Feature request: 'archive' should honor deletion

[za3k]

This is a request to make 'archive' remove tweets on re-running. If that requires checking all accessible tweets, it could be enabled by flag so the default run speed is reasonable.

Use case: Right now I'm using this to archive my friends' twitter, and it's basically making them uncomfortable that posting something online guarantees it will never be removed.

P.S. believe it or not, this is currently the best tool for archiving twitter that I've found.

[negatendo]

This is difficult to do right now because of the way the Twitter api limits the number of tweets the archiver can retrieve. It's possible to have a tweet deleted outside of the range of the tweets received, so the archiver would never know about its deletion.

A different approach might be making something else that "cleans" the archive as a side task. It could check each id in the archive for existence and remove those that are gone.

This is a good point regardless. Twitter says that developers should honor deletions in their applications. Folks rolling out bots for their friends or others should be aware of this issue.

[za3k]

Honoring deletions only within the 30,000 tweet archive limit would not be too bad of a compromise for me--I think most tweets get deleted within a day or two, except in cases where someone is closing their entire account.

[negatendo]

The limit is more like 3,200 tweets, by the way! Mentioned here: https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/statuses/user_timeline