Don't even TRY automating IG through Website anymore...

ManiB said:

Are you not reading the OP before commenting? He said that he tried on his home wifi netowrk. How can that be bad? Just cause you are selling proxies doesnt mean you should comment on random threads suggesting them better proxies.

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toninin said:

are you using selenium? there should be some javascript variables which needs to be changed

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RupFox said:

For sure, but that requires using something like Appium which is a huge PIA.

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grammakov said:

Are you using the session ID to log in? I'm running my own web-based scraper and it works just great on large amounts of data.

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RupFox said:

UPDATE: I managed to successfully run the script for 3 hours today and followed 65 people while liking roughly 40 posts. I did it from my home wifi network. Not sure why it worked today while yesterday it was going nuts. I did add some more random waits and random scroll behavior. So it goes to a person's profile (via url). It waits a bit, scrolls down their feed a random amount, scrolls back up to the element it wants to interact with, then clicks it. interacting with 100 posts/users after an hour is obviously not ideal, but it's something!

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RupFox said:

For sure, but that requires using something like Appium which is a huge PIA.

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RupFox said:

I spent all weekend creating a custom automation script (Using webdriver). I had actually done this once before over a year ago, and there seemed to be NO rate limits. I was going crazy and all was well.

I decided to record a video tutorial on writing an instagram bot from scratch this weekend, and it was hell.

I've had three different accounts action-blocked. Within minutes. These are three different accounts I use regularly, they have posts, some followers, and I've only automated them through a few days stretch over a year ago. So they should be 'warm' and in good standing.

Amazingly, I'm getting rate-limited by number of VIEWS!! I had a list of 200 profiles to navigate to, get their follower/following ratio and store them in a file. Well after about ~20 profiles the pages stopped loading. When I stopped the the script and navigated to the page manually it would say something like "Please try again in a few minutes". LIking posts led to me getting a good old action block after liking 5 ~ 10 posts. Same with follows.

Here are some of the steps I took to try to fool Instagram:

Mobile emulation: I am starting the Chrome browser as an iPhone X with a small viewport.
Network throttling: I am throttling my network to make it seem like it's 3G (might not be working)
Scrolling: I scroll around the page before scrolling to the button I want to click, and the scroll amounts are randomized.
Timing: All actions are timed randomly between 5 - 60 seconds, this means I'm only liking /following several to a dozen users per hour. When I follow someone the browser waits between 1 ~ 2 minutes before proceeding.
No login: The browser loads with a user profile that is already logged into Instagram.

Still getting blocked.

After reading the posts on here and Jarvee's struggles, it seems clear to me that Instagram has DRAMATICALLY hobbled the power of the web instagram client. If you try to do ANY mass actions on instagram through the web client you will get blocked. They only accept a large number of actions through the mobile app now it seems.

I tried using my laptop home wifi network, and using USA proxies via Tunnelbear. It doesn't seem to be my ip that's getting blocked, because I log into another account and I'm good. They just block whatever account is acting suspicious. I'm going to try a few more things to really confirm this. And then if that still doesn't work, I will have to use Appium to automate the actual mobile app.

Any success stories from people using their own custom scripts?

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