Question

I am using the tweepy-gae library to do authenticated (oauth) calls to the twitter api (user:friends). The calls are working when running from my local machine and are failing with a 403 Forbidden: “The request is understood, but it has been refused. An accompanying error message will explain why. This code is used when requests are being denied due to update limits.” The app has read / write access but only does reads (not posting anything).

I’m aware of the white listing issues with Google App Engine and Twitter, and how GAE uses the same set of IP addresses that are hitting the limits collectively.

But these are authenticated calls for a method (user_friends) that are authentication optional, and twitter documentation says that rate limiting in this case is based on the authenticated user (350 calls / hour). And I’m doing a couple of calls per hour here and there only.

Any idea what can be the issue? Any help or hints would be appreciated 🙂

Answer 1

I figured what was wrong in this case. The Tweepy GAE library hasn’t been updated in a while and was calling calling the api under http://twitter.com/%5B%5D instead of http://api.twitter.com/%5B%5D

So the twitter api was behaving oddly probably because it was an old outdated version of the api that was being hit.