/chats resource gone?

Any request to /chats/ has been returning a 404 for a couple of days now. This currently breaks the Plex plugin entirely. I'm writing a fix for that now, as obviously it should be handling such a situation more gracefully, but... is it really gone, or is there something else going on?

I am also having this issue, it has broken the xbmc plugin as well. Originally I thought the issue was due to the plugin still using http://api.giantbomb.com rather than http://www.giantbomb.com/api but it seems the plugin is breaking on requests to /chats/, but other requests are still working.

For those with xbmc, I fixed this issue by commenting out the following lines in

/storage/.xbmc/addons/plugin.video.giantbomb/default.py lines 15-24:

#if user_api_key:

# response = urllib2.urlopen(API_PATH + '/chats/?api_key=' + user_api_key + '&format=json')

# data = simplejson.loads(response.read())

# if data['status_code'] == 100:

# # Revert to the default key

# my_addon.setSetting('api_key', '')

# else:

# global API_KEY

# API_KEY = user_api_key

# account_linked = True

Looks like this section is just to check if your API key is working or not and to use the default key if it is not. The Plex plugin may do this as well?

I was using the /chats/ api to send out tweets and emails whenever a new chat/stream went live. Is it really gone for good? That would be really disappointing, and result in having to do some awful screen-scraping workaround instead.

Hey guys, is /chats/ ever coming back?

Thanks!

I don't think it's documented anywhere, but the LiveBomb extension for Chrome pulls live show data from here: http://www.giantbomb.com/upcoming_json

Yeah, the upcoming JSON works well when staff members put shows in the upcoming block, but sometimes that doesn't happen. API calls to /chats/ were the most reliable method to tell any and every time a show went live.

If /chats/ really is deprecated for good, I'll probably just screenscrape http://www.giantbomb.com/chat/ and use a couple quick and dirty regexes to see if there's a chat going on, and what the title of it is.

@joshuacant:

The upcoming JSON also has an entry that indicates when a show is live (the liveNow field). You really don't need to do screen scraping.

Oh neat, that sounds like it will work great. Thanks.

I've switched to the JSON method, but it looks like /chats is back up and running again... Reappearing as mysteriously as it disappeared.

Yeah, what's the story here?

I pushed some fixes to the Plex plugin that give it exception handling powers (how novel) so a resource being unavailable doesn't make the whole thing fail, but it'd be nice to know if we should be using something else (like that JSON feed) or if /chats is still okay to use.

@frobie?