Facebook app blocked for posting too fast. What are the limits?

Question

We (a local hackerspace) have a Tumblr blog and wanted to make ourselves a Facebook page. Before going live we wanted to import all our Tumblr content to Facebook so our fans on Facebook can browse it here as well. For this I have made an app that reads all the posts from our Tumblr blog and publishes them to our new Facebook page (backdating those posts as well). Here's my problem: after the app does about ~130 re-posts (~260 operations: publish + backdate) I start getting an error:

Received Facebook error response of type OAuthException: It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.

Learn more about blocks in the Help Center. (code 368, subcode 1390008)

The block is gone the next day, but after a similar amount of operations it's back. After a couple of hours later, when the block is gone again, I introduced 6 second delays between operations, but that didn't help and after 19 re-posts I'm blocked again. Some facts:

• I am publishing posts to a feed of (yet) unpublished page I am the (only) owner of.
• The app is a standalone JAVA application and uses restfb to work with Facebook.
• The line that is causing the error: facebookClient.publish("me/feed", FacebookType.class, params.toArray(new Parameter[0]));
• All publish operations contain a link, mostly to respective posts on out Tumblr. Some contain message, caption or a name (depending on post type).
• I need to re-post ~900 posts from Tumblr, I have done ~250 so far. When over, I will likely put in on server, scheduled, to keep syncing single new posts.
• This app is not meant to be used publicly, it is rather a personal utility (but the code will be posted to GitHub, should anybody need it).

This is my first experience with Facebook API and I wasn't able to find a place where I could officially address them with this question. I could proceed by doing 100 posts/day, but I'm afraid I will eventually get banned for good, even though I don't feel like doing anything wrong.

I haven't put any more code here, as the code itself does not seem to be a problem, but rather the rate at which it is executed.

So, should I proceed with 100 posts/day and hope I won't be banned, or is there another "correct" way of dealing with this?

Thanks in advance!

Eustoliaeutectic

Hi, great post ! I'm working on something very similar. Any chance you can post the link to your github so I can have a scope? :) – Loewi

It's not there yet as some minor housekeeping is required for the code, but I can try not to forget to put it there as-is if you in a hurry. – Eustoliaeutectic

I was working away at this overnight and managed to get some baseline applications in place in python. There's no rush for pushing the code however I may have a snoop once it's live ! Cheers – Loewi

Answer 1

I'm answering a bit late but I just had this problem too so I did some research : it seems that besides the rate limits shown in Facebook docs, there's also a much more limited and opaque rate for POST requests to limit spam.

It's not clearly set but it could depend on your relationship to the page you're writing to (admin or not), if you post to multiple pages and finally if you post too quickly.

To answer the question, it seems that it would have been okay if you had done like 1 post per minute or less.

Padnag

Answer 2

I think you exceed the rate limiting for your user Id.

- Your app can make 200 calls per hour per user in aggregate. As an example, if your app has 100 users, this means that your app can make 20,000 calls. One user could make 19,000 of those calls and another could make 1,000, so this isn't a per-user limit. It's a per-app limit
- That hour is a sliding window, updated every few minutes
- If your app is rate limited, all calls for that app will be limited, not just for a specific user
- The number of users your app has is the average daily active users of your app, plus today's new logins

Check this: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/advanced/rate-limiting

Iover

Thanks Alexey. I've seen this info but I don't thinks it the case, because: - I am getting different error code. - I am not even able to make 200 posts, it's less than that. - I checked my rate limits monitor, and it says "Your app has not made enough calls in last 24 hours to qualify for Rate Limiting". – Eustoliaeutectic

I've gotten that too. – Setose

Answer 3

It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.

Learn more about blocks in the Help Center. If you think you're seeing this by mistake, please let us know.

Intensifier