Weather Syndication accounts hitting error code 326, pain unlocking accounts ensues

[iembot]

I operate a few hundred bot accounts that syndicate US NWS weather content. Yeah, they are bots, but they are hopefully good bots (they only post, no following, likes, etc), just syndicating NWS content in real-time.

I have been running these for many moons since 2009.

The problem I have is that every so many months/years, I get ensnared within some new twitter anti-bot spam code and I have to manually get the bots unlocked. An example error is the generic:

 {"errors":[{"code":326,"message":"To protect our users from spam and
other malicious activity, this account is temporarily locked. Please log in
to https://twitter.com to unlock your account."}]}

So the unlock procedure is always

1. visit twitter.com as the bot account, OK
2. Prove I am not a bot by doing the captcha and clicking on cars/fire hydrants/traffic signals (I am very good at this now)
3. Failing to provide my cell phone number as the UI indicates it is being used by some other account, but unsure which one.
4. Fill out the appeal form
5. wait for the email to arrive (sometimes it comes immediately, sometimes many hours later)
6. respond to the email with desperate pleas to talk with somebody regarding this, I write generic babble these days as what I write does not seem to matter
7. wait one to a few days for the automated response to come saying that the account lock out was in error.

I would love to know how I can keep my bots from hitting whatever is currently triggering the spam 326 errors. Or get my bots whitelisted somehow. Or perhaps if twitter is really against these accounts and want them deleted, I can pull the plug on this and start doing other things during my day than captcha clicking

Thanks

[IgorBrigadir]

It’s very frustrating having bots like that flagged, especially when there’s lots of them - but i don’t think there’s much you can do to prevent it - apart from maybe adding more to the accounts to make them less “default” (user description, header image, etc - you have that for some of them, but not all it seems - that’s just an idea though, accounts with default / empty things like descriptions etc get filtered more often it seems.)

Other things to consider might be to regenerate the access tokens the bots use (assuming they’re all using the same application) or log in to the accounts periodically.

[akrherz]

I’m the actual person behind this work And if on cue, overnight, I had 8 more accounts locked out. Sigh.

iembot_mpx
iembot_ama
iembot_abr
iembot_ind
iembot_ilm
iembot_apx
iembot_ddc
iembot_lkn

[hmz]

Please see this post for the next steps to take in this scenario. It sounds more than likely that your app was potentially identified as not having followed the automation policy - write restrictions are usually due to unexpected behavior or automated @mentions and hashtags.

If you still think your app is being restricted after complying with the policies, you can reach the appropriate team for this here.

[akrherz]

Thanks for the response.

I have no indication that my app was restricted. I don’t do mentions and I stopped hash tags a few years back after I thought that was to blame for troubles I was having at the time with suspended accounts.

It would be very helpful to know what exactly is meant by “Your account appears to have exhibited automated behavior that violates the Twitter Rules”, the page it links to has many rules listed, so I have no idea which one I am hitting.

Irregardless, the apology email I later get always states that the lockout was in error. So I don’t know what to do here.

[hmz]

Unfortunately, I’m not able to provide insight as to what those apps were restricted for. The best place to address such queries is here .

[akrherz]

Thank you for the suggestion. I have opened tickets for many moons now, I never get a non-automated response

[akrherz]

Uffties, I have nearly 100 accounts now locked out and accounts that I just got unlocked got locked out again. This is depressing.

[IgorBrigadir]

Since a lot of those accounts are old, have you accepted the new terms of service and privacy policy that was updated for GDPR several months ago? I had some old bots that i had to log in to web and accept. Also, several of the private ones tweet away without any lockouts - it’s not ideal, but maybe making your bots private is a roundabout way of keeping them alive? Tweetdeck is also worth using for managing multiple accounts btw.

[hmz]

I’ve contacted my internal team to see what they’re able to do as you’ve already tried multiple times to reach someone. Hopefully, someone should reach out to you. Apologies for the inconvenience, @akrherz

[akrherz]

Thanks for the help. To make things worse, there is some sort of issue today with the recaptcha step and it is taking many minutes to get through the endless loop of buses, traffic lights, bikes, hydrants, cars, cross walks, etc. After 20 attempts just now to file an unlock request for iembot_mkx, I gave up.

[akrherz]

Wheww, the captcha issue went away and I can open cases at a more reasonable clip now. For a sampling of fun, here are recent Case numbers for iembot_gsp

Case# 0099676620 iembot_gsp open: 2018/12/05 closed: 2018/12/06
Case# 0100022635 iembot_gsp open: 2018/12/10 closed: 2018/12/11
Case# 0100379875 iembot_gsp open: 2018/12/14

If case IDs are sequential, kind of scary to see how many cases are opened each day!

[akrherz]

For whatever reason, some accounts, like iembot_sgx are letting me use my phone number to unlock the account, but this account has gotten locked out, I think, three times today. Sigh. I am up to 100 cases now, no human responses yet.

[IgorBrigadir]

Just a guess but reusing the same phone number is probably hurting you more than helping

[akrherz]

agreed, but what do you suggest I do? I only have one phone number.

