FAQ AutoTweet What is Rate Limiting (Errors 403 Forbidden and 341 Feed action request limit reached)?
What is Rate Limiting (Errors 403 Forbidden and 341 Feed action request limit reached)?
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Answer
The APIs (Twitter, Facebook and others) only allows clients to make a limited number of calls in a given time. So AutoTweet is affected by these limits when updates are posted:
The default rate limit for calls to the Twitter REST API is 350 requests per hour. So normally this should be not a problem. See here for infromation about Twitter rate limiting: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/rate-limiting
Update: An error 403 is also returned when you are trying to post a message with more than 140 characters to Twitter. This may happen for messages with long URLs when they are not shortened or the url short service has failed...
Update (June 2011): Since version 4.0 AutoTweet NG is using the new Facebook Graph API. It seems that the rate limit for calls over the Graph API is now 25 posts per user per day. But - as ever with Facebook - this is my own finding and not an official information.
The situation with Facebook rate limiting is much more complex and there are no real official information about this by Facebook. Also they change from time to time the behavoir of the rate limiting without announcements (Some times I will give up development for Facebook...).
Here is a conclusion about the actual situation with Facebook (This is what other peoples finding out and this are also my personal suggestions!):
All applications are affected by this limit. So this is not a problem of a single application like AutoTweet. For most people the limit for update (with the function stream.publish) is 10 posts per user per day. And some more facts:
1. The limit does not affect Fan Pages when using the identity of the fan page ("Post as the page itself").
2. This limit is NOT related to the allocations that are listed under statistics.
3. The situation with this limit has changed in the first quarter of 2010 and is more complex now. Also more people are affected by the limit. (It seems that the "OFFLINE ACCESS PERMISSION" does not work anymore or does not work the same way as before.)
4. There are many discussions and bugs about this problem but Facebook does not answer the questions, does not provide the develpers with documentation and does not fix this at the moment.