Hi there,

That is indeed what I meant. We are planning to skip some ids to force the 2^32 change during business hours. Twitter itself should be fine but I originally announced this to the list so people could make sure they'll also be fine. There is no change to the format of responses and the number will continue to grow upward. This was just fair warning that you might have used the Rails default definition (or some other method) that relies on signed 32-bit integers. The 'decide to do this' part is deciding to do this now by skipping ids rather than let it occur naturally 12 hours from now when people have been up for 24-hours and might not be at their best. Let's not allow the 'insulting' vagueness devolve into insulting tone, please. We're working on co-ordinating internally to do this at 21:00 GMT but like all things involving groups of people we may run a little late. Sometime after 21:00 GMT this is still planned. We'll update @twitterapi when the exact time comes.

Thanks;
 – Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
     Twitter Dev

On Jun 12, 2009, at 1:06 PM, Stuart wrote:


2009/6/12 J. Adam Moore <[email protected]>:

So do I just allocate as many bits as I can in my database to the id
field and hope that it doesn't ever run out? I'm confused why you just announced that. Okay, so an overflow is happening. Is that your fault?
Is this fixable on your end, my end. Is this just for people who are
using 32-bit signed ints to store ids? Decide to do what? Roll it over
like an odometer or increase the field size? Forgive me for being an
idiot, but 'decide to do this' is just about vague enough to be
insulting. I was happily under the assumption that this problem was
considered long, long ago when the field size was initially chosen by
who I also assumed to be smart people.

I read it as "we're considering skipping a bunch of IDs so we hit the
limit during today rather than sometime over the weekend. That way
there will be people at Twitter able to react to support issues that
might arise.

As for what developers should do I think it's pretty obvious. If
you're using a signed 32-bit integer to store tweet IDs you need to
change that ASAP because judgement day is coming!!!

-Stuart

--
http://stut.net/projects/twitter

On Jun 12, 10:23 am, Matt Sanford <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,

     The overflow of the 32-bit signed integer value for status ids
(a.k.a "The Twitpocalypse" [1]) is fast approaching. The current
estimate is around tomorrow at around 11am GMT, or 3:00am Pacific time
in the case of Twitter. There is some discussion internally about
accelerating things so we'll be in the office and able to cope. Nobody
is their freshest at 3:00am, not to mention it would be nice to not
have apps broken throughout the weekend if one-person developer teams
don't notice. No decision has been made yet but I wanted to get
something out to you all so you know what's going on in the event we
decide to do this.

Thanks;
  – Matt Sanford / @mzsanford
      Twitter Dev

[1] -http://www.twitpocalypse.com/


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