I have never heard anyone in 20+ years of development experience try to say they don't own responsibility for their API- Application Programming Interface. It has no meaning if not supported by the underlying application.
Bogie, I'm not mad at you- you are just the messenger. Please take the message back to Ched that he's making a big mistake and it makes all of you look really bad.
If a chain drops due to an ingame failure such as server outage etc, the chain should be restored
If you are too lazy to use the Mark 1 Human Eyeball that God gave you to monitor your chains as the game intended, and use out of game scripts/software/APi and your chain drops, suck it up
actually no, the developer shouldn't be needed to validate if the data is right, it's an official API provided by torn servers not third-party servers, how would the developer even know if the data is right? so if the developer of tools say data provided by torn servers wrong is will it make data provided by torn server wrong? The source of truth is torn server not the developer. Any data provided by Official-API should be considered as truth as far as the tool is concerned.
If the API says one thing and the website says a completely different thing who will you trust? They are both data from torn servers and are supposed to be same. It's not the tool developer's responsibility to decide which is correct information.
If the API says one thing and the website says a completely different thing who will you trust? They are both data from torn servers and are supposed to be same. It's not the tool developer's responsibility to decide which is correct information.
That one is easy: the official position is that Torn the game is the reference, and the API is not.
Yep, shouldn't "need" to, just like we shouldn't "need" banks, because nobody should steal from someone else...
But the consequences of not, in a Production environment, are just too high not to.
Its good practice to validate, validate, validate... bugs happen with APIs, many times they remain happening for as long as they do because they're not reported.
The "third party" comment was because to the developer of the software, the Torn API is a third party data-source. Id validate ANY third party data-source, and do, just out of good commercial practice (which should bleed into personal projects too).
I believe this was the only mention of when it might be back up:
Posted on 09:42:20 - 02/11/22 (8 hours ago) Chedburn: One of our replicas (that the API uses) is currently out of sync, halted at around 05:13:22. We'll need to re-sync it. This could take some time, but we'll try to get it all sorted today.
Again, there are hardly words. "You should build in a bunch of validation to verify our system is sending over correct data." Again, if I said this to one of my customers, I would be laughed out of the building.
Torn started as a pet project and we get that Ched hasn't worked in a professional development shop. But even for not working in a professional development shop, this idea that the API isn't responsible for accurate data is a stretch.
If Ched is overwhelmed (like was said in his announcement) and this is one too many things to deal with right this moment, okay. Say that. Don't say "Sorry our data was crap- you shouldn't rely on it and should totally reverse engineer it to make sure it is right."
not saying any of that is wrong dude, not my issue at all.
we dropped a chain as we used the api as our last line of defense alert you know, that's on us and we take full responsibility for that.
the issue i have is that the dev team knew about the issue and did nothing to alert the wider community other than admit the issue existed in a thread buried deep in the forums. a thread started by another player. that is why i posted this here as i knew more people would see it and stop trusting the api.
the api is not third party. it is now a pretty well used part of the game. had we noticed an issue with the apps using the data we would of blamed the app before doubting the data. i think anybody else who uses torn tools, yata, whatever other app/plugin/bot would do the same. blaming the third party not the data.
the thread in bugs and issues is linked in the op, i imagine that would be the best place to look for updates. but hope now we are having this discussion here, this thread will get an update then too.
I'd actually love it if you can write it somewhere officially on api docs page. All this fuss will be gone and people will create/use tools with the assumption that data from torn API might be wrong. BTW Nothing against you :)
The game wasn’t providing bad data, if you’d looked at the game the chain wouldn’t have broken. The API, released for the purposes of allowing supplementary tools to be built, NOT guaranteed “failsafes”, provided bad data.
RadicalFanatic[1483140] · #74 · edited
I don't know why so many people are complaining, any faction dedicated to chaining won't have there chains broken, everyone expects easy accomplishment these days, and robots to do all the hard work. I must say I notice a significant lag reduction since api went down, hopefully it stays down as long as possible.
If a chain broke it's your fault for not having actual human chain watchers it's not the api's fault but yours. *shrugs*
I would recommend you relook at the bug report. The OP there outlined that the API provided incorrect information. Bogie and Ched acknowledged that the API sent incorrect information.
I am not here to rail on them for having a bug. Bugs happen all the time in software development. It was the expression that they don't stand behind their API that is galling.
Definitely something that should be announced one way or the other to the playerbase... API was down since about 5:30 am... then about 13:30 it got disabled..
Is this the official answer, that the API results are not guaranteed to be correct?
The API documentation page starts out with "The goal of the Torn API is to provide a fully supported and read-only method for players to pull useful information from Torn about their player, faction, or company." and no where does it state that the responses may be incorrect. My interpretation of that the page, is that the API can be a trusted source of information.
Edit Maybe I should reword. Is the official answer that we should not trust the API to be correct at any point?
![[image: i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/Mja8BHJ.png){kind=link}