gwibber should display/create retweets correctly (not '♺')

[LiohMoeller]

gwibber currently just adds a ♺ sign to retweets, instead of marking them as retweeted. The latter will display them correclty in twitters web ui (a green retweet symbol in the upper left corner of the tweet) and in other clients like the Android twitter client (which is even not able to display the ♺ correctly btw).

[Jon Dowland (jond)]

If I may just expand on this: I don't know if gwibber is trying to be clever or cute, but it's approach to retweets loses information and frustrates your followers.

Twitter has a special notion of a 'retweet' which is different from a regular tweet. Something someone else writes is retweeted by you, which puts their tweet in your follower's streams. That is, the tweet's author is still the same, the date of the tweet is still the same, and - crucially - if your follower is also following that author, they don't see the tweet TWICE. (or more times, if more people retweet it).

Gwibber merely copies the text, prepending '♺ @<original user>'. This loses the correct author and date information, causes duplication and frustration in timelines, and potentially truncates the original message, needlessly.

[pwaring (launchpad-pwaring)]

The other problem is that copying the original user's name means that you lose some of the 140 characters. It's not uncommon to see users with Twitter names of 10+ characters, so once you include the ♺, a space and the user's name you've lost 10% of the available space, which often means that a retweet won't fit without editing (which sort of goes against the point of retweeting).