Hey guys, I'm new here and I have a big issue - I started an Instagram account that puts all of my followers' profile pictures into a Unity game and makes them fight to the death. However, it grew far faster than I was expecting and I am at nearly 10k followers in about a week. My original method for gathering their profile pictures was by using a simple JavaScript program to gather them into a .csv file as I scrolled down my 'Followers' List, but there are simply too many of them now. I have tried headless browser automation, API Header emulation, and I keep running into rate limiting or HTML confusion. I need help finding an alternative way to gather a large amount of follower images, and quick as I post one a day! I am fairly well versed in Python and Javascript, but I can learn quick if there is a more effective approach. Please help!
#Time Sensitive Scraping
slim walrus
thin basinBOT
-# Python @naive bronze @wheat abyss @final spire
wheat abyss
per instagram's robot.txt and this server's rules we are not really allowed to assist with that
the robots.txt states robots.txt User-agent: * Disallow: /therefore all forms of scraping are tos violations
wheat abyss
i think you can use an api for it but you need a facebook developer app and some other stuff
toxic rivet
When I need to do something in a rush as a specific user and the API is either too cumbersome or simply has no access to my personal account, I'll throw on my Kludge cape and write a userscript.
My guess is that you'll hit something that prompts you to verify you're human if you actually script too much though? 🤔
slim walrus
Yeah, and I found that the method I was using at around ~3000 followers would end up rate limiting me even by hand just from scrolling, it would just reset and not show me any followers on the actual Instagram page
when I try to create a Facebook developer account I just get instantly banned, I have tried multiple times with different emails and sent a video of my face for confirmation but I think it is just automatically set to disable new developer accounts or something
toxic rivet
Yeah, and I found that the method I was using at around ~3000 followers would en...
Aye and you could probably change how the list is sorted/filtered to expose more but it'd be slow going?
runic mauve
Yeah, and I found that the method I was using at around ~3000 followers would en...
Just do some random shit lol
no one's gonna actually check
as long as the profile pics are diverse enough and are repeated randomly no one will notice with 10k characters fighting