News For Chat Catcher Plugin Users

Chat Catcher, which has a plugin for WordPress users allows bloggers to install their free service and add a “reaction” like in Disqus or trackback entries from Twitter, FriendFeed, and identi.ca, along with various url-shortening services.

Here is what Shannon Whitley, the creator of Chat Catcher said in an email I received for Chat Catcher users:

Greetings,

I’d like to make everyone aware of an issue we are having in processing your comments. The bit.ly url shortening service temporarily blocked Chat Catcher and we were not able to expand bit.ly urls. This has prevented us from linking comments back to your blog if bit.ly was used to shorten the url. Links from other url shortening services were not affected.

This was a temporary situation due to routine maintenance at the bit.ly site. I have been in contact with support staff at bit.ly and we are working on the issue. At this time, you should begin to see comments again.

For some posts, Chat Catcher will go back and retrieve comments that were missed during this period. There are some limitations around historical searches and it’s probably best to assume that most of your missing comments will not be retrieved.

I apologize to those people who have missed comments. As a user of the service, I’m disappointed as well. I am doing everything I can to make sure Chat Catcher runs smoothly and will post any updates to the @ChatCatcher account on Twitter.

Thank you for your support.

Best,

Shannon Whitley
Whitley Media
swhitley AT whitleymedia DOT com

By the way, separated the email address so Shannon would not have any extra spammage.

So, basically until Bit.ly is fixed, Chat Catcher cannot process urls with Bit.ly. However, they will be able to go back and catch up from skipped tweets once they are back up.