Template talk:Twitterlink

Automatic link to Wayback Machine?

I'm pretty sure if we appended something like

([https://web.archive.org/web/1000/twitter.com/{{{1}}}/status/{{{2}}} Wayback Machine snapshot])

after the Twitter link itself, then it will automatically link to the oldest existing Wayback Machine snapshot (eg this link will redirect to this specific snapshot). While this doesn't guarantee the existence of a snapshot, it might (for example) ease or at least change the nature of the workload for WiKirby:Project Archive in some fashion.

I hesitate to change it myself since it doesn't seem like an insignificant change. —willidleaway [talk | edits] 19:03, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

PS: 'change the nature of the workload' meaning that the task is no longer about manually inputting a Wayback Machine snapshot link for every Twitter link that uses {{twitterlink}}, but about clicking through and verifying that some kind of snapshot exists (or getting IA to generate one). Twitter links that don't use this template are another story entirely of course. —willidleaway [talk | edits] 19:05, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

PPS (because basically I'm just thinking aloud here alone): this is a slight abuse of the Wayback Machine's URL-based snapshot search (via Wikipedia). Normally it will look for a year or year-month combination, and return the closest snapshot to that date. So in principle instead of 1000, you could use 0 or 199204 or 186555 (although some numbers lead IA to return the newest snapshot as if you hadn't supplied a number at all).

Since the oldest snapshot should usually be a sane one (or at least stands a better chance of being sane than the newest snapshot does) but isn't guaranteed to be, perhaps it would be wiser to have an optional argument to disable showing it in the link. —willidleaway [talk | edits] 19:26, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Having a parameter to disable it seems good, although I wonder if having it be a parameter to enable it and be off by default would be better. Maybe an optional parameter to set the Wayback Machine timestamp manually would be helpful? ---PinkYoshiFan 00:38, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Since it seems sooner or later we'll have to archive all links (as this is currently where the consensus seems to lean), so I support the change.

Afaik, tweets can't be edited, so getting the oldest snapshot shouldn't cause any problems. That being said, if there would any benefits with making that adjustable, then I don't mind. Superbound (talk) 08:48, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Tweets can be edited, but only for 30 minutes after posting and only for subscribers. I don't think it'll ever be an issue, and thinking on it more a case where a manual timestamp would help would probably be enough of an edge case that we could just add that to the template if necessary. ---PinkYoshiFan 15:04, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Prototype at User:WillIdleAway/Twitterlink—pretty simple change, I think. In this prototype, inclusion of the Wayback Machine snapshot link is optional and opt-in, as PYF suggested. There is also an optional parameter for the timestamp. See User:WillIdleAway/Sandbox#twitterlink for example usage. —willidleaway [talk | edits] 23:17, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Looks good, and a manual timestamp is definitely needed now if the Wayback Machine archives any tweets while Twitter is login-required and then Twitter stops needing logins. ---PinkYoshiFan 23:28, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Per Gigi's approval over Discord and PYF's approval above I have pushed the change to the actual template. —willidleaway [talk | edits] 23:30, 3 July 2023 (UTC)