Handling 403 errors when doing a retweet

[tehspaceg]

From some of my research, it looks like if my application receives a 403 error when doing a POST statuses/retweet/:id action. It happens during some heavy retweet activity, so it looks like I may be hitting a soft rate limit cap.

Is there a reliable way for me to see how close I am to the cap? I can get my rate limit count for gets without issue via application/rate_limit_status, but I can’t find a way to look for where I am when it comes to retweets and tweets.

Is the best way to just look for 403 errors, then wait a few minutes? Or do a rolling limit of <40 tweets per hour (guessing based on 2,400 limit per day)?

[andypiper]

That’s probably about right. The API doesn’t expose the write/create action rate limits as they are adaptive to detect and respond to spammer etc. So, your strategy is probably reasonable, provided you’re not doing anything that might trigger the spam filters.