[Plugin: Twitter Widget Pro] Feed suddenly not updating

The vast majority of the time this happens because you’re on a shared host and someone else with a site on the same server (or set of servers) uses up all the requests before you can. Twitter only allows about 100 unauthenticated requests per hour from a given IP. Eventually I’m going to have to add authentication to the plugin, but I don’t currently have a timeline for that.

Thanks for the reply, Aaron. I’m wondering about the diagnosis, though. It seems incredibly abrupt. The thing stopped pulling Tweets all of a sudden and hasn’t pulled through a single new one since. It seems like, even if there were some other site on the same IP sending requests to Twitter, I’d squeeze through one every once in a while. I’ll keep fiddling with things…

That really depends on how that other site is using the Twitter API. Maybe it’s simply bashing the server. If so, a site could easily use an entire hour of requests in half a second or so.

Thanks again! I’m going to get my hosting folks to migrate my site to a different shared server and see if that has any effect. My other Twitter-related plug-in seems to be experiencing problems as well and I’m wondering if the IP has been blacklisted by Twitter.

That’s also possible. I’m a little fuzzy on Twitter’s policy of blacklisting. I know that if you over-use they will throttle the IP even more (so if you always use your 100+ requests in the first 5 minutes of the hour, they’ll cut you down to something like 50, and maybe even further), but I don’t know when they decide to completely blacklist an IP.

For what it’s worth, the issue was on the hosting/server end of things. Thanks!

Thanks for the update!