API Not Letting Me Follow

[DanielCHood]

A few users have reported to me that when they go to follow through my application that they are prompted with this: “You are unable to follow more people at this time. Learn more here.” and are linked to: https://support.twitter.com/articles/66885. None of them are at the 5,000 following limit and none have followed more than 1,000 today. My application doesn’t appear to be limited. Unfollowing and other api calls work fine. Any ideas?

[andypiper]

This is really hard to say - what is the API response code when this is happening in your application?

Are those same users able to follow and unfollow accounts via twitter.com directly? Is this limited to only a few users, or all of them? Is your application doing any kind of automation that cause the users to fall into the “aggressive following” definition?

[DanielCHood]

The response code is 161.

I’ve had it happen to my own account and I am able to follow the same user within twitter.com. Looking in my database, some members appear to still be able to follow people. Nothing is automated, my app just allows users to find accounts to follow by searching via keyword or searching through mutual friends. We limit them to 300 per day which is less than the 1,000 limit from twitter that I saw. Our current feature set is similar to crowdfireapp.com to be honest. Keeping track of their reach (follower count), new followers, new unfollowers, etc…

[DanielCHood]

Hello @andypiper,

Sorry to bother you and bump this thread but the issue is still happening. I thought it was resolved a couple hours ago (hence my deleted post) because it allowed me to follow a couple of accounts but it must have just been a coincidence because it’s back to delivering that error message.

Any ideas what might be the problem?

[DanielCHood]

So, I figured this out. Apparently if you make too many bad requests, your app keys kind of get disabled or some sort of prevention goes into place. I was sending the cursor key in another segment of my app in the wrong format which resulted in them all being bad requests. Once I stopped those requests from happening, my keys got unlocked.

[DanielCHood]

Hello @andypiper,

For some reason I’m still experiencing this issue intermediately. Can you give me any sort of guide on where to look for what might be causing this? All my other api requests appear to go through: getting ids for followers, looking up their user info, unfollowing, keyword searching, etc… Following appears to be the only thing that results in errors like this.

[DanielCHood]

@andypiper, I submitted a ticket to support on Monday because my app lost write access. Any idea how long it will take to hear back? We have several people that are waiting to use our service and we just went through this process Easter weekend (and haven’t changed anything since then that should cause this). Is there a phone representative or someone we can speak to?

[andypiper]

Timings may vary depending on availability of agents, but using the platform support forms is the correct way to go. If your app had write access revoked, there’s a high chance that it was caught by the antispam system we use to avoid automated bulk action apps.