Rest client #follow! method rescues Twitter::Error::Forbidden

[joshsilverman]

Is there a reason you rescue 403 errors? I've just noticed that I have been missing a whole lot of these...

[sferik]

There are two versions of the follow method: #follow and #follow! The version without the bang suppresses Forbidden errors, the version with the bang raises Forbidden errors.

[joshsilverman]

I tried both methods and neither version raises an error. I also have modified the issue title to make clear that the follow! is the method rescuing, not follow.

Refer to line 142 of https://github.com/sferik/twitter/blob/master/lib/twitter/rest/api/friends_and_followers.rb

You can see that you're rescuing the error in follow! and not allowing it to propagate. Did you mean to have the rescue statement in the follow method maybe?

[sferik]

Sorry. My earlier post was from memory. I was posting from my phone, so it wasn’t easy for me to pull up the code. Looking at it now, you appear to be right. Note that the #follow method is implemented using the follow! method, so they both rescue Twitter::Error::Forbidden, as you say.

I’m trying to remember why I added the rescue in the first place. It was added in 7d42dd5, just before version 3.0.0 was released and has been in every version since then. You’re the first person to complain about it.

I guess my thinking was, if you try to follow someone who you don’t have permission to follow, it should fail silently instead of raising an exception. I’m not sure that was the correct decision or whether that’s even what I was thinking at the time. Maybe there’s a better reason that I can’t remember now. I’m worried that removing it now would cause exceptions for a lot of people who don’t expect it.

[joshsilverman]

No problem. I really appreciate the work you've done on this gem.

I'm having trouble coming up with a reason why it would be helpful to silence these errors. Wouldn't you expect #follow! to bark loudly if there was a permission error? Is it possible that you were rescuing attempted follows of suspended users?

I have implemented a workaround in my code: I now throw an error whenever #follow.empty? == true. That state indicates vaguely that something unexpected happened, which is enough of a warning system for me.

In terms of what's in the best interest of the community of users of the gem, I suspect that a large volume of follows are failing silently ( I believe that this has been a non-trivial issue in our codebase for as much as 10 months -- I don't know how we missed it). I think it would be best to air on the side of exposing the full Twitter response to users, especially for #follow!.

ps. I agree that it's strange that nobody else is complaining about this. Another clue may be that I'm seeing these errors when I hit a follow limit. The exception still seems valuable in that case.

[sferik]

I suppose I’d be willing to make this change in an upcoming minor release. Technically, it doesn’t change any public APIs.

[joshsilverman]

Thanks Erik -- I think it's in the best interest of users.

I would bet that you'll confuse some people who thought their follows had been going through, but ultimately they will appreciate the more transparent behavior.