Protest Against @mikf (Regarding Account Ban on X Due to gallery-dl Usage)

[darkeroticism]

@mikf
Over a year ago, one of my sub-accounts was banned from X for using gallery-dl. My main account is still alive, but there’s no way I’m going to use it now.
I’ve been trying to gather information on this matter, but you went ahead and closed the related issues, didn’t you?

#5532
#6020
#6130
#7742

• Tell me your stance on this problem (e.g., “this is not a gallery-dl issue, it’s an X issue,” etc.).
• My view is that, while it may not be a direct flaw of gallery-dl itself, the fact that it exposes users to such a serious risk without any warnings or explanations is dishonest. To me, it looks like you are trying to sweep the issue under the rug.
• If you have no intention of addressing this, then you should not be interfering with user discussions or blocking information sharing. At the very least, you should redirect people to a single place, like Discussions.
• If there’s no realistic prospect of keeping up with X’s advanced bot-detection measures (e.g., no PRs coming in), then you should stop advertising “support for X,” deprecate the API, and issue clear warnings.
• I hereby protest your actions.

[thatfuckingbird]

You willingly used software that violates the X terms of service. All responsibility is yours. Automated scraping is disallowed by most sites that gallery-dl supports, this should be especially obvious for X. The developer tries his best to make gallery-dl in a way that won't get you banned, but there is absolutely no guarantee about anything, especially when a site tries to fight it. This should also be obvious. If you need guarantees then go pay for official X API access (https://docs.x.com/x-api/introduction), since they're the only ones that can give you any kind of guarantee.

The issues are closed because prolonged general discussion is not what issues are for. Closing them is not sweeping anything under the rug, they still can be found as you did, and all the information is still there. There are also several open discussion threads regarding twitter with people discussing how to avoid getting suspended.

It is also entirely possible that the reason you are getting banned is because you are using gallery-dl wrong in some way. Currently I regularly scrape media from 109 twitter accounts and also download a lot of individual tweets and never had my account banned.

[docholllidae]

I hearby protest your actions.

What actions are you protesting? that mikf takes much of his time and effort to create a free tool for archiving many site's contents? It's your actions of using this tool to violate the X ToS that allegedly led your account suspensions.
Further, I say "allegedly" because last I knew x/twitter doesn't provide a reason for your account suspension other than "you did something that violates the ToS"; being 3rd parties to this suspension and having no context of how you used your account we can't even be sure that it was in fact the use of gallery-dl that led to the suspension

if it was the use of gallery-dl led to the suspension, then it sounds like a configuration issue on your end.
same as @thatfuckingbird , i have an input file with several hundred accounts that get scraped regularly, using my daily non-paid account, and have never gotten any suspension or even warning from x/twitter
try using larger sleep values, and make sure you're aborting after only a few posts - for example, i use

            ....
            "skip": "abort:4",
            "sleep": [14.9, 29.2],
            "sleep-request": [13.8, 33.6],
            ....

this has allowed me to fully archive accounts with literal 10s of thousands of media, and to run non-stop passes on several hundreds of accounts in succession

[gphg]

This is good. Thanks for telling me how to get good.

Edit: had to remove "skip": "abort:4", because it stopped on already downloaded link, for reasons.

[iseeface]

• If there’s no realistic prospect of keeping up with X’s advanced bot-detection measures (e.g., no PRs coming in), then you should stop advertising “support for X,” deprecate the API, and issue clear warnings.

gallery-dl has "sleep" and "skip" features to help avoid bans from scraping too quickly and being flagged as a bot. You can use options like --sleep or --sleep-request to add delays between requests. You can find these options in the configuration documentation.