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Fun with Twitterbots!

Posted by Flatiron School on July 16, 2013

The following is a guest post by Joe Giralt and originally appeared on his blog. Joe is currently a student at The Flatiron School. You can follow him on Twitter here.

So sometime last week a friend asked me to to help her make a twitter bot that would help win a contest by the number of “#” tag references to a particular subject. I don’t to blow up her spot so lets just say the hash tag reference was to #riggingthevote.

Here the the code I used to do that

Blog post image: tumblr_inline_mq19lwB8Ax1qz4rgp.png

First things first, twitter is actually pretty smart at catching bots. I actually got a dummy account suspended because I made too many references in a row to the same hash tag in a too short period of a time.

Also, if you post too often you’ll reach your “daily limit” so one should be patient. Anything under 15 seconds will get you booted.

Instructions below

Step one

Get a dummy twitter account.

Step Two

goto https://dev.twitter.com/ and get a development account. Make sure to apply for a consumer key and authorization tokens

Step Three 

Modify and then run the code  above and run the script. Make sure to include your own text file that gabbler can go through. Half the fun is how nonsensical random sentences are when taking out of context.

Blog post image: tumblr_inline_mq19mlKZHT1qz4rgp.png

Enjoy!

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