Twitter has recently implemented changes to its API and we’re starting to see the full effect of them. For those of you that don’t know, a lot of our Twitter accounts have (or, had) automation set up from services such as weather.im or Weather Message – which broke about a month ago. We reverted to using weather.im and have had success for about a month – but officially the program, written by NWSChat founder Daryl Herzman, is no longer working, he said in a tweet:
Of course, this is very frustrating for all of us. We know how many people see our automated alerts and use them as a source for severe weather. I use it myself, and our other Team members do too. We’re losing a lot of information.
There’s currently no workaround and no ETA as to if we’re ever going to get automation on our accounts again. It should be noted that Twitter has been known to make some changes, heck it was even said that “good bots” would not have any restrictions, so maybe this is temporary. I wouldn’t count on it being, though.
Why was this done? Because Twitter is under new management and Elon Musk (former CEO of Twitter) thinks bots are bad and “abuse the API”. There might be some truth to this, but other things could have been done besides breaking hundreds of apps.
How else can I receive alerts? Multiple ways. Local television stations may offer their own weather app for their local area. There are many other weather apps out there that can send you alerts based on your location. My favorite is Carrot.
But I want to see all of the alerts I was seeing before 🙁 Our Discord server continues to receive updates from weather.im in real-time and posts updates into separate channels. You’re welcome to join-in on there!
Of course, I apologize for any inconvenience. Of course, I will still continue to use my Twitter account, but there will no longer be any automation. I will try to retweet any Warnings near the time they were issued.