Why do I always get 403s when I try to send a direct message? All other API endpoints work

[therealrobru]

Hi,

I’ve been commissioned to overhaul and modernize Gwibber (among other things, I am updating it from API 1 to 1.1). I’m mostly done, however sending new direct messages just utterly refuses to work. I can send public tweets, and I can send replies, and I can receive direct messages, but I cannot send them.

I’ve scoured the API docs, and I’ve found various different potential meanings for a 403 error. One page suggested that 403s would be given in response to duplicate requests – well i’ve tried many different direct messages that could not be considered duplicates. Another page suggested that I don’t have DM permissions – well I can access direct_messages.json and direct_messages/sent.json, so I seem to have that permission.

I really don’t understand why this isn’t working, and I’d appreciate it if somebody could look into it for me. The code is here:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~robru/gwibber/twitter/view/1486/gwibber/gwibber/protocols/twitter.py#L198

Note that all other methods defined in that class demonstrably work, and I have tested them on my live twitter account with success. It is only direct_messages/new that is giving me 403s and I have no idea why. What have I done wrong here?

Thanks!

[episod]

Have you examined the response body that comes with that HTTP 403? We tend to provide more informative errors if you examine the body.

When attempting to send a direct message, is the target a user that the authenticating user is allowed to send a direct message to?

Looking at your connection code, it looks like you’re making some assumptions that aren’t necessarily true – in _get_url (which could have a better name since it performs more than just getting URLs), you determine whether to perform a POST or not based on whether there is data – in the Twitter API there are plenty of methods that you’ll want to use a POST on but not necessarily have data to provide. It’d be best for you to make setting the HTTP method more explicit.

[therealrobru]

Thanks for the quick response.

Turns out the people I was trying to message weren’t following me, and that’s not allowed. Didn’t realize that was the case. After I messaged somebody who followed me, it worked fine.

As for POST/GET, I can pass an empty dict into that method to trigger a “POST with no data”, it’s smart enough for that.

Thanks again!

[KalyanSharma8]

When I try to send message for the first time it is successful, but afterwards it throws error code 403 and forbidden.