Fun with Twitterbots!
First things first, twitter is actually pretty smart at catching bots.
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
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.
Enjoy!
Disclaimer: The information in this blog is current as of July 16, 2013. Current policies, offerings, procedures, and programs may differ.