[IgorBrigadir]

No idea, honestly the only thing that i can think of that might be helpful is applying for increased app-level rate limits, if you haven’t already: Update: POST endpoint rate limit enforcement moving from September 10th to October 22nd (that’s assuming that you have only 1 main application, and multiple bots authenticating to it, rather than multiple applications for the same “purpose”, in which case that could be getting you flagged too)

[akrherz]

another fun filled day of filling out account suspension forms, clicking captchas and digging emails out of gmail’s spam folder. Here’s a status table of the recent fun

                 Account    Case open  Case closed
Case# 0099733410 iembot_lbf 2018/12/06 2018/12/08
Case# 0099747414 iembot_tsa 2018/12/06 2018/12/08
Case# 0099872888 iembot_cle 2018/12/08 2018/12/09
Case# 0100022635 iembot_gsp 2018/12/10 2018/12/11
Case# 0100035716 iembot_crp 2018/12/10 2018/12/11
Case# 0100190245 iembot_rah 2018/12/12 2018/12/13
Case# 0100190795 iembot_fwd 2018/12/12 2018/12/13
Case# 0100204831 iembot_lkn 2018/12/12 2018/12/14
Case# 0100204986 iembot_slc 2018/12/12 2018/12/13
Case# 0100281313 iembot_mpx 2018/12/13
Case# 0100281468 iembot_ama 2018/12/13
Case# 0100281556 iembot_abr 2018/12/13
Case# 0100281646 iembot_ind 2018/12/13
Case# 0100281910 iembot_ilm 2018/12/13
Case# 0100282009 iembot_apx 2018/12/13
Case# 0100282092 iembot_ddc 2018/12/13
Case# 0100282171 iembot_lkn 2018/12/13
Case# 0100361793 iembot_fgf 2018/12/14
Case# 0100366085 iembot_mlb 2018/12/14
Case# 0100372978 iembot_tbw 2018/12/14
Case# 0100373173 iembot_oax 2018/12/14
Case# 0100374765 iembot_hgx 2018/12/14
Case# 0100374884 iembot_mob 2018/12/14
Case# 0100377771 iembot_mkx 2018/12/14
Case# 0100378001 iembot_lch 2018/12/14
Case# 0100378102 iembot_mfr 2018/12/14
Case# 0100378472 iembot_shv 2018/12/14
Case# 0100379280 iembot_jan 2018/12/14
Case# 0100379373 iembot_fsd 2018/12/14
Case# 0100379438 iembot_vef 2018/12/14
Case# 0100379511 iembot_sjt 2018/12/14
Case# 0100379632 iembot_gjt 2018/12/14
Case# 0100379712 iembot_lub 2018/12/14
Case# 0100379784 iembot_abq 2018/12/14
Case# 0100379875 iembot_gsp 2018/12/14
Case# 0100380767 iembot_key 2018/12/14
Case# 0100380913 iembot_grr 2018/12/14
Case# 0100381671 iembot_top 2018/12/14
Case# 0100381771 iembot_lot 2018/12/14
Case# 0100383646 iembot_iwx 2018/12/14
Case# 0100383725 iembot_jkl 2018/12/14
Case# 0100402790 iembot_ctp 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100402858 iembot_sgf 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100402926 iembot_eka 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100403106 iembot_pqr 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100403746 iembot_akq 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100403820 iembot_ggw 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100403876 iembot_sew 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100404062 iembot_pah 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100404127 iembot_mhx 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100404179 iembot_lzk 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100404395 iembot_maf 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100404783 iembot_lox 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100404823 iembot_mqt 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100405091 iembot_mfl 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100405177 iembot_eax 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100405217 iembot_hnx 2018/12/14 2018/12/15
Case# 0100425547 iembot_buf 2018/12/15 2018/12/16
Case# 0100427073 iembot_iln 2018/12/15 2018/12/16
Case# 0100427310 iembot_lbf 2018/12/15 2018/12/16
Case# 0100427574 iembot_phi 2018/12/15 2018/12/16
Case# 0100467009 iembot_rlx 2018/12/15 2018/12/16
Case# 0100467044 iembot_boi 2018/12/15 2018/12/16
Case# 0100467230 iembot_lsx 2018/12/15 2018/12/16

[akrherz]

thanks for your continued ideas. As accounts get unlocked, I am adding them to my tweetdeck to see what happens going forward.

[ICT_Lineman]

Thank you @akrherz for trying so hard and not giving up on this. These bots are important to some of us. Its a shame twitter isn’t helping you more on this. Ought to be way to talk to a human and get this straightened out or get all the bots verified with a blue check mark so this doesn’t keep happening everytime the change some security protocol or something. Gotta be a way to prove your bots are legit and are needed and get excempted from these protocols. I have been checking my iembot lists hourly to see whats up and whats down and trying to keep a running track of this mess. All we can do is trudge on I guess until this gets sorted out. The bots are a great source of info that I have been trying to get more people to use on the forum that I am moderator on. Hope it all is resolved soon. Keep up the hard work sure would hate to see these bots fall by the wayside. Thanks again.

[andypiper]

Hi @ICT_Lineman thanks for your post - but I’m not seeing anything in the text here that moves the technical conversation forward. What is your experience with building automated bots on Twitter? If you have relevant information I’m sure the author would be grateful for any advice.

Appreciate the update @akrherz @iembot - do you have a single approved Twitter developer account as yet? Under the new developer account approval system we would recommend having just one approved developer account and app, and having all of your other accounts auth’d through that. We certainly want to support similar use cases, but do ask that you work with us as the platform evolves to safeguard the health of the platform.

I’d also note that Tweeting from your bot accounts to point to this thread does not seem to offer much value to the developer platform discussion going on here on this site? Your accounts are unfortunately seemingly being flagged by antispam measures. If we can help you to get to a good state we will aim to do so. Thank you for working with us as we make these important changes to the developer platform.