Twitter 403 error You cannot post the same tweet twice

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Posted on by Mik_Haycock

I have a really simple flow that checks my outlook calendar,

On a specific meeting title it will post a tweet

the reasoning for this is - we have been using Zapier to accomplish this using a schedule - however we need to post a 'monday morning tweet', just the usual - "Hi we are open",

We need it to take into account public holidays and times the office is shut. I expanded the idea slightly to check on the subject of the meeting with a simple case statment and tweet a different message dependant on that. The plan is to move it over and run it off a Sharepoint list, but we don't have full access to sharepoint or groups yet as it is a staged rollout in our organisation.

If you have ever used Buffer - it is pretty much echoing the funtionality of that

I have beem playing with Flow as an alternative as we have new guidlines to keep as much development on trusted sources as possible and Zapier and Buffer are not on that list. Where as MS 365 is.

The flow was working fine however it started failing last week with no error and today I actually got an error message (below)

{ "status": 403, "message": "You cannot post the same tweet twice.", "source": "127.0.0.1" }

There was an exisiting tweet from earlier in the day with the same wording - I'm wondering if there is some inbuilt checks to stop Flow spamming twitter - If so - does anyone know what the interval is, As at the very least i would like to have a weekly tweet. If this is not possible then i will have to can the whole idea

TIA

Mik

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Using flows

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v-micsh-msft on at

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Hi @Mik_Haycock,

I think this is mostly related with Twitter API. Microsoft Flow build the Twitter connector based on the corresponding REST API.

According the Twitter Developer Documentation:

"

For each update attempt, the update text is compared with the authenticating user’s recent Tweets. Any attempt that would result in duplication will be blocked, resulting in a 403 error.

A user cannot submit the same status twice in a row.

While not rate limited by the API, a user is limited in the number of Tweets they can create at a time.

If the number of updates posted by the user reaches the current allowed limit this method will return an HTTP 403 error.

"

Reference: POST statuses/update

Currently I can't find any detailed information about the limits mentioned in the document above.

So the possible workaround here should be, try to make each tweets in a different way, and make sure they are not the same.

Regards,

Michael

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Mik_Haycock 15 on at

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thanks for the reply Michael,

"A user cannot submit the same status twice in a row."

this bit caught my eye, as looking at the twitter feed - I had tried to post the exact same tweet twice in a row - I shall try to alternate the tweet text and see if that is a viable work around.

Regards

Mik

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v-micsh-msft on at

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Hi @Mik_Haycock,

Any update here?

If you need any further help, please post back.

Regards,

Michael

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Mik_Haycock 15 on at

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Hi - yes - sorry for the late reply - this is a bit of a side project and as such got moved to the back burner a bit,

However - after the previous answer and some experimentation with Flow and Twitter

It appears that.

1) You cannot post two consecutive tweets with the exact same text using flow, either by using flow for both tweets, or manually entering the first tweet and then using flow for the second.
2) If you are using twitter and outlook calender - the flow will only fire for the FIRST appointment in a series.

Basically I believe it is 'working as intended' I was just being stupid and not reading the documentation properly.

regards

Mi

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pladavm 210 on at

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Hi @Mik_Haycock @v-micsh-msft What about including the time & date in the tweet that way it is never the same tweet.

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Mik_Haycock 15 on at

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That would work - however it would decrease your available character count - I have solved the problem simply by using an end of week tweet aswell just to make sure that there is always differing text

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pladavm 210 on at

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@Mik_Haycock How did you make sure the tweet is always different?

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Mik_Haycock 15 on at

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I just make sure I have a different tweet fire between the morning messages. In case nothing else has been tweeted that day/week.

Tweet A = "Hello, Good morning and welcome...blah blah blah"
Tweet B = "And it's good night from me and it's good night from him"

Monday wk1 - Tweet A
Friday wk1 - Tweet B
Monday wk2 - Tweet A
Friday wk2 - Tweet B
etc.

It used to be set up to run
Monday wk1 - Tweet A
Monday wk2 - Tweet A
Monday wk3 - Tweet A

if no other tweets were fired in between those tweets - that is when the 403 happened

regards

m

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