I've made this script to try to find how many of the followers I have on twitter are inactive accounts. I think there are already services which does this and my approach to mark an account as inactive is naive, just coded this because I was bored.
- Ruby >= 1.9 (I've used 1.9.2)
- Twitter gem
ruby inactive-followers <scree_name> <inactive_days> [-n]
The script has two phases, first it gets the needed data from Twitter:
- Get the user followers
- For each follower, get last tweet and user info
All the data is saved locally. Twitter API has a limit of 150 requests per hour, the script does not do any throttling, it consumes all the requests it can, then it sleeps until it can continue.
Then it uses the data to check which follower is inactive:
- Each follower begins with a score of 0
- If certain criteria are met, increase the score
- Lists all users whose score is above certain threshold
This approach is naive and when I've tested with my own account I've seen some false positives. But it also found real inactive/bots accounts following me. Just add/modify the criteria and the threshold used to list the users.
The -n parameter is used when you want to avoid the first phase and only used the locally saved data.
The inactive_days parameter is used as one of the criteria used of the second phase.
This script is licensed under the BOLA license Where this BOLA license comes from? Read about it on Alberto's site