Get mentions to older posts

[marcthiele]

Hey there,

It would be fantastic to get bridgy to look even for older posts, if you start using it. Automatically would be fantastic, but I can see the overhead here with big blogs or websites. Therefore a manual way to let bridgy trigger a certain url and time would be fantastic.

Cheers,

/marc

[snarfed]

thanks for filing!

the example here was https://brid.gy/twitter/btconf , which signed up on 12/14, and hoped to backfeed everything on https://twitter.com/btconf/status/664389870492717056 (posted on 11/11) to http://beyondtellerrand.com/blog/wrap-up-ber2015 .

some IRC discussion with @kevinmarks and @aaronpk:

KevinMarks: if you tweet a link to it, does bridgy decide to look again?
snarfed: KevinMarks: the new tweet, yes, but not the old tweet with the responses he wants
KevinMarks: ah, right
aaronpk: snarfed: do you think it'd be simple enough to make a field you could put in a link to an old post and bridgy would go check it?
snarfed: aaronpk: honestly, no. :/ it's not really designed for that mode
i mean, it's obviously doable, but nontrivial
aaronpk: it wouldn't require extra backend infrastructure would it?
snarfed: i'm not sure
aaronpk: I don't really know how the queueing system works but I would imagine it might be as simple as putting a new job onto the queue the same way it does when it finds a new post
snarfed: aaronpk: yeah, i understand the idea. the problem is that most of the work happens before then, in creating the job to enqueue
aaronpk: ah
snarfed: mostly since that job is per response, not per post, since posts regularly get new responses
if you want to look, it'd basically be generalizing the poll method here to handle a single silo post as well as the current "grab everything" mode: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy/blob/master/tasks.py#L108

[tantek]

One possible UI for this would be a form like: "Original permalink: _______________ (Recrawl)" where the user/author could enter a permalink to an original post on their site, and have Bridgy recrawl that for u-syndication URLs, and then check its DB for all webmentions it attempted for those u-syndication URLs that failed (e.g. "No webmention targets") and resend them all.

[amandarush]

While I can definitely understand how non-trivial a feature like this would be, it would definitely be useful. When resending webmentions while using a screen reader, every time you resend, the focus changes because the page refreshes to reflect the new activity, so there's no way to pick up where you left off.

[snarfed]

done! feel free to try it on your user page. thanks for the suggestions all!