Programming a retweeter

SLAchicago · 2012-07-10T19:48:13.000Z

We are programming a retweeter for efficient backchannel-communication at an upcoming Annual Conference.

We are using a Cronjob and MySQL to interact with the streaming Twitter API. We are receiving the following error message, and would like to know possible sources of an error such as this:

Got Oauth hash, it is 3ffe7cae5f271c6b3227100d02e0b6e3
Results of Tweeted is NULL query: 1
Re-tweet failed, with status code 403

kurrik · 2012-07-10T23:24:55.000Z

The 403 error code is listed here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/error-codes-responses

It appears that you may be hitting Tweet limits with your application.

SLAchicago · 2012-07-11T00:24:29.000Z

Thanks. However we do not approach 1,000 tweets/retweets per day.

Could updates be counted as each time the cron job interacts with the API?

Thinking if we space that time out so it happens less per hour, we will stay under the update limit.

kurrik · 2012-07-11T23:25:50.000Z

The 1000/day is broken up into smaller intervals, so if you’re doing a bunch of Tweets at once, you can still hit the limit while staying under that amount. Spacing out the requests should help.

Reference: https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364-about-twitter-limits-update-api-dm-and-following