Actually i think miningpoohub is right here. Seriously, how difficult can it be to contact 4 or 5 mining pools directly. It is 1 email spread to all mining pool owners, not a real big investement of time, not?
Every average serious guy in crypto have personaly developed software for parsing twitter. If you are not strong in programming - you can create your own slack chat and add crypto bot to your channel.
If any mining pool do not use any additional software for monitoring market - it is serious problem for pool investors. I would not trust my money to such persons who just sitting in their comfortable chairs and waiting for dirrect info messages from developers. Things in crypto is changing constantly and very fast, if you do not have means to get actual info then hire some experts, who can get all actual market state info an provide it for you.
Following top 300 crypto twitters is normal in nowadays, at least if you mining half of top 300 coins.
I strongly agree with this, crypto involves research. It wasn't like the swap date was kept a secret either, the devs posted it months in advance across several different social media platforms.