Faux Pas

A Twitter API 1.1 bot that listens for tweets @ a specific user, and replies redirecting the tweeting user to another handle.

Why?

By the time I'd signed up for Twitter, I'd missed the chance to get @tomcardoso, and was stuck with @tom_cardoso instead. Occasionally, people will tweet at @tomcardoso instead of my actual handle, so this bot tweets at them and suggests they might want to tweet at @tom_cardoso instead. (This isn't terribly rude because @tomcardoso has been inactive for years. Please be polite when using this bot.)

Faux Pas' code is heavily inspired by Michael Keller's mockingjay.

Installation

Make sure you have Node.js installed, then do:

npm install faux-pas

Usage

First, create a file called .twitter.json in the project's root directory and add your API keys to it as such:

{
  "consumer_key": "your consumer key here",
  "consumer_secret": "your consumer secret here",
  "access_token": "your access token here",
  "access_token_secret": "your access token secret here"
}

Once that's done, you'll want to customize the opts variable in index.js as so:

var opts = {
  mentioned_user: "example_user_name", // the Twitter handle you'd like to track goes here
  intended_user: "your_user_name", // the Twitter account you want to redirect people to
  credentials: {
    consumer_key: config.consumer_key,
    consumer_secret: config.consumer_secret,
    access_token: config.access_token,
    access_token_secret: config.access_token_secret
  },
  bot_name: "your_bot_name", // the name of your bot
  count: 20
};

Crontab

This package is meant to be run on a cron. Here's an example setup that runs it on the 1s

1,11,21,31,41,51 * * * * /usr/bin/node /home/ubuntu/tasks/botname/index.js

Alternatively if you want to run it locally just once, you just need to do: node index.js

Troubleshooting

More often than not, if you're having a problem after setting up the scripts, it's because the /last-ids folder is missing. Try recreating the folder and everything should (hopefully) work… more or less.