EntryCentral and Twitter

Update 23rd July: Twitter has now resolved these issues, still without notice or explanation, one week later.

We’re having some trouble with Twitter.

The EntryCentral script which launches events and memberships, posts a Tweet with the name of the event/membership and a link to its EntryCentral page. Our Twitter account is intended to just carry notifications of launches, plus the very occasional blog post. We’ve been using it this way this since 2010 without issue, and have quietly picked up over four thousand interested followers.

On July 16th, we started to notice that we were having trouble with Twitter:
1. Nobody is able to Tweet links to the EntryCentral website

2. When a user clicks an EntryCentral link in an existing Tweet, they’re shown the following warning

This one certainly carries the highest reputational risk for us.

Furthermore, we used a Facebook app within Twitter to replicate the Tweet on our Facebook page. But the link routed the user through Twitter, so Facebook users clicking old posts are all shown the same warning as Twitter users.

We used Twitter’s support pages to find the feedback form to query this decision, and in particular what triggered it. We immediately received the following automated response, but nothing further at the time of writing, 3 days later.

Meanwhile we’ve checked EntryCentral’s reputation across a variety of other services, and the results all came back clean:

In fact here’s a list of website reputation checkers – please take your pick!

In addition to simply not currently having any problems, we use the following services to mitigate against future problems and keep your data secure
– Cloudflare – to provide a security layer which stands up in front of EntryCentral
– Tinfoil Security – for independent penetration testing, looking for ways into the website through its pages via insecure code, but haven’t found any. Please locate and click the Tinfoil badge on the EntryCentral about page for verification.

We are still waiting for a response from Twitter, but in the meantime there are some things we can do now:
– In the short term, we will not include links to EntryCentral pages in launch Tweets
– We will begin posting directly to Facebook, so that Facebook users can click on a link and so that we no longer have that particular dependency on Twitter.

Still, we are hopeful that Twitter lifts this restriction quickly in order that we can resume normal service as soon as possible.

I’ll update this blog post when something happens

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