Logging on to AutoFollow

Twitter has changed the rules of engagement

Because of the way AutoFollow interacts with Twitter, we cannot use normal methods as AutoFollow pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable, and AutoFollow will be shut down as an application

Death of Auto Following

Somewhere in August, Twitter will be turning off Basic Authentication. This means that all applications that use Twitter need to be registered with Twitter as a Twitter OAuth Client Application. This means twitter can control that way an application behaves as a whole, rather than concentrating on individual Twitter users.

In this way, Twitter can turn off every AutoFollow application if it disagrees with the way AutoFollow works.

Which of cause it will, as Twitter does not like Auto Following.

New way

So, in order for AutoFollow to keep AutoFollowing, we need find a new way to stay under the radar of the Twitter immune system. We don't want to cause bother for Twitter as we love to hang out there too, but we would like keep AutoFollow up and running also.

We have thought about this, long and hard and we have found a solution.

But unfortunately it requires a little more complexity when logging on to Twitter with AutoFollow.

Don't be discouraged. It is only a little bit  more complex and actually quite easy if you follow the quick and easy Step-by-Step guide. And once your done. That's it for that account. You can login as normal from then on.

Twitter OAuth Clients

Twitter OAuth clients are applications registered with Twitter that allow users to log on to Twitter on behalf of a third party application such as TweetDeck or Digsby (Popular Twitter Applications).

Twitter has a facility for any developer to set up their own application for distribution to Twitter users. This makes it easy for third party developers to make new software that can access the Twitter network.

But not only Developers can access this area. Anyone who has a Twitter account can setup their own Twitter OAuth Clients.

This is the essence of how we can continue to use AutoFollow

How we Stumbled upon the Solution

At first we thought we would try to test AutoFollow running under one OAuth Client application.

We ran up about 5 instance of twitter accounts running under an Application we setup. Unfortunately as we suspected. The AutoFolow1.4 OAuth client was revoked within 24 hours of operation.

This left us scratching our heads for a while. Would this be the end for us?

But then we tried again. We simply registered a new Application, but this time we just ran two accounts AutoFollowing under the new application. This worked fine.

It appears as though if we had a small number of users running under one application, we could AutoFollow quite happily and still keep under the Twitter auto-follow radar.

Another way would be to use hidden web calls to masquerade as a person with a  browser, but this is slow and limited in effectiveness and scope.

What you need to Keep AutoFollowing

AutoFollow has added 2 new fields to the logon screen.

1. A Consumer Key (Supplied by You)

2. A Consumer Secret (Supplied by You)

With these new fields populated you can keep going.

The trick is, you need one set of these per Twitter account to safely stay under the radar. But it is not a hard to do. You simply follow our Guide to adding a new application. This will take only a few minutes per account and hopefully that's all you will need to do forever. Well at least until Twitter decide to change the rules again.

Follow our Guide

Follow these easy steps to create your own OAuth client for each of your Twitter accounts