characters_reserved_per_media value says 22 in API, but seems to be 23 as of today

dubiousbaldwin · 2013-03-06T22:31:55.000Z

http://screencast.com/t/i7CXxIZdbGSc for evidence of the documentation as of 2:28PM PT March 6 2013

Using https://api.twitter.com/1.1/help/configuration.json, we are finding that characters_reserved_per_media has a value of 22 characters, as it has for some time now.

However, the API is acting like photos take up 23 characters as of the last couple hours, and is rejecting update_with_media calls that have a photo and 118 characters (no URLs).

It’s feasible to have 3rd party services dynamically update with your help/configuration endpoint to set media character allotments, but when the API and documentation ceases to be accurate, this seems like a pretty nasty bug.

This is affecting numerous Fortune 500 enterprise brands that use our platform for marketing on Twitter. Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

episod · 2013-03-06T23:17:04.000Z

Do you have an example captured response of that method returning 23 for that field? I’m not able to reproduce in my requests to help/configuration


{
  "short_url_length": 22,
  "short_url_length_https": 23,
  "characters_reserved_per_media": 23,
  ...

If you have a response with HTTP headers, it would be very useful in tracking down if there are any servers not correctly returning this amount. Thanks!

dubiousbaldwin · 2013-03-07T01:41:56.000Z

Thanks Taylor. I’m actually now seeing 23 characters for the characters_reserved_per_media field, not sure if this was weird caching on our servers doing the retrieval or what.

It is a little misleading that the documentation page about help/configuration still shows an old response, but it makes sense that its 3p’s responsibility to dynamically adjust.

Thanks!

episod · 2013-03-07T01:46:11.000Z

Agreed. I’ve updated the doc. Thanks!