Okay, so I got this plugin for Google Chrome.
After a year of using the plugin, the Notifier for Twitter plugin stopped working.
Instead of a notification for a tweet, I got this instead:
I should have gotten this:
Clicking the tweets in the plugin worked okay.
I tried everything under the sun.
Within the plugin options, I clicked the Logout button, and then reauthorized the app. NOTHING!
I uninstalled the plugin and reinstalled the plugin. NOTHING!
I cleared my chrome cache. NOTHING!
I uinstalled and reinstalled Chrome. NOTHING!
I rebooted my computer. NOTHING!
And worst of all? It works on my other computer that has the same operating system.
I won’t bore you with everything else I tried.
After 3 days, I decided to use the Chrome TweetDeck. I liked it except for the fact that I always had to have it up and running in Chrome to get my notifications, and I couldn’t lengthen the notification timeout to more than 2 seconds. Very annoying! I mean, I read fast, just not that fast.
1 week later, I decided to reinstall the plugin again thinking that maybe Twitter fixed something at their end. Sure enough, it DIDN’T work. After 30 minutes of trying other things, I FINALLY figured out the problem. The problem always existed (on my end), so it had something to do with a change to Twitter’s website that introduced the error. I remembered that the problem started happening when Twitter announced changes on February 7th, 2017.
https://blog.twitter.com/2017/an-update-on-safety
Here is what I did that helped determined my problem:
1) I right-clicked the plugin and clicked Manage extensions. I then clicked the background.html link.
2) This brought up the Chrome Developer Tools Window. It was defaulted already to Console and was monitoring the extension. Low and behold….. a 401 Authorization Error???? Wait! What?
3) I then started Googling the issue, and upon my second website visit, I found the issue.
https://twittercommunity.com/t/user-streams-401-unauthorized-error/8376/11
The following (yellow highlighted part of the) sentence stood out like a sore thumb.
401: Authentication credentials (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/auth) were missing or incorrect. Ensure that you have set valid consumer key/secret, access token/secret, and the system clock is in sync.
Could it be that simple? I do have an issue with the time on this computer that is connected to a network. The network time is 5 minutes fast, and every so many hours, the network does a sync refresh causing my computer to be off 5 minutes again. Nothing, and I mean nothing has ever prevented me from doing anything because my computer time was 5 minutes off. I have heard things not working because of the clock being more than an hour or day or year off, but not 5 minutes.
I changed my computer time by decreasing the minutes by 5 to sync with the real time and wouldn’t you know it!
BAM!
Fixed.
Hope this helps someone else!