blockbot

High-level utilities to make Twitter tolerable.

Table of Contents

Features

Block Followers of an Account
Block Media Replies
Long-Running Queries (Daemons)

Getting Started

blockbot uses the builtin sqlite3 module for minimal dependencies, only requiring:

Python 3.7 or higher.

Next, install blockbot from source:

python setup.py install --user

Configuring API Access

blockbot requires API access, and does this through Tweepy. In order to access Tweepy, you must update config/api.json with your credentials acquired from Twitter Developer.

High-Level Access

First, edit the configuration files in ~/.blockbot/config/. You will need to edit api.json and the config for the script you wish to use.

A dummy example of API JSON with realistic but fake data is:

{
    "consumer_key": "AIbwRVbCJMkaiQVlfJbKG5gAy",
    "consumer_secret": "P0wiBhrdNlCTb2okvzxRGNKD4opnyOtFGM7Q6Hvmig0IzjMYw5",
    "access_token": "Q9D4wOv9zA-q3rlIxbZgknaZKaPwGBPtiT4AcQLWZ5Q9lduhX7",
    "access_token_secret": "lXyoz2kDkSz01riCAkbOlE4iOmSkBlHXVij"
}

In addition, due to the Twitter APIv2 rate limits, you can also specify local rate limiting with the API version. An example of this would be:

{
    "consumer_key": "AIbwRVbCJMkaiQVlfJbKG5gAy",
    "consumer_secret": "P0wiBhrdNlCTb2okvzxRGNKD4opnyOtFGM7Q6Hvmig0IzjMYw5",
    "access_token": "Q9D4wOv9zA-q3rlIxbZgknaZKaPwGBPtiT4AcQLWZ5Q9lduhX7",
    "access_token_secret": "lXyoz2kDkSz01riCAkbOlE4iOmSkBlHXVij",
    "api_root": "/2",
    "local_rate_limit": true
}

For example, use block_media_replies, you would edit block_media_replies.json to have the desired data. An example would be:

{
    "account_screen_name": "twitter",
    "whitelist_screen_names": ["jack"],
    "keywords": {
        "whitelist_photo": true,
        "whitelist_animated_gif": false,
        "whitelist_video": false,
        "whitelist_verified": true,
        "whitelist_following": true,
        "whitelist_follow_request_sent": true,
        "whitelist_friendship": true,
        "timeout": 5,
        "sleep_time": 600
    }
}

Finally, run block_media_replies.py (if it's not in the path, it should be installed in ~/.local/bin/block_media_replies.py). Now, the script will run in the background blocking the most recent media replies to the account in question.

To kill the script, run kill_block_media_replies.py.

Block Followers of An Account

Twitter has a major harassment problem, leading to "dogpiles". Often, a problematic user quotes a Tweet of yours, leading to large groups of their followers harassment you. blockbot allows you to block all followers of an account, to help stem the tide of harassment:

import blockbot

# List of account screen names to block followers from.
account_screen_names = ['twitter']
# Optional list of account screen names to whitelist: don't block the account
# if they follow or are followed by @jack.
whitelist_screen_names = ['jack']
blockbot.block_followers(account_screen_names, whitelist_screen_names)

# Valid keywords to customize connection behavior:
#   timeout (default 5) - Seconds to timeout when making request.
#   sleep_time (default 600) - Seconds to sleep on a non-fatal connection error.

# Valid keywords to customize blocking behavior:
#   whitelist_verified (default True) - Do not block verified accounts.
#   whitelist_following (default True) - Do not block accounts you follow.
#   whitelist_follow_request_sent (default True) - Do not block accounts you have sent follow requests to.
#   whitelist_friendship (default True) - Do not block accounts that follow you or you follow.

Block Media Replies

Twitter prioritizes "native" media, which means media is an intrusive form of content on Twitter. Recently, groups of accounts have started spamming videos in replies to popular trends or in the replies of popular accounts. blockbot allows you to block these accounts automatically:

import blockbot

# Block all replies to Tweets from @twitter with media in the replies.
account_screen_name = 'twitter'
# Optional list of account screen names to whitelist: don't block the account
# if they follow or are followed by @jack.
whitelist_screen_names = ['jack']
blockbot.block_media_replies(account_screen_name, whitelist_screen_names)

# Valid keywords to customize connection behavior:
#   timeout (default 5) - Seconds to timeout when making request.
#   sleep_time (default 600) - Seconds to sleep on a non-fatal connection error.

# Valid keywords to customize blocking behavior:
#   whitelist_photo (default True) - Do not block media replies containing photos.
#   whitelist_animated_gif (default False) - Do not block media replies containing animated GIFs.
#   whitelist_video (default False) - Do not block media replies containing video.
#   whitelist_verified (default True) - Do not block verified accounts.
#   whitelist_following (default True) - Do not block accounts you follow.
#   whitelist_follow_request_sent (default True) - Do not block accounts you have sent follow requests to.
#   whitelist_friendship (default True) - Do not block accounts that follow you or you follow.

Daemons

NOTE: Daemons are only supported on UNIX-like systems, AKA, Windows will not work.

Daemons are long-running tasks that run as background processes. Daemons are ideally suited to a Twitter block bot, so we provide utility functions to convert any feature into a daemon.

Please note that only one tasks, whether it is a daemon or a function call, should be running at a single time.

import blockbot

# Block all replies to Tweets from @twitter with media in the replies.
account_screen_name = 'twitter'
# Optional list of accounts to whitelist: don't block the account
# if they follow or are followed by @jack.
whitelist_screen_names = ['jack']
# Pass the function name as the first argument, and any arguments
# to the function after. This will start the task as a daemon.
# This will exit the current interpreter.
blockbot.as_daemon(
    blockbot.block_media_replies, 
    account_screen_name, 
    whitelist_screen_names
)

Thread Safety

Please note that nothing in this library is thread- or process-safe, and should not be run in multiple threads or processes with multi-threading or multi-processing. Since the bottleneck is both network I/O and Twitter's rate limits, neither multi-threading nor multi-processing makes sense and will not be supported.

Viewing Blocks

Want to view who's blocked? Go to an online SQLiteViewer and open your database (found in ~/.blockbot/db/database.sqlite), and you can view your blocked accounts and information on why they were blocked.

License

Blockbot is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE for more information.

Contributing

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in lexical by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Warning

Make sure not to accidentally expose your Twitter credentials on pull requests. To avoid accidentally exposing credentials, run the following command after cloning the repository:

git update-index --assume-unchanged config/api.json

All commits with Twitter credentials anywhere in the git history will be automatically rejected, for account safety reasons.