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"@" on Twitter

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Re: "@" on Twitter

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen the rate limit message a lot. Almost seems like it always happens when there is a Referer header. If you refresh after the error, it usually works. Not sure why they would punish people for linking to tweets...

It may be from your cell network's NAT hitting rate limits on their IP.

My network’s NAT is my router in the basement. There is no CGNAT, and yet I hit rate limits. No one else in our house accesses twitter, logging at the router reveals usually one to two attempts of accessing twitter per day.

And yes, rate limits.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#92
post #66
post #8

That must be Bobby Droptables twitter account :-)

Classic! We named our guild in EQ "NULL", as a joke. People would comment that we had a problem when they saw us running around with " " running over our head. It bit us on the ass when someone went to Sony's EQ con one year, and they literally couldn't print out their badge because "your guild name is NULL? Really?"

> they literally couldn't print out their badge

I still don't quite get how this doesn't work. Why are they handling "NULL" as a special case? What's coercing "NULL" into null?

Re: "@" on Twitter

#93

Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you. My understanding is that for the sake of simpler interfaces such as SMS, which they let hold the whole service back for a long long time, they had a "follow [username]" feature - and if the person had to approve follow requests, it would send one to them. To accept the re…

“Next time you make a seemingly obvious mistake, don't feel too bad. Even Twitter did it.”

There most infamous “mistake”, at least as I see it, was neglecting to backup their database data. That was just unforgivable.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#94
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I want to change my name to NaN

you probably don't, if the story about the cars with plates on a variations of "NO PLATE" is any indication https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to-bill/

Wow. Problem one: applicant writes "no plate" instead of leaving it blank or writing in a crossed line. Problem two: so do the law enforcement officials! The former is a silly mistake; the latter should be a learning opportunity.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#95
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... And they literally just have to show you 280 characters. Thank God they are not building flying cars..

And to show you that 280 characters they need to download about 6 kbyte css, 4 kbyte javascript, 17 kbyte Google analytics, 26 kbyte jquery, 1.5 kbyte favicon, and some images... Total about 100 kbytes.

It's almost as if "they literally just have to show you 280 characters" is a bit of an oversimplification.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#96
post #67
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been bitten by this bug before, PHP's associative arrays are pretty strange compared to other languages.

I find it easier to think of them as an "ordered" hash map rather than an array...

http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

First sentence, “An array in PHP is actually an ordered map.”

Re: "@" on Twitter

#97
Reminds me of some artists who included a script tag in their book title so that when the book got listed on online shops it would make the page spawn a JavaScript alert()

Re: "@" on Twitter

#98
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could such an account have been created?

I asked somebody who used to work there, and the answer I got was that there are a bunch of accounts from back before validation was as tight as it is now. Which seems reasonable to me. At-replies were not something that Twitter started with, but instead were community-driven with software support added later: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2008/how-replies-w... It's a good reminder that it's always easier…

It does seem surprising that they haven’t contacted the affected users and invited them to change their usernames.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#99
post #69

It's a lesson for us to learn when building services that people create accounts on. There's another one, https://twitter.com/@home . It redirects back to Twitter's home page. I discovered this while looking for "@home", which is a homeware store.

That will happen for any reserved names where it is used for a page rather than registered by a user. e.g.: http://twitter.com/@search

Re: "@" on Twitter

#100
post #22

For a while I had my display name (as opposed to @ handle) on Twitter set to the empty string. It didn't cause major issues as far as I could tell, though it would cause some Twitter clients to display my tweets unusually. I achieved this by entering a greater than symbol (>) in the input field. Twitter presumably tried stripping any HTML tags, which resulted in an empty string. I'm not sure if this still works; they…

> I achieved this by entering a greater than symbol (>) in the input field. Twitter presumably tried stripping any HTML tags, which resulted in an empty string. I'm not sure if this still works; they might have fixed that bug.

I just tried it and got the following error:

> Name can't include 'invalid characters'

Note how it doesn’t define "invalid characters".

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