Highschool timetable announcer

Kwibox · 2012-01-27T11:12:20.000Z

Dear twitter devs,

I’m a student, and I use twitter a lot. So I used python with tweepy to build an automated timetable announcer voor my own high school. People can subscribe to it using their student number and when any timetable changes are detected, they get a mention or dm. I have at the moment around 400 followers, and its still getting more and more popular. My highschool has around 1500 students.

My questions:

Is what I’m doing against the twitter rules or policies?
I’m facing some problems with the rate limits, because the changes are generally published around 3 pm in the afternoon, I often hit my tweet limit for the hour. Do you have any tips regarding this limit? As an example, I found out that the limit per hour is around 120 tweets? Is this correct?
May I create multiple accounts to spread the “load”? As an example:
Our school has 2 departments: h and v, may I create an account for the h-students and a seperate account for the v-students?

Best regards,

Stephan (@Kwibox)
@CCSRoosters

episod · 2012-01-27T15:49:41.000Z

It doesn’t sound like this is against any policies off-hand. Make sure you’ve reviewed the automation guidelines here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915 – by using the follow model you’ve also reduced the chance that your bot will be objectively considered spam by our algorithms.

I think for the purposes of your project, separate Twitter accounts makes a lot of sense and would be the best way to manage the roaming posting limits accounts are subject to. Keep in mind there will always be some limits you’ll hit, and you may need to get somewhat creative or selective in what gets tweeted or DM’d.

Kwibox · 2012-01-27T16:01:08.000Z

Thx for your reply!

I am thinking of creating 3 more accounts (so 4 total), for max 250 followers each
4 x 250 makes 1000
This way we have a kind of buffer because there is no way every student has twitter and timetables are only subject to a certain number of students.

Of course, the changes are only tweeted or DM’d to students who are subject to the change. The idea is that every students get a personal mention or dm with all his changes for the day in one message.

Again, thx for your reply1