Hi!

I want to create a twitter app that automatically re-tweets all tweets that have certain words included. I'm not interested in spamming, I just want to be able to follow some stuff on Twitter more easily and not have to do 30 different searches every day. This "bot account" would be very useful to other people I know too.

I've been trying to find out how to get this done, but I only find links to apps that have a monthly fee. Is there a free solution? Is it possible to code something like this myself? The most promising guide I found doesn't work anymore (https://www.krautcomputing.com/blog/2013/11/19/how-to-set-up-automatic-retweeting-using-a-google-apps-script-yahoo-pipes-and-twitterfeed/), as it gives the "Script is using OAuthConfig which has been shut down" message.

Can anyone help with this? Sorry if I'm posting in the wrong forum, feel free to move this message to the right place.

Cheers

PM

I'm not 100% sure, but I would guess this will violate Twitter's ToS.

I'm not 100% sure, but I would guess this will violate Twitter's ToS.

Maybe. But if so, there's hundreds of twitter users who are in violation, so they probably don't enforce it.

For example, tweeting #indiedev, or #gamedev, or #screenshotsaturday, or etc... has multiple dedicated twitterbots auto-retweeting them, and many people follow them.

I don't think retweets really spam their services bandwidth-wise much anyway; it'd be pretty much just {yourUserID, tweetID}. They have a public API and I think there's probably some specified limit that if you reach they'd start throttling you - though I might be mistaking that for a different web API.

I'm not 100% sure, but I would guess this will violate Twitter's ToS.

Maybe. But if so, there's hundreds of twitter users who are in violation, so they probably don't enforce it.

For example, tweeting #indiedev, or #gamedev, or #screenshotsaturday, or etc... has multiple dedicated twitterbots auto-retweeting them, and many people follow them.

I don't think retweets really spam their services bandwidth-wise much anyway; it'd be pretty much just {yourUserID, tweetID}. They have a public API and I think there's probably some specified limit that if you reach they'd start throttling you - though I might be mistaking that for a different web API.

I bring it up because it is clear that Twitter is important to him. Is this worth having his account blocked? I really don't use Twitter much, but I know of not one legitimate website that allows for bots or fake accounts. Again, I am not sure.

It's definitely an important point to bring up. He can probably find more information on Twitter automation limits with the API documentation, iirc.

Check out Twitter's RESTful API, which allows you to search for tweets based on a number of criteria. If you wanted to tinker around with everything first and make sure it can do what you want, before committing to a full application, you could write some test scripts around the curl command-line tool. I haven't done much Twitter development myself, but from the looks of the documentation, they seem to heavily enforce rate limiting and authentication on all endpoints, so they're probably anticipating a lot of bots hitting the API. However that's just my interpretation from the tech side, and it's always good to read the ToS either way.

Thanks for the answers! I'm aware of Twitter's ToS and retweet bots don't automatically violate the the rules.