Group Redent Plugin for Status.net / Identi.ca

For a bit over a year now I’ve been using the free software based microblogging service identi.ca. Unlike twitter, the identi.ca code base is released under the AGPLv3, through the status.net project. Anyone is free to setup their own instance of status.net and can even federate with other instances, using the Open Micro Blogging standard.

Another feature which identi.ca/status.net has over twitter is support for groups, so someone can send a message to a group of people, a bit like how a mailing list works. One down side of this feature is that some people redent (like retweeting, but on identi.ca) without removing the group “bang tag” (aka !). This leads to the same message being sent to the group over an over again which gets annoying. I left !linux and have considered leaving !ubuntu, because of how often this happens.

As status.net is freely available, I decided to write a plugin which handles this problem. If someone redents a message to a group without changing the group tag to a hash tag, the plugin does it for them. It is like the status.net twitter bridge when reposting dents to twitter. If someone really wants to redent something to a group, they simply use !! instead of ! and it will be sent to the group. This is useful, if for example, a dent from someone is relevant to a group, but wasn’t posted there initially, it can be redented to the group

I disagree with Bela Hausmann (aka @and3k), I think it should be enabled by default on identi.ca. I hope others consider it to be a useful feature and ask for it to be added to identi.ca.

If you run your own instance of status.net running, download the plugin, drop it into /path/to/statusnet/plugins/GroupRedentCleanerPlugin.php and add the following to your config.php: addPlugin('GroupRedentCleaner', array()); Have a play!