop working unless Wurm pays money for them.  This means:

 

• No more deed founding/disbanding announcements unless you're online to see it
• No more rift time estimations
• No more unique death announcements

 

since these features on fansites like Wurmnode are all powered by a) Wurm's access to the Twitter API (allowing for free posts to Twitter accounts) and b) free fansite access to the Twitter API (allowing for free scraping of tweets, a feature that they seem most bothered about monetising.)

 

In addition, deed Twitter accounts will stop working.

 

Free access to the Twitter API will end seven days from now on February 9th (this only got announced this morning, with one week of notice):

 

 

It will become much harder to track things like rifts, deeds and uniques seven days from now unless another solution is put in place. This is bad.

 

The new Twitter management has been known to reverse decisions just as quickly as they make them. However, given that they currently aren't even paying their rent properly for office spaces... I think it's safe to say that Twitter is very, very shaky right now, and it's probably not a good thing to have so much Wurm functionality tied in with this third party service.

 

 

Suggested quick fix

 

It would be possible to pay for Twitter API access, but that feels like a waste of money (especially given how many servers Wurm has = paying for it at least 17 times over), plus fansites would have to pay for the API too to be able to scrape tweets, which is a shame for people like @Drogoswho already put a lot of free time and effort into running them.

 

As it stands, all Wurm servers already publish data to the web elsewhere. This data is tied in with the server graphs of things like player count and creature count. This goes to raw data pages that I (assume?) are hosted by the servers themselves given the subdomain, e.g. here's the one for Independence.

 

Instead of sending tweets, a new "announcements.log" file could be made, where each line is simply a copy of the text that would have been sent in a tweet (with a timestamp too, please! The tweet timestamps are essential for calculating when rifts will happen next.) This announcements file would be easy to download as necessary to scrape the server information we traditionally got from Twitter. The code that sends tweets would just need an addition/replacement to append the string it would have sent to Twitter to the announcements log file instead. Could set a reasonable line limit on the announcements log file of e.g. 100 or 1000 lines so it doesn't get too big.

 

As for deed Twitters, it's not easy to replace private Twitter accounts for now with a free feature. Long-term, if there's community demand for it, the best solution might be a Discord integration (since a lot of people use Discord now, it has a free API, very good bot support, and is much, much more stable than the current Twitter situation.)

I have been working on implementing discord webhooks as an alternative for quite some time. Each village will be able to send webhook messages to discord (one way).

[Drogos 512]

I was just tipped about this, and it is true, WurmNode does currently depend on these twitter feeds to work. If an API or "announcements.log" file will be made available before the weekend, I will do my best to port the functionality before locked out of twitter.

[Ekcin 2,406]

Good luck, Drogos, and thanks a lot for all you are doing.

 

That said, I have always  been mistrusting any relying on the Internet oligarchy and mafia, be it Twitter, Google (one of the worst), Facebook/Meta etc. Granted we cannot sever the ties to Java/Oracle, at least not easily, and it makes some sense to stay at the leading edge of information technologies. Relying on open source as much as ever possible should be preferred anyway. 

 

Btw., setting up a provisional interface on IRC should not be impossible. Bit clumsy maybe, but robust. Anyway, the "announcement.log" sounds good, too.

[Tomatoes 276]

much as there is an internet oligarchy and mafia, its not quite so bad. or maybe its worse then you think, depends on how you see it: - https://www.ces.tech/articles/2020/october/the-truth-about-the-people-with-the-keys-to-the-in.aspx - i was actually surprised by the info here. 

anyways, the way it looks with Musk now, - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/03/twitter-sued-overdue-rent-san-francisco-branch - i dont think twitter is going to be around for very much longer.

 

[elentari 2,660]

7 hours ago, Tomatoes said:

anyways, the way it looks with Musk now, - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/03/twitter-sued-overdue-rent-san-francisco-branch - i dont think twitter is going to be around for very much longer.

It will be because it's a giant corporation, no matter how you view its leader or the company's policies. It's simply too valuable to let fail. Most likely it will be bought out by a competitor like microsoft or google.

 

There's an old saying that's true for "too big to fail".

 

If you owe the bank 1 M $ then you have a problem. If you owe the bank one billion dollars, the bank has a problem. The more Musk owes, the more 3rd parties will be interested in keeping twitter afloat so he pays his debt.

 

In any case, Twitter was always a destructive media force, promoting nothing but the dregs of humanity.

 

That said, yeah Wurm should really explore some open source alternatives or maybe even develop its own based on some open source software.

Edited February 3, 2023 by elentari

[Ausimus 755]

On 2/2/2023 at 7:04 PM, Drogos said:

I was just tipped about this, and it is true, WurmNode does currently depend on these twitter feeds to work. If an API or "announcements.log" file will be made available before the weekend, I will do my best to port the functionality before locked out of twitter.

We will be having a system that writes to a public file that you will be able to read from.

[Ols 305]

On 2/3/2023 at 5:07 AM, Tomatoes said:

much as there is an internet oligarchy and mafia, its not quite so bad. or maybe its worse then you think, depends on how you see it: - https://www.ces.tech/articles/2020/october/the-truth-about-the-people-with-the-keys-to-the-in.aspx - i was actually surprised by the info here. 

anyways, the way it looks with Musk now, - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/03/twitter-sued-overdue-rent-san-francisco-branch - i dont think twitter is going to be around for very much longer.

 

 

What will happen is that it will be sold for a massive loss, with the buyer taking on all the debt and obligations to gain access to it for a low initial fee. Companies of this size generally do not close down one day but rather get folded into a competitor's operation. 

 

  

On 2/3/2023 at 12:17 PM, elentari said:

If you owe the bank 1 M $ then you have a problem. If you owe the bank one billion dollars, the bank has a problem. The more Musk owes, the more 3rd parties will be interested in keeping twitter afloat so he pays his debt.

 

Not him personally, but the organisation that has now taken on the debt incurred in the process of buying it and is struggling to service those payments.

  

On 2/3/2023 at 12:17 PM, elentari said:

In any case, Twitter was always a destructive media force, promoting nothing but the dregs of humanity.

 

That said, yeah Wurm should really explore some open source alternatives or maybe even develop its own based on some open source software.

 

I wouldn't say that but it does make sense for Wurm to expose this information via APIs that other developers can draw from easily, rather than relying on a middle man. I think there's also a case to be made for there to be server APIs that work on a request basis - giving out current server information at whatever pace an affiliated site/application needs. Maybe the application only wants server data on a daily basis? If the most desirable approach is to stream events as and when they happen to all subscribers, I'd probably opt for an events driven architecture service like Apache Kafka to achieve this, although I admit that would probably be overkill.

Edited February 8, 2023 by Ols

[SmackedDown 115]

Trying to use the .XML for Discord bots and they all say the XML is not formatted correctly. Even a XML checker states the same. Webhooks are great from your deed to you discord server for 1 server your deed is on. Lets say others are on other servers how do you get those feeds or even the WO announcements like before.

[Docterchese 1,570]

On 5/26/2023 at 7:58 PM, SmackedDown said:

Trying to use the .XML for Discord bots and they all say the XML is not formatted correctly. Even a XML checker states the same. Webhooks are great from your deed to you discord server for 1 server your deed is on. Lets say others are on other servers how do you get those feeds or even the WO announcements like before.

 

It might be worth putting in a bug report if the xmls are incorrectly formatted. Has anyone else had the same issue?