packtdavidb's dashboard

Selana, I have ATT as well and mine was working fine, then it just stopped last year. I Have been adding and deleting and just can not get it to work. What is odd is that my husband has no issue with it working and mine wont. I wonder if it is because I am a second phone on his account. Although I really don't see why that would make a difference. – Vretallin, on June 30, 2008 04:25

I'm on ATT as well, and everything was working fine, until I upgraded my phone. I can still tweet out, but nothing comes in. I went through the whole, "remove-add-verify" thing. I've sent "on" more times than I can count. And still, nothing. So sad!! I heart Twitter, I'm going through withdrawals!

hi eridanus I'm in ireland using three ireland and its very frustrating and i think your comments are very very relevant since a lot of mobile tariffs in ireland don't include free texts and also charge very highly for international texts - would twitter ever consider having a relevant sms number for each country and not just +44 for half the world!!!! if the twitter team would do something about your comment-6. *** A lot of us would be a lot happier if Twitter could get the ON command to work from the Web. ***" that would be a big help - COME ON TWITTER - THERES A LOT OF US OUT THERE WHO WANT TO USE THE SERVICE BUT ITS NOT ALWAYS EASY OR FREE!!!!!! – brackagh, on May 26, 2008 12:30

See Crystal's interim reply in
http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to... for the most comprehensive and useful explanation I've discovered so far.

Crystal and Jack from Twitter are following that topic, so I'll post this there too.

As I currently understand it:

1. SMS updates are very easy to turn OFF, from wherever you like (Web, phone, ...).

2. Twitter automatically turns SMS updates OFF whenever one of their their SMS fails to trigger a prompt confirmation of delivery from your phone network, for any reason at all. Your mobile service provider may have a temporary problem, your phone's battery needs charging, your phone can't get a signal, it's busy reorganising its memory, or whatever.

3. When Twitter goes down, SMS updates will probably go OFF too - and may very occasionally (though more probably not) go back ON when Twitter returns.

4. The only way to turn SMS updates ON is to send a classical SMS from your phone to the relevant Twitter No. (the international No. +447624801423 in my case) - quite expensive for some people. I'm certainly not going to do THAT 30 times a month! Using a 3rd. party app. running on your phone isn't enough: Twitter wants a "genuine" SMS to confirm SMS is working for your phone.

This classical SMS needn't be an ON message: a normal 140-character update will tell Twitter that SMS is working on your phone and turn SMS updates ON (until the next hiccough turns it back OFF).

For what it's worth:
I sent ON (to +447624801423) yesterday, immediately received Twitter's SMS confirmation, and received all 9 expected SMS updates over the next few hours.
Today, however, I've received nothing (should have been 2 SMS so far) - result of last night's downtime? Or were SMS updates affected by this? :-

"Given an overflow of IM traffic, we're going to shut off IM services for the night while things recover. We'll keep you updated!"
[blog link: http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/too-m...]

5. For some people even this classical SMS isn't enough: they have to delete & re-register their phone to persuade SMS updates to work again for a few hours. This is risky, because sometimes a deleted phone won't re-register.

6. *** A lot of us would be a lot happier if Twitter could get the ON command to work from the Web. ***

7. Twitter could wait longer (e.g. two successive non-confirmations of delivery) before automatically turning SMS updates OFF. (Might be cumbersome to implement, though: introducing an extra database of pending c-of-d's with a counter for each user).

8. I'd really like to recommend Twitter to my friends - but at present this SMS problem makes Twitter just too fiddly for non-geeks to be bothered with.

I had the same problem yesterday. Tried to verify my phone again today and this time it worked. So I'm guessing it might have been related to one of this week's outages. – mdy, on May 24, 2008 06:14

I deleted and re-saved my number. Despite sending the notification code, I didn't get re-registered. No updates/DMs for me... On Orange, Romania.

