@recomme down
There’s a bug that showed up that means direct messages get “stuck” and spam a user with the same message. A thousand apologies to anyone whom this affected. The bot is down until I can sort it out.
recom.me
Replies are sane again
A little bit of hacking, and @recomme has adjusted to the new API changes. The bot should not incorrectly reply to you when you simply mention it to your followers. I’m sorry for the couple spurious messages sent out today.
Top Twitter Tips for Musicians
There are a lot of musicians following @recomme, and you can’t imagine the number of private messages the bot receives asking to be recommended. Those are more forgivable than the blind, automatic, “hey, check out my blog” DMs.
If you’re a musician, and new on Twitter, you need to read this article. Don’t be “that guy.”
Overactive replies
You may have noticed that @recomme now responds to any mention of its username. This is because of a surprise change in the API. Unfortunately, the result comes across as fairly spammy behavior.
I’m sorry for this. I’m looking into a fix soon, but can’t guarantee when I’ll be able to see to it.
Better matches
After an evening of hacking, I’ve implemented some techniques I’m fairly happy with so that the recomme bot will be confused a lot less often in response to tweets. I hope this means more uptime, fewer nonsensical or buggy responses, and a better experience for all.
For what it’s worth, there’s some intelligent text matching in there, but the real star of the show is MusicBrainz’s public domain ArtistAlias data. This should mean that @recomme won’t be confused by queries like “DCfC,” “CSS,” or (ugh, ‘cause this was a big probem) “acdc.”
