"You cannot send messages to users who are not following you"

JacobyDave · 2014-03-18T13:45:33.000Z

I have two twitter accounts. One is the one I generally tweet from. The other I have tied to automated things. When my computers upgrade or reboot, they tweet to that one. Each account follows the other.

One of the things I do is use it as an interface to track my coffee intake. When I drink a cup of coffee, I (acc1) dm myself (acc2) a message of “d acc2 drank 1 coffee”. I have done this for several months.

This morning, the message I have DM’d myself several hundred times stopped working, saying “You cannot send messages to users who are not following you”. I’m DMing myself from myself. I have been DMing myself nearly daily for almost nine months. What changed this morning? And, how can I adapt to this change?

JacobyDave · 2014-03-18T14:35:00.000Z

This looks like https://dev.twitter.com/issues/1580 to me.

ze_m0n5t3r · 2014-03-26T11:19:59.000Z

that issue says it’s closed, but I’m getting this right now (a robot that alerts me about things can’t send messages any more)

<Response [403]> {"errors":[{"code":150,"message":"You cannot send messages to users who are not following you."}]}

… and sending from the website while logged as the robot works, of course.

84NorthStudios · 2014-03-28T20:12:15.000Z

(tried to delete this)

84NorthStudios · 2014-03-28T20:11:46.000Z

I am just in the middle of writing an automated tweet sender and I was trying to use the “D screen_name message” format using the ‘statuses/update’ request and I got the exact same error.

But when I switched over to using the ‘direct_messages/new’ request instead it worked (it takes different parameters though so you’ll have to look up the API, but it should be a simple one-liner to change). So you might want to give that a shot.