How can a bot use a trending hashtag without suspension?

colinsurprenant · 2012-11-13T21:15:28.000Z

Hi,

Or how can a bot send status updates about a trend (meta trend discussion) without being accused of “posting unrelated tweets to trends in order to get attention” ?

I’d like my bot to include a reference to a trending hashtag or topic without injecting into that trend. The goal is not to piggyback any trend but simply to find the best way to reference a trend. For example with hashtags, could removing the # and, say, enclosing the tag into square brackets [sometrendytag] work? What about topics? Is there some best practice with this other than using out-of-band communications?

Thanks,
Colin

colinsurprenant · 2012-11-15T04:19:52.000Z

I am currently replacing the first and last letters of the hashtag with dotdot and enclosing in square brackets. #hashtag becomes […ashta…]. Seems to work.

I don’t want to play trial & error with this since “error” will result in account suspension

Is there a symbol such as underscore which could be prepended for example to the hashtag or topic word that will be kept as part of the word and avoid injecting into that topic? For example #hashtag would become _hashtag and topic would become _topic. _hashtag would be different than #hashtag and hashtag, _topic would be different than topic.

Thanks,
Colin

episod · 2012-11-15T16:08:07.000Z

You’re going to have a hard time attempting this. It would be difficult for our system to see what your account is doing as anything different than an account that is gaming trends.

colinsurprenant · 2012-11-15T18:48:22.000Z

Just to be clear, my goal here is not to game trends, it is in fact the opposite, I want to find a way to make sure I will not interfere/inject into a trend.

Looking at the twitter-text gem regular expressions https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-rb , for hashtags anyways, the underscore is a valid character so clearly #somehashtag will be different than the _somehashtag plain word (because #somehashtag and #_somehashtag are both valid and different and _somehashtag could possibly(?) interfere with #_somehashtag but not with #somehashtag).

Now I ear your comment as basically “if you play with fire, you might get burned” but it would be useful to clarify the boundaries to help those with noble intentions O:)

Thanks,
Colin