The community, the rules; What do we care and how we work?

by Atakan Eser

Last month was very busy for the companies who use Twitter’s User APIs. Some of them were shut-down, some of them pivoted their business models to make them in comply with Twitter’s rules and policies. We read lots of stories about profile management business recently, want to make our side of the story clear. ..

The main rule when working with companies which share data with their partners in a programmatic way (APIs) like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc, is that they announce every development whether introducing some new features or removing some of them to the public several months before if not years.

There is a common misconception that, companies like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter may discontinue APIs overnight, and changes the rules in the blink of an eye. No, not really. They announce at least 6 months before to protect their developer community as well as the ecosystem by warning them about upcoming changes. So the partner companies would work on their models and adapt them to the new rules.

TLDR;

There is no known Twitter API, Rules & Policy changes about user management APIs. If you’re following their guidelines and respect their policies, your account should be good to go.

If you’re interested in the newest development about the platforms, you can watch & read their announcements through their developer portals like Twitter’s “Stay Informed” and recent changelogs about the platform.

What we care and how we work?

  • We respect Twitter’s rules and policies and force these rules on our platform and never try to cheat on them.
  • We respect Twitter’s decisions about your accounts, and if some requests are denied, we warn our users about Twitter’s answer about their request and make sure they don’t try to break the rules.
  • As Circleboom, we do our best to provide our users with smart search tools to help them find their niche. We also help the ecosystem with their fight with spam, bot, and fake accounts.
  • Every search results we displayed on the grid clearly displays the result’s profile picture, name, and location as well as a detailed profile link on it to help our users to follow or unfollow them based on their profile.
  • We don’t incorporate features like “remote access managers (RAM)” and other things which act like a “bulk process” on the users’ end even if it is not a bulk process at the backend. We believe there is a reason that Twitter wants every follows and unfollows should be done purposely by the user.
  • We don’t allow any bulk and automated requests for profile management. That’s why every request should go through individual clicks deliberately made by the user and that’s why we put every request to the queues.
  • It may take a while before our systems send them to Twitter. If there is no issue with your account limits determined by Twitter, your requests will be fulfilled in a couple of minutes if not seconds. If you hit your limits, we stop other requests and mark them as failed at the moment. You may see the same person in our grids as suggestions you previously wanted to follow or unfollow based on the fact that your previous request did not fulfill by Twitter, and rejected.
  • We use every chance to educate our community about Twitter’s rules & policies with our blog posts, help articles and Tweets as well as our site contents. We’ve created several how-to and FAQ articles at our help center, we highly recommend everyone to take a look at them;
  • Why I can’t follow anymore?

Twitter locks or suspends users’ accounts from time to time when they do an aggressive follow churn as mentioned on Twitter Rules.

That means, when a user follows too many users in a short period or unfollows them faster than an average Twitter user, Twitter marks the user for a period to close-watch him/her for follows/unfollows across the Twitter ecosystem including all 3rd party apps like Circleboom, Twitter mobile apps, and websites.

By early 2018, Circleboom passed the strict controls of the Twitter team, and until now, we never received any warnings for violating Twitter’s rules . & API policies” which means we’re fully compatible with current Twitter Policies.

If we receive any warning or change request about our platform, we’ll comply with them as we did before. The platform rules bind everyone…

Happy Circlebooming