Goodbye, Twitter Tools

I had fallen behind in installing software updates on this blog since I hadn’t posted for a while. (Too many other things going on in my life that I had to deal with so the blog got put on the back burner.) So when I logged in today I wasn’t surprised to see that several plugins needed to be updated. One of them in particular really bothered me.

I have been using Twitter Tools to tweet my new posts for a long time. One of the features I liked in Twitter Tools was the additional plugins made for it. For example it had a YOURLs plugin that would use my YOURLs installation to supply short URLs for each tweet.

But the update I installed today changed everything. Not only does the YOURLs plugin no longer work but Twitter Tools requires another plugin, Social, to be installed to make the main plugin work. Though I didn’t like this requirement I installed it anyway so I could see how it worked. If things went fine I’d just remove the plugin.

Things didn’t go fine. For one thing there was a problem with Social. When I clicked the link to add my Twitter account it redirected me to a dead link on my own blog. I had to manually play with the URL to point to the proper page to allow Social to access Twitter. Then, once I’d set up the account, it didn’t tweet my next blog post.

The final piece to the puzzle was the 2,021 comment spams that came within an hour of setting things up. I will not say that Twitter Tools or Social are responsible but out of the 200 I’ve managed to moderate already all of them are associated with the tweets imported by Twitter Tools. It certainly seems suspicious.

Needless to say Twitter Tools and any related plugins are no longer welcome on any of my blogs. Time for me to investigate other solutions.

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