Elevated access and new post/rate limit

[LeBraat]

Hello @GoalShouter,

Thanks for writing in. I’ll look into your case now.

[GoalShouter]

Thanks @LeBraat.
We hope you can help us solving this issue.

Thanks very much

[LeBraat]

Hey @GoalShouter - Just double checked to see if your case is still open. It is on our agent’s radar, and we will make sure to address it soon. In the meantime, please let me know if you do actually hit the rate limit.

[GoalShouter]

@LeBraat thanks very much for your attention and support.

Since we’re close to a new weekend of football (where most of our users and customers post on Twitter), do you have an idea of what could be date/time to have the issue officially fixed?

Thanks very much,
d.

[GoalShouter]

Hello @LeBraat sorry for bothering you.
Most of our users are asking us if the post rate/limit will be fixed before the weekend, but we didn’t receive an official reply from Twitter about it, so we have no chances to provide them with an official response saying YES or NO.
Is there anything we can do to speed up the post rate/limits elevation process?

Thanks very much,

[GoalShouter]

Just one more quick note on our discoveries.

We operated a few tests of our app after your message posting some tweets, using PostMan and one of our test-users tokens/secret.

We noticed that the tweets were published but the POST request https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/update.json didn’t provide any “x-rate-limit-limit”, “x-rate-limit-remaining” or “x-rate-limit-reset” into the header.

It means we could not have any means to monitor the rate-limits in real-time and it seems connected to the part of your documentation (https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/rate-limiting.html) saying:

_

“Lastly, there may be times when the rate limit values that are returned are inconsistent, or cases where no headers are returned at all. Perhaps memcache has been reset, or one memcache was busy so the system spoke to a different instance: the values may be inconsistent now and again. There is a best effort to maintain consistency, with a tendency towards giving an application extra calls if there is an inconsistency.”

_

Any chance to get official confirmation about the elevation of the post rating limit?

Thanks very much,
d.

[GoalShouter]

Dear @LeBraat we finally received the following reply to our request:

We’ve completed our review of your request, and we regret to inform you that we are unable to elevate your rate limits at this time.
Please check the form again in the near future; if you become eligible for elevated rate limits, you will see an option to apply in the form.
Regards,
Twitter

We don’t know what to do next to avoid issues to our users and customers.
Why did Twitter decide not to elevate such a posting limit?
How do we become eligible?
What does it mean “near future”? 1 week? 1 month? 1 year?

To reduce the issues to our primary customers, we needed to avoid the “posting-to-twitter” feature to all other users.

We know this is not a solution and it’s also frustrating for football clubs using our app to provide real-time updates about their games.
But with almost no clear info from Twitter, we had no options.

We do appreciate if you would like to provide us with more info to help us in serving our customers and users that are affected by such a change in the posting rate limit.

Thanks

[AMERCF]

Hello,
It’s really important to solve this issue. People from Goalshouter are making a great job and letting us broadcast our games in an easier way.
Please, we need this app to reach to as much people as we can, and even most important, to let people know how our team is performing, not only with the result, but also with how the game is going.
Thank you.

[lyne_fc]

Good morning twitter people,

Lyne F.C have 150 kids as members, 20 lady members and 35 gentleman members. Goalshouter has been a fantastic tool to keep our members and many followers up to date with our senior match days. The goalshouter app is helping us connect our junior and senior sections of the club keeping engagement of the two. Please please help goalshouter out on this one as it is fantastic app love by many many clubs!

Thank you in anticipation.

Nigel
Chairman Lyne F.C

[LeBraat]

Hello everyone,

I stand with our team’s decision, but am more than willing to work with you to figure out a solution.

We are not currently considering applications that are not posting close to the volume of requests that would require an elevation, so this should not have a negative effect on your platform unless you are experiencing rate limiting on an Twitter app that is not on our radar.

Can you please help me better understand your situation so that I can figure out how to proceed?

• Are your hitting rate limits with an app that I’m not aware of?
• Are you anticipating hitting rate limits with any events in the near future?
• If so, how many POST requests do you anticipate requiring, and for which POST endpoint?

Once again, based on the usage that we have visibility into, it appears that the platform should be able to function properly without this elevation. Please let us know if this is not the case.

Thanks

[GoalShouter]

Thanks @LeBraat for your attention to our users’ messages.

We are in the following situation:
our app (GoalShouter, appID: 3115419) already hit the “300tweets/3 hours” posting rate limits during the weekend of 27-28 October.

Since football games are played almost in the same time-windows, and we could not run the risk to not-publish real-time updates, after that weekend, we switched off the “publish to Twitter” feature to all our small customers/users, to reduce the chance to have further issues affecting our main paying customers.

This is the reason why you currently see a “below the threshold” activity for our app. But you’ll see tonight during the UEFA Champions League round that our app will be, once again, really close to the 300 tweets/3 hours threshold.

But, as mentioned in previous messages, this is not a solution since real-time updates of football games are relevant during 90 minutes of games.

So, for instance, if you consider 20 tweets per single user per single game (1 photo, 1 lineup, 2 goals, 4 yellow/red cards, half-time score, full-time score, 6 substitutions), it means we can only serve 15 concurrent users publishing on Twitter when we have hundreds of them on Saturdays and Sundays…

So, to be able to serve our current customers and users, we’ll need a threshold at around 3.000 tweets/3 hours (it means 150 concurrent football games), at least during matchdays.

This elevation will be useful only for status/update and media/upload POST endpoints.

Let us know if everything is now more clear.

Thanks very much,
d.

[LeBraat]

I completely understand where you are coming from here.

First a clarification:
The recent changes did not affect the media/upload endpoint.
If you are experiencing errors with this endpoint, please share that error code and message with us.

Second off, what error message are you receiving when you hit the rate limit with the POST status/update endpoint?

I do understand everything that you have laid out, and will make a case to our agent to apply this elevation to your account. There are other considerations in play here, so I cannot promise anything.

[GoalShouter]

Dear @LeBraat ,
thanks for your reply.

We’re glad to know that media/upload endpoint is not subject to posting rate limit.

Regarding the errors, from 2018/10/24 to 2018/10/29 we got 4.507 Twitter error events.

The most common error we got is the following
{
“errors”: [
{
“code”: 185,
“message”: “User is over daily status update limit.”
}
],
“httpstatus”: 403,
“rate”: null
}

Other errors (less common) were

{
“errors”: [
{
“code”: 64,
“message”: “Your account is suspended and is not permitted to access this feature.”
}
],
“httpstatus”: 403,
“rate”: null
}

[GoalShouter]

Dear @LeBraat,
Could you please confirm that the provided information is what you were expecting from us?

Thanks very much

[LeBraat]

Thank you very much for providing this information. I have been able to use this information to identify a couple of ways that we can improve our system and will work towards a solution here.

In the meantime, I have manually provided you access to apply for this elevation via the proper pathway. Can you please fill out the following form one more time, being sure to select ‘I would like to apply for elevated POST limits’. I will make sure that your application is reviewed quickly this time.
https://help.twitter.com/forms/platform

I’m very sorry for the difficulties that you’ve experienced here.

[GoalShouter]

Thanks @LeBraat we just re-submitted the form.

Looking forward to hearing from you

Have a great day!

[LeBraat]

Thanks @GoalShouter. I’ll escalate internally.

[GoalShouter]

Thanks very much @LeBraat!

[GoalShouter]

Thanks @LeBraat it now seems everything is working properly.

[hmz]