If you meant -- am I currently getting updates from their account, the answer is not right now because my sms also stopped working around 18 hours ago. LOL. – mdy, on May 23, 2008 16:25

Does their account works? – John, on May 23, 2008 09:07

If I may suggest -- it might be a good idea to try following a regularly updated twitter account, such as @bbcnews or another one of the newsbots. By following an account that I know is updated at least once an hour, I'm effectively testing on an hourly basis whether or not sms is working again (without having to do anything). – mdy, on May 22, 2008 16:26

AND again, the same is for me:

Poland, phone-carrier/operator: Play

For an experiment, I've started following myself, and have not recived any updates till now.

I've just sent an e-mail with this problem direct to them. When I recive anything, I'll paste it here.

if there's a problem at twitter.com in the application side, sending ON will not solve the problem.

i've done so many times lately since the internal server errors, and what did i learn from it ? i learned patience...

if sending ON or deleting then enrolling your phone only works for a short time, wait a few days. to be safe, try again after a week and see if the twitter developers have fixed the problem...

when i sent ON to twitter a few days ago, the phone notification stayed on this time, and until now it's still working. i suppose they've fixed the application problem. :-)

the service is free, who am i to demand more than what they can provide ?...

Hello. I see you've already found the relevant related thread.

Hope you don't mind my posting the link just the same, for future reference.

It's interesting that the problem was solved for so many people by simply sending a tweet. In my case, it was always by sending ON or by re-verifying my phone.

I had this problem too. O2, UK, pay as you go.

I deleted and started again with my phone last week -- worked for a couple of days but then sometime Saturday or Sunday it stopped.

Seems to go wrong at the weekend, which is annoying because that's when I'm away from the web and need SMS the most! (And can't get to web to do the delete & start over thing.)

Hi Non-Sequitur,

I hear you. And good points all.

We have myriad systems and scripts in place to check and triple check everything, texting/paging and otherwise notifying us at all hours if something even seems close to being a problem. Unfortunately this was one of those rare conditions where something we had not anticipated bit us (and you). We've new systems going into place right as I type this to make sure this edge case and any others we can anticipate around this issue won't come up again.

As for a status message on the site, coincidently enough one of the things I added to the site just yesterday was a message banner through which we can notify Sandy's clients of any issues (specific to them or otherwise). It is already in action for issues around account activation, but I'd just not yet had the chance to enable additional notifications. That'll be in tomorrow, I can assure you.

Rael

Well to be honest I was thinking that even something that was nothing more than a few scripts that checked her status and/or queue and sent out via email. Preferably from you all instead of a third party like Get Satisfaction. This way mobile users would not be flooded with a million emails that were not related just because we created or responded to other Get Satisfaction issues.

Also I still think that a little status icon on the website would be a good move. After all if we check that and the site is down then it is obvious that Sandy is most likely having issues of her own.

Hi Non-Sequitur,

Thanks for your thoughtful suggestions!

For an out-of-band email process with the ability to pick and choose topics you're interested in, GetSatisfaction's "Follow this topic" functionality seems to fit the bill.

For Sandy status updates, visit http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy... and click the "Follow this talk topic" link beneath the first post.

If you're also interested in any new features, fixes, etc you might also consider following the "Updates" topic at http://getsatisfaction.com/iwantsandy.... We post there with detailed notes whenever we push a new version of anything to our servers.

(Do make sure you have your GetSatisfaction account set up send you email about topics you follow (under Account > Email & Notifications) [see http://getsatisfaction.com/satisfacti... for more info].)

We are usually pretty on the ball about posting to there when there are status updates (good and bad) to report. And it is completely out-of-band and so doesn't rely at all upon Sandy or iwantsandy.com being available.

Having this on the main site wouldn't be much of a protection in the eventuality that the site weren't reachable, I'm afraid.

The one thing that would have made all of this probably a lot smoother today would have been if I'd moved a little faster to post in the first place.

If you've any suggestions or pointers to other things that might have worked well, please do pass them my way. While balancing fixing the problem and reporting back with anything approaching helpful details is prime for me, anything else I can do to accomplish more of both of these goals is pure gold!

Best,

Rael

Thanks for the vote of confidence, softwarecat. A start up in Oregon? What's that like? ;-)