Ben XO's dashboard

Ben XO replied on November 30, 2009 16:54 to the problem "Facebook application profile box empty" in Last.fm:

I'm sorry to inform you that the Facebook app which displays a box on your profile has been deprecated. See the 'application' page for the app on Facebook for more information.

Ben XO replied on November 30, 2009 16:53 to the problem "Different Artists with Same Name Problem" in Last.fm:

Unfortunately this is a very difficult problem to solve. However, it is something we are actively working on in the long run.

In the mean time, if you come across a track in your radio that is by the "other" artist, you could click Ban to prevent that track from appearing on your radio again.

Ben XO replied on November 30, 2009 16:50 to the problem "I've been debited twice!" in Last.fm:

Hi Alvaro,

If you subscribe twice through PayPal you will end up with two recurring subscriptions and PayPal will send us the money twice.

To fix this, you must cancel one of the recurring payments. (You must do this through PayPal). When this is done, please contact our customer support team for a refund on the months you were double billed.

Recurring payments through PayPal are similar to a 'standing order' - you tell PayPal to send us a certain amount of money every month. (They are not like a 'direct debit' - we do not have access to cancel your payments).

Ben XO replied on November 06, 2009 14:06 to the problem "Retired Facebook app - really? Why?!?" in Last.fm:

Hi Diana,

I'm afraid this was mostly a technical decision. Unfortunately it is not the case that it takes no effort to leave it be; there is always work to maintain a feature against an ever-evolving codebase, and deprecating the feature has actually freed up a large chunk of our server resources.Freed of the need to maintain it, we will be using the extra developer time available to work on improving the reliability and quality of our core product.

I hope you can understand our position!

Ben XO reported a problem in Ping.fm on April 28, 2009 10:49:

Unnecessary URL shortening

Ping.fm transforms URLs to the http://ping.fm URL-shortener form even though the message would fit in the allowed length without the shortening. It would be nice if this only happened when the URL was too long.

Ben XO replied on August 02, 2008 12:09 to the idea "AIM status update" in Ping.fm:

i currently use Twitter.pl for Pidgin to update my status from Twitter (which i update from ping.fm) but it would be nice to do it all with one site.

Ben XO started following the idea "AIM status update" in Ping.fm.

Ben XO replied on July 03, 2008 00:57 to the problem "ping.fm incorrectly shortens a URL with brackets (parentheses)" in Ping.fm:

i posted the same problem against getsatisfaction.com in another ticket, and the guy from there (here?) said it would involve wrapping or modifying something in Rails.

Not sure if ping.fm is Rails based, but if it is, you might want to collab with him on it. :)

Ben XO replied on July 02, 2008 14:51 to the problem "getsatisfaction incorrectly shortens a URL with brackets (parentheses)" in Get Satisfaction:

Sounds good to me. If it's a problem with Rails auto-linking, I guess I should take my bug report upstream (or perhaps you could take your fix upstream..!)

Presumably this is exactly the same bug as Twitter and Ping.fm exhibit as they're rails-based too.

Ben XO replied on July 02, 2008 11:08 to the problem "ICQ CONNECTION PROBLEMS" in Adium:

A version of pidgin that fixes the problem is already out, so I'd expect a version of Adium to be imminent...

Ben XO reported a problem in Get Satisfaction on July 02, 2008 11:01:

getsatisfaction incorrectly shortens a URL with brackets (parentheses)

Same problem as with this ticket i posted for ping.fm:

http://getsatisfaction.com/pingfm/top...

http://bassdrivearchive.com/archives/...(2008-07-04).mp3

is shortened wrong, as you can see.

Note: many implementations of e.g. BBCode (such as the implementation in vBulletin) have the same problem. But the URL I pasted is straight from Firefox "right click, copy location", and I should not have to manually substitute %28 and %29 for the brackets.

According to RFC1738 (http://www.w3.org/Addressing/rfc1738.txt , section 2.2) the following characters are allowed unescaped in a URL:

$-_.+!*'(),

Of course if you automatically include ) in a URL without you will probably have complaints from people who enclose their entire URLs in brackets (http://www.example.com/). I would suggest only excluding a final ) or , (and possibly !) if the following character is a disallowed character (e.g. a space) and always including all the others. Also definitely include a ) if the URL ends with it if the URL previously contained a matching number of (s.

See, look, i've done all your work for you. ;)

Ben XO replied on July 02, 2008 10:54 to the question "Ping.fm shortened URL returns HTTP 404" in Ping.fm:

I have a similar problem: http://getsatisfaction.com/pingfm/top...

Ben XO replied on July 02, 2008 10:37 to the problem "ping.fm incorrectly shortens a URL with brackets (parentheses)" in Ping.fm:

According to RFC1738 (http://www.w3.org/Addressing/rfc1738.txt , section 2.2) the following characters are allowed unescaped in a URL:

$-_.+!*'(),

Of course if you automatically include ) in a URL without you will probably have complaints from people who enclose their entire URLs in brackets (http://www.example.com/). I would suggest only excluding a final ) or , (and possibly !) if the following character is a disallowed character (e.g. a space) and always including all the others. Also definitely include a ) if the URL ends with it if the URL previously contained a matching number of (s.

See, look, i've done all your work for you.

Ben XO replied on July 02, 2008 10:31 to the problem "ping.fm incorrectly shortens a URL with brackets (parentheses)" in Ping.fm:

heh looks like getsatisfaction.com has the same problem :)

Ben XO reported a problem in Ping.fm on July 02, 2008 10:31:

ping.fm incorrectly shortens a URL with brackets (parentheses)

ping.fm incorrectly shortens a URL with brackets, for example:

http://bassdrivearchive.com/archives/...(2008-07-04).mp3

is shortened to

http://ping.fm/dqoL0(2008-07-04).mp3

Note: many implementations of e.g. BBCode (such as the implementation in vBulletin) have the same problem. But the URL I pasted is straight from Firefox "right click, copy location", and I should not have to manually substitute %28 and %29 for the brackets.