2nd
EventBox Twitter Aftermath
What happened today? Well, I woke up and found loads of messages that Twitter wasn’t working. So I launch EventBox and indeed something is wrong - no new messages although I can see about 25 unread events in the top level container. I scroll down and see messages dated 1-2 years ago that were sent a few hours ago. Bug.
I fire up the debugger while talking to Chris on the phone and looking at the API results from Twitter. These old dates must be coming from somewhere. So what happened?
- Twitter changed their API responses to include a bit more information about the creation date of the user who posted a tweet
- The creation date of the user and the creation date of tweet clashed in EventBox (essentially the date of the user overwriting the tweet date).
We’ve issued updates to all EventBox users (stable + bleeding edge) and have forwarded a critical bugfix release to the MacHeist people. We advise MacHeist users to read through my earlier post regarding restrictions before updating.
NOTE: Only new tweets will have the proper date. Old tweets which were fetched with the wrong date will remain unchanged.
Could we have prevented this? Yes. We should have been more careful when parsing the replies and we should not have assumed what we did. We’ve learned our lesson the hard way.
I sincerely apologize to anyone affected by this issue.
Update: While we wait for the MacHeist crew to update the MH binary, we’re hosting the critical bug fix release here.
