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Asked: 2026-06-15T23:05:03+00:00

I am currently working on a Flattr plugin for a popular open-source RSS reader

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I am currently working on a Flattr plugin for a popular open-source RSS reader (tiny tiny RSS).

I am using the lookup API for the first time and am unsure why I am getting mixed results.
So I’m unsure if I use the API correctly and want to confirm with you experts if I got something basic wrong.

First, let’s see if I can come up with an API call that looks up a thing successfully. I look at the Flattr page of thing 1066706 (I can’t post the whole URL here as SO only allows me two URLs for this whole post). On that page, I find the official URL which Flattr stores for that thing and look that up with the API:see here

This returns {"type":"thing","resource":"https:\/\/api.flattr.com\/rest\/v2\/things\/1066706", ... so that’s good.

But it seems this method is not a sure way to test if things exist. Here is an example that doesn’t work: I open the Flattr page of thing e7579b349cb7b319b28d883cd4064e1e.

That URL I find on that page is indeed the URL of that article and I don’t see any other URL it might have. I look that up in the same way as above:check this

Alas, I get {"message":"not_found","description":"No thing was found"}

(I also tried both of these with encoded URLs, but got the same result. I figured this is easier to read for you.)

So, why would that second thing not be found? Thanks for any enlightenment.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The id “e7579b349cb7b319b28d883cd4064e1e” is not a real thing id but a hash that identifies a temporary thing for a not yet submitted thing – it’s part of Flattr’s autosubmit functionality: http://developers.flattr.net/auto-submit/

    So the system is very correct in telling you that a thing for that URL doesn’t exist – someone would need to flattr that thing for it to become submitted for real and created in the system with a real id to it.

    (Just for reference – for some URL:s, like Twitter URL:s, Flattr can actually answer that the URL is flattrable even though it can’t find it in the system: {"message": "flattrable", "description": "Thing is flattrable "} That way you can now that it is possible to flattr that thing without you having to use any kind of flattr-button/url supplied by the author to be able to flattr the URL)

    Also – if you don’t know it yet then for a RSS reader you should primarily be looking for rel-payment links to find out whether an entry is flattrable or not, see http://developers.flattr.net/feed/ and http://relpayment.com/

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