Tweets mentioning users not appearing in their mentions notifications

[alfageeek]

I’m using the API to generate tweets on this timeline: @TopTweetsBot

My beta testers are reporting that they don’t see tweets mentioning them in their notifications. I can confirm this, as I don’t see mentions of my account by this bot in my notifications, either. I’ve confirmed that all my notification filters are disabled (as did a couple of my beta testers). Following the account doesn’t seem to help, either.

I did see notifications for the first few days of testing, but then they stopped.

I suspect the notifications are being dropped by some sort of automated spam filter. But since people explicitly signed up with the bot in order to get the notifications, that’s a total false positive.

I turned on notifications for all tweets made by the bot on my account, and I do get those. But if this thing takes off and lots of people start using it, that won’t be a good solution. Is there anything I can do to help ensure my users get mention notifications from this account?

Updated: If someone likes a tweet that the bot made, the person mentioned in that tweet also does not get a “…liked a tweet you were mentioned in” notification. In case that help you diagnose the issue.

Updated: If I send exactly the same tweet using Twitter, it also does not deliver the mention. So the issue isn’t specific to using the API, but rather has something to do with the account sending the tweets. Like perhaps it was flagged as “spammy” in some way?

[LeBraat]

The symptoms do make it sound like this account was flagged as “spammy”. This could be because it has been Tweeting too many Tweets that are significantly similar. I don’t have any good suggestions for you at the moment, but will ask some colleagues if anything can be done about this.

[alfageeek]

Thanks in advance. This does essentially the same thing the FavStar Bot account did before FavStar closed up shop.

[alfageeek]

Any progress? I discovered that if I post the “congratulations” tweets as replies to the original tweet, the notifications go through, so that’s an okay workaround for that case. But it’d be cool if we could solve the problem for other tweets it sends.

Hmm. Seems that’s not 100% reliable either. It just congratulated me on a 500-like tweet, and that didn’t show up in my mentions.

[rraallvv]

I also don’t see mentions with my handle from a tip bot, even when the bot was tweeting to me via a command that someone else tweeted, and not at random (like some spam bot). That’s very bad since I could have missed some tips.

[andypiper]

There’s no API that guarantees that users will receive or see notifications. There are a variety of filtering systems that may affect this visibility, some of which are controlled by the users of the app via the quality filter settings, and others of which are on the server side. If our antispam systems have marked content as low quality or spammy then they may not appear in Notifications. There’s nothing we are able to do about this from a developer platform perspective, except to encourage you as developers to adhere to the automation rules and developer terms and policy.

[hashtoc]

The issue is that the false positive SPAM problem happens even if you adhere to the automation rules, terms and policies of Twitter. In our case, we only respond to post directed to us (i.e. the post mentions our account with some specific syntax). We don’t send any unsolicited message.

In fact, we do exactly what appears in the section “DO!” of the automation rules.

How can we solve this problem? Thanks in advance.

[andypiper]

Are you using the account activity API or the standard user_mentions endpoint?

[hashtoc]

We’re using the account activity API.

El El jue, 22 de nov. de 2018 a las 16:56, Andy Piper twitter@discoursemail.com escribió:

[hashtoc]

To write the tweet we’re using the statuses/update endpoint. I know we’re following Twitter’s rules because we’re only responding to mentions and as Twitter’s terms indicate:

“A mention of your account by the user in a manner suggesting the user clearly wishes or intends to receive a response. If you want to run an auto-reply campaign with a campaign- or use-case-specific hashtag, users should also mention you in their Tweets.”

Given that we’re following Twitter’s rules (we’re not spamming, we’re responding to people’s mentions), is it possible that we’re included in a whitelist?

I can even show you the code we’re using if necessary. Or, do you know who should I contact in order to be whitelisted?

Best

[LeBraat]

It does sounds like you might still be bumping up against an automation rule. We do not comment on specific cases as they relate to spam. If you continue to have issues, it might be a good idea to review the automation rules through a different lens and consider changing your usage of the POST endpoint. If you have received any errors that might suggest that you have been caught for spammy behavior, please follow the directions from the error message.

Thanks