Organic behavior by bots

[hmdz105]

One problem many programmers face these days is Instagram's advanced anti-bot algorithms. Even real users are affected by account bans and blocks for bot-like activities.

What are your general advices in making Instagram believe it is dealing with a real human user not an algorithm/bot? (Like refreshing timeline feed, marking some media as seen with delays at random...)

[ghrlt]

From my personal experience, I would say:

Save session settings and re-use them at next login
Add phone and email to account
Do delay between requests (random between "fast user" and "boomer user")

If you are scraping data, use the public API whenever you can. (Instagrapi handle this perfectly)
Older account means less suspicions, thus less problems.

Following these, you can run a chat bot 24h/24, 7j/7.
For scraping, you might need to manually confirm your tel/email sometimes (but no ban)

[diegogurr]

@ghrlt how do you save session settings and re-use?What do you mean exactly?

[ghrlt]

You can do the following

s_path = "session.json"

cl = instagrapi.Client()

if s_path in os.listdir():
    cl.load_settings(s_path)

cl.login(username, password)

cl.dump_settings(s_path)

[diegogurr]

And how I create 'session.json'?It creates automatically on every login?Or I have to create it by code?

[ghrlt]

The dump will create the file to s_path

That is why you should check if file exist before loading

[diegogurr]

Thank you very much

[trevtravtrev]

From my personal experience, I would say:

Save session settings and re-use them at next login

Add phone and email to account

Do delay between requests (random between "fast user" and "boomer user")

If you are scraping data, use the public API whenever you can. (Instagrapi handle this perfectly)

Older account means less suspicions, thus less problems.

Following these, you can run a chat bot 24h/24, 7j/7.

For scraping, you might need to manually confirm your tel/email sometimes (but no ban)

Interesting about using the public api. I assumed using the lower level _v1 would be better. Why is that?

[ghrlt]

Yes it does. As it will use public api until no more being able to, and then the private api.

But that does not allow you to not being safe while scraping, so continue using delays, reasonable scraping tasks, etc...

[trevtravtrev]

Just at a glance, most scraping functions have an "amount" variable that is fed to it. How do you add delays when calling this function? If you input amount=500 doesn't this function automatically search 500 posts before returning?

[ghrlt]

Yes it does (depend on the functions actually).

I encourage you to look the source code to understand how the scraping functions are working in order to create a more safe and efficient scraping flow.

[trevtravtrev]

Thanks for your helpful responses. If I am looking to infinitely scrape account emails from a hashtag, do you have any other recommendations?

[ghrlt]

Just don't scrape 24/24 7/7.

Keep in mind that you are doing actions against the Instagram TOS, and they are doing their best to prevent you doing that.