safe limits and best practises

[martin@rootjazz]

But please be aware there is no "exact" safe number. What works for an aged account may not be applicable to a new account. Do be aware of any numbers you may be given. If I tell you it is safe to follow 500 users a day. That may be true for today, but not next week.

Also I may follow 500 users 3 times a week. Then you go do it 5 times a week and get banned.


Due to the above I am reluctant to give any actual numbers.

As with any bot, you always need to be thinking
"what *MAY* soundcloud be looking for"
"what is normal user use"
"how can I stay under the radar"


Just because the bot allows you to follow 1000 users in 5 minutes. That is not a good idea as no normal user could do that much so quick. Would you should do to follow a 1000 users is
1) Setup a routine to follow a 100 users every 12 hours for 5 days
2) Set a substantial pause, so you follow 1000 user pausing for 300 seconds after each, thus it takes 3.5 days to complete

I always prefer to go slow and steady and not give any risk to accounts. You can probably push it further with no risk, but that is risk management. If you push it too far, what are the risk? temp ban account. Are you prepared to risk that for completing processing in 1 day rather than 3?

But all the risk is, is temp bans. I have never heard of permanent bans on actual accounts (only bulk created accounts).


Best practises
* make use of interaction, so favourite other tracks. Preferable tracks that have just been uploaded in teh last hour so you know the user is online and active. They will likely check our your profile / tracks, interact with you back.
* Make use of the scrape / filter functions to allow you to interact (fav, comment, follow users) who have just uploaded a track recently, again so you know they are online
* When following / favouriting / commenting, make sure you select to play the track first. Who favourites a track / comments on a track when they have not listened to it, also if the artist sees that NO one has played the track for months, they may know you are a bot.
* Find some good groups and share away, share and unshare and share again to keep on top of the group