ztratar / followr

A no-frills chrome extension to gain followers on twitter through tasteful automation.

Introducing Followr

A no-frills chrome extension to gain followers on twitter through tasteful automation.

Download on chrome

Setup takes 15 seconds and there is only one requirement: you must be logged into twitter.com. Once you specify your interests, followr will search for tweets every 30 minutes and favorite a small amount of them.

Unlike all other bots, followr's goal is to actually improve Twitter. As such, followr will limit itself from spamming excessively and rewards you for good behavior. The more you use Twitter normally, the harder followr will work.

Why was Followr built and what does the future hold?

What is new in V1?

Contributing

As an open source project, I'm happy if people want to help. Just let me know on twitter.

License

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2014 Zach Tratar

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

followr's Issues

Is Followr Dead?

Just relaunched followr after a few months, and it doesn't seem to be working. Guessing Twitter have changed some things on their website which has messed up with the functionality. But is this project dead? Are you still working on it at all?

Stopped working

It stopped working a week ago!
I was having so much fun with it :(
Make it work again PLEASE :(

"blacklisted words" should also take the user name into account

Example: https://twitter.com/ArchUpdates/status/506942008053624832

I follow #archlinux tag, but I'd like to ignore @ArchUpdates user since all their tweets are automatic and there are so many of them, that followr rarely favorites #archlinux tagged tweets from other users.

I propose user names (e.g. ArchUpdates) and full names (e.g. ArchLinux Updates) are taken into account for blacklisted words.

# followers gained stuck at 0

I know that I have gained a number of followers from followr, but the number shows 0:

Hanging?

Currently churns and then closes without favoriting - has anyone else experienced a similar issue?

I think it's broken with latest chrome updates

Seemed to stop working on me... any way I could help you out? (logs/whatever)

Feature Request - Show Followers Gained Per Tag [Author will accept pull request]

21 followers gained That's cool to know how many people were attracted by Followr. However, it would be good to know what topics made what numbers. I could get rid of inefective tags.

Let's say the "Topics to follow" are: #first, #second, @Company, blah. After clicking a 21 followers gained link, more detailed stats would appear. Please note that 10 + 10 + 2 = 22, not 21. It's possible when a tweet had more than one tags that Followr monitors.

#first: 10
#second: 10
@company: 2
blah: 0

Cool plugin!

History formatting combines name and handle

Followr malfunctioning after importing 100+ words into blacklist

Followr worked fine until I imported about 100+ words into the blacklist. 316 to be exact. Why the long list? I included a list of vulgar/bad words from a-z.

Thank you for this chrome extension . I appreciate the time and effort you put into this.

UPDATE:

• Removed my entire blacklist and left no words & the extension started working again. When I tried adding back 1-3 words, it stopped working.

Best,
Clifford

abort finding new tweets after some timeout

Finding new tweets sometimes hangs. Instead of waiting for it to never succeed, some timeout needs to be in place.

Been using Followr since HN post, account is now suspended

Filing for an appeal now. Fingers crossed?

v1 gathers hundreds of tweets to favorite

I recently upgraded to v1. The first time I ran it (after clicking save) it gathered 896 tweets to favorite and started chugging along at about one per second. Since it gave no hint of stopping, I closed the window manually at ~30 and, in the meantime, disabled the extension.

Followr doesn't work for about a week - hangs with 100% CPU usage

The last time Followr favorites something is September 26th. Since then there are only favorites that I did myself.

"Finding new tweets..." spins for a moment, then hangs with 100% CPU usage. The window closes soon after.

Reinstalling doesn't help. The last time I updated Chrome was 2014-08-23, so that's not the problem. Did Twitter change something?

Feature Request - Time-based Analytics [Author will accept pull request]

It would be nice to have some sort of date analytics based on followers. i.e X followers in X weeks.

I love Followr Ive been creating chrome user accounts and opening separate windows for each twitter account and keep Followr running on those - beats logging in and out each time!

Tab closing after initiating work to gather followers

Something seems to currently be wrong with this plugin. It currently just closes the new tab that is supposed to work on the follows. Tab opens and then closes. Great plugin in. I loved it before the very last update.

If you need more specifics on this issue I can give them. I am not sure you are aware that this great plugin stopped working with the latest update.

Feature request: Auto removal of old favorites?

I have accumulated around 10k favorites with my Account... we should make followr to remove old favorites 'pseduo randomly' too.

Just an idea.

not working

Couple of days ago it stopped working. It is stuck at loading tweets sections and does not seem to like new tweets. @ztratar

Followr crashes when no window is open

Steps to reproduce:

1. Start Followr
2. Close all Chrome windows but leave Chrome running
3. Wait for Followr to try to run again
4. Message from Chrome: "Followr has crashed. Click this balloon to reload the extension"
5. Clicking the message. Followr crashes again.
6. Open a new window in Chrome.
7. Click the message again, Followr successfully runs.

Possible fix: Before calling chrome.tabs.create (https://github.com/ztratar/followr/blob/master/src/bg/background.js#L31), call chrome.windows.getCurrent and check for an open window. Not tested.

Manifest file is invalid.

When trying to install on Google Chrome (Version 33.0.1750.149), installation failed with "Manifest file is invalid" error.

Twitter closes randomly

I find that when I'm scrolling through the feed or writing a tweet, the window will close automatically. Seems to be a bug in the latest version of Followr. Have you encountered this?

Thanks for all of your work @ztratar.

Extension mysteriously providing Twitter .btn CSS styles

With this extension loaded, any .btn button within the Twitter UI is getting the following user agent styles applied:

Resulting in really tight kerning everywhere, because of the letter-spacing: 1px; (most other styles are being overridden elsewhere in the actual CSS from twitter.com):

If I disable this extension and don’t touch anything else, those styles go away. I’ve looked through the code of this extension though, and these styles don’t seem to be anywhere in this repo. I have no idea where this user agent stylesheet rule is coming from, but I’ve narrowed it down to this extension being enabled being the factor which reproduces the issue for me.

Notes:

• This style does not turn up when visiting non-twitter.com sites that have rules for .btn, for example if I view the Bootstrap docs it’s fine.
• I’ve installed the extension based in the current master branch, not via the Chrome extension store.

@ztratar Any ideas?

Feature Request: Location-based Favoriting [Up for grabs, will approve pull request]

Not even sure if this would be possible, but it would be nice to restrict to a particular location, even if its only country based?

Its stopped working for me

Sorry not the best on computers but loving this piece of software but it has stopped working. I have no idea why? it goes through to the grey screen looking for tweets then just freezes and stops?

Any help please?

Regards
Craig

Semi automatic mode / suggest like rather than automatically like

Followr is a great discovery tool, but when dealing with polarized debates or topics related to crime, full automation can get pretty ugly when you like bad news or tweets supporting the opposite you support... I know that people may not be following your like list at all times, but still... I tried throwing a few blacklist keywords but it hasn't been conclusive yet, followr has liked a lot of tweets I wouldn't have liked myself.

Would a semi-automated option (followr brings up suggestions and human decides what to like) make sense for anybody else than me, at least in the learning stage?

Can't switch accounts?

Followr seems stuck on one account. Where is the ability to switch to a different Twitter account?