Python-bot to win thousands of prizes to Twitter Bashny.Net

Resourceful Programmer Scott Hunter wrote bot , which automatically takes part in promotional games where you have to publish a report with the hashtag advertiser. Such games twitter carried a huge amount, so the bot gathered a good harvest of prizes.





The program is a script in Python, which logins, sought tweets with messages like "retweet to win!", Then retweet them.

Boat operated continuously for nine months, and the average winning four prizes on the day. "I'm not sure if anyone was doing anything like that, but did not see any evidence bots, working the same way. But seen real people who were doing this work manually, hundreds of retweets contests in a few hours "- Hunter wrote in his blog.

Some contests require participants to a reader of the organizer. In this case, the bot zafolovit tried it. If it succeeded, he exercised retweet.

The most difficult part for the first nine months was to avoid the ban by Twitter. They have various anti-spam schemes: they prohibit tweet too often, many retweet quickly fouls and remove from the list of readers. The exact mechanism of this work was not disclosed, so we had to proceed by trial and error. There are limits on how many people can subscribe to and how much should be readers, and among them should be some proportion, otherwise the account will cause suspicion among administration. If you only have a few hundred readers, then you can not foul more than 2,000 people.

The programmer used the method FIFO, that is, before signing up for the competition, delete the oldest account on the list to the total number does not exceed 2000. This gave plenty of time to make sure that the organizer otfolovlenny finished his competition level and follow / unfollow below the set limit. He was lucky: the number of new tenders was more than the rate at which work boat. So get constantly find new contests and not to stop the process.

In the first nine months of the script he took part in the competitions 165 000, of which about one thousand won.

Of course, most of the prizes is of little things like logos and avtarchikov, tickets for all kinds of concerts and events, most of which were carried out in other countries. That is the good bit. He also won a huge amount of virtual currency in different online games. Interestingly, when the game Destiny distributed beta codes came about 30 pieces - so many draws performed.

Among the prizes were many some exotic pieces. "Finding every day mysterious things in the mailbox was pretty cool," - says Scott Hunter. The result is almost like a comic Munro.



The most classy of the prizes was a cowboy hat autographed by stars of some Mexican soap opera. And the most expensive prize - a trip for a week of high fashion in New York delivered to your limo from home for two. This ticket costs $ 4,000, but Hunter did not took him to avoid paying taxes on the prize. Moreover, though he American, but lives far away from New York City.

That's the whole basket with prizes .



There were funny stories, when people played for fun or trash wrote "Do retweet, and you can win absolutely nothing." Naturally, the bot stupid retweet them, and a pair of Hunter never won "absolutely nothing».

Eventually, he realized that he could use the robot for something good. For example, to retweet messages, for which the foundations listed in any amount.



He added them to the dictionary database script.

If you are interested, the full list of prizes is published here .

Source: geektimes.ru/post/259764/