This page contains a collection of information related to running your bot. Firstly, you can check your status in the follower competition right here.

List of user_id for all bots is here.

Below is the list of requirements (updated week to week). 

Bot abilities

• Make sure the bot is running continously on cron. It's a good idea to check on it periodically to make sure a bug hasn't brought it down.
• Make sure the bot profile is updated and has a good human score on bot-or-not: http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot/.
• Make sure the overall bot behavior is as human as possible. This includes:

• Tweeting according to a realistic temporal profile (appropriate to the time-zone you're in).
• Making sure that the profile is geolocated to San Francisco. And that individual tweets are also geolocated (e.g. use your base location as a starting point and add random noise to tweet around your neighborhood).

• Run the reciprocal follow routine (see Lecture 3). 

• Until you have 1000 followers, follow 50% humans and 50% San Franciscans. After you reach 1000 followers, focus solely on San Francisco (SF) accounts. You determine if bots are in SF by either having geolocated tweets in SF, or having "San Francisco", "San Fran", "SF " in the account description.
• It's probably also a good idea to follow according to a "realistic time-table"
• Start following the bots that follow other people in the class. The list is available here. See Lecture 8.
• For every human follower you gain, use the network and follow all of their reciprocal followers (people they follow and who follows them back). [Remember that class bots are not human, so do not follow this strategy for those bots - our current reciprocal follows will lead to a network of follow-back bots.]

• Generate content

• Auto-retweet according to principles in Lecture 4, 5.
• Generate one original tweet per day. You may choose your own method, e.g. grabbing content from popular web-pages. Or follow some of the strategies that Claire outlined (see Lecture 8).

Bot Logging

• Make sure the logging script is running reliably. See the "Amazon EC2" page.
• IMPORTANT (this one is necessary for the final project). For every human you attempt to follow, store the entire user profie for later analysis (see Lecture 8). Keep track of who follows you back and who doesn't. 

​Bot Evaluation Criteria

• Effort put into a convincing bot persona
• Continuously running & attempting to acquire new followers (total follower count is not a criterion)
• Continuously reporting/collecting stats (recall that final project depends on this)
• Participation in interventions.
• Creativity in tweeting mechanism