Retrieve Twitter "mentions" timeline

[James Teh <jamie@…>]

It would be useful if Bitlbee could retrieve the "mentions" timeline in addition to the "home" timeline for Twitter accounts. See here: ​http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/statuses/mentions

[ilf@…]

Just a "I second this" to subscribe here.

[uschebit@…]

Mentions are sorely missed by me, too. While you're at it: How about twitter's direct messages?

[renchap]

+1, useful feature

[MentalFS <bitlbee-bugs@…>]

I'm wondering a bit why Twitter doesn't include mentions in the home view, but that's the way it is.

I'd like to see them, it does not have to be a separate channel (in chat mode), in fact that would be better for me (less clutter).

[MentalFS <bitlbee-bugs@…>]

One problem I see could be old mentions popping up everytime you log in. It would be great if they could be filtered based on age or something. Like only younger than the first fetched item in the timeline.

Also, if someone you follow mentions you, that tweet shouldn't occur twice in your channel/chat.

[quintopia]

I would be happy enough if the @mentions got mixed together with the main timeline in time order. That would automatically handle the old @mentions issue, since old ones would be older than your most recent tweets.

[meh. <meh@…>]

First patch

[meh. <meh@…>]

I made a patch for adding mentions to the timeline.

You can set if you want mentions or not by setting include_mentions to true or false.

Mentions are added only if they aren't too old, like #comment:5 suggested, same goes for multiple occurences, they're sent only once.

Plus if the message starts with @username it's replaced with the IRC nick, because some IRC clients highlight only if the message starts with the nick. I couldn't implement this yet because I don't know how to get the IRC nick , anyone can do it or tell me how to please?

Live updated patches here: ​https://github.com/meh/bitlbee/compare/master...twitter.diff

[wilmer]

I thought you had a clean version of the patch (no whitespace changes, using tabs instead of spaces)?

Then again, I also mentioned running indent over the Twitter code since it's awfully inconsistent at the moment. Were you waiting for that?

What's the point of enable_highlight_filtering ? I suppose that can be deleted since we're not handling the hilights (the user can just set a /hilight himself if s/he wants to). Either way, new settings should always be documented.

It'd be nice to have a different polling interval for stuff like mentions and DMs at some point but no need to do that now already.

[meh. <meh@…>]

Yeah sorry, the uploaded patch is old, same goes for the address.

The enable_highlight_filtering isn't present in the last patch.

The address for bzr HEAD patch is ​https://github.com/meh/bitlbee/compare/devel...twitter-devel.diff

This patch has no space fixing, and if I recall it uses spaces instead of tabs because it useless to tinker around with spaces if you have to run indent anyway.

[wilmer]

Okay, I have to rush out a new release now to fix the followers problem. I did the indent I was going to do but want to look at this patch a bit more carefully before importing it.

To save both of us some pain, I did already generate a diff of your change post-indent, which should avoid any stupid merge conflicts.

[meh. <meh@…>]

Ported the post-indent patch to github.

[wilmer]

Perfect. I'll get to your patch, sorry for the wait, but I want to do a release this weekend and I don't like too much "new code" right in a release - it's bitten me before.

[meh. <meh@…>]

Replying to wilmer:

Perfect. I'll get to your patch, sorry for the wait, but I want to do a release this weekend and I don't like too much "new code" right in a release - it's bitten me before.

No problem, better safe than sorry :)

[wilmer]

I'm finally really looking at your code now. Quite happy about the implementation, mostly. :-)

Just looking at this piece:

	if (output && twitter_compare_elements(l->data, output->data) < 0) {
		continue;
	}

What's the purpose of that? I assume it's meant to prevent loads of old mentions being shown at login time? But what if the oldest mention is older than the oldest timeline message during subsequent fetches? I'd say that the user wants to see those.

(A bit hard anyway, maybe some users will expect to see older mentions even at login time.. This is one of the unanswered questions that kept me from implementing this myself. :-)

[meh@…]

Replying to wilmer:

What's the purpose of that? I assume it's meant to prevent loads of old mentions being shown at login time? But what if the oldest mention is older than the oldest timeline message during subsequent fetches? I'd say that the user wants to see those.

Yeah, I did what #comment:5 said, we could make it an option though.

[wilmer]

I'd prefer that. I prefer to err on the side of "too much" and let the user figure out what's new. Just like BitlBee doesn't remember the home timeline cursor across sessions. The only obvious difference here is that mentions will trigger hilights.

It can be annoying, but let's assume most people don't reconnect that often. Giving the people who do a setting would be best.

Will you or shall I?

[meh@…]

Added the option show_old_mentions, which is set to true by default.

[wilmer]

changeset:devel,808.

I made some changes (replaces the gbooleans with a few flags and renamed + sorted the settings) but otherwise all looks good. And it looks like it still works which is a nice bonus. :>

Would you mind also updating the help info for these new settings BTW?

[wilmer]

Oops. Looks like I forgot to close this bug. This was done in 3.0.4 already.