Question on error 187 for duplicate tweets

[MetalDave01]

I am speaking as a novice developer who has never tinkered with Twitter before.

I have been looking into some of the past posts in regard to this topic and I am not clear on how error 187 really works. But, here is what I have been attempting to develop.

I had an idea to create an account that would tweet every hour the number of hours left until an event. For example…

“There’s just # hours left until this thing happens!”

So, the only thing in the tweet that would change would be the number of hours. With that in mind the tweets would be ‘very’ similar, but not ‘exactly’ similar.

Is what I just described heinously against the rules? Because I can manually tweet the count down, but I would have much rather automate it.

[andypiper]

That sounds fine. You wouldn’t be able to post identical text immediately after a previous update, but you’re changing the content so this does not apply.

[MetalDave01]

Thank you for the response! I am still receiving the 187 error, though… Is there some documentation available that I can use to troubleshoot it? Or perhaps I could send you a PM with specifics?

[andypiper]

Weird, is that definitely a non-identical status?

[MetalDave01]

It’s very close, but like in the message before this is what the account would be doing.

So, an hour change happens and it tweets… “There’s just 2000 hours left until this thing happens!”

The next hour… “There’s just 1999 hours left until this thing happens!”

But, like I mentioned, I receive that error. So the messages are very close to be exact, but are not. And I can manually tweet the messages with no issue. (Like, via my phone or the twitter website)

[MetalDave01]

Testing things a bit today and I noticed that there is some correlation between the API catching my messages at exactly an hour apart, because when I ran the process 65 minutes after the last tweet, there was no error from Twitter.

With that in mind… Unless there is something I am missing, I do not see any way for me to automate having a tweet sent every hour.

I could randomize the hashtags that are added to the message, of course, but if there is a way to have my tweets sent every hour without doing that, I would like to know.

Any assistance would be great!