Detailed Plan Configuration#

This page contains all details and cautions about plan configuration: which field is required (must be set) in one rule, what value can a field takes... If you are confused about usage of a rule, the answer is most likely written on this page of the documentation. (Can't find what you want? Ask questions to remind us to improve the documentation.)

Tool Scope Concepts#

Time Type Values#

All the time type values user configured for the tool, generated by the tool, are taken at UTC+0 (i.e. Greenwich Mean Time Zone). (But in general you don't need to be too concerned about a few hours' deviation in filter rules setting or so.)

There are three available time formats for configuration:

2022-01-01 01:01:01 -> datetime.datetime(2022, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)
2022-01-01 -> datetime.date(2022, 1, 1) (the time part is 00:00:00)
2022-01-01T01:01:01Z -> datetime.datetime(2022, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1)

Tips About Searching And Matching#

For more information about Twitter search queries, please refer to the official documentation.

Both tweet search and regular matching are simple yet powerful rules. They are extremely easy to misuse because they just match characters in text rather than the semantics of the text. For example, let's say you want to select people who hate cats and use hate cats as the keyword, but instead you get a match for I hate cockroach!!! Love cats so much ♥♥♥♥.

Our advice is to carefully choose words that only your target group will say:

Use short phrases that are long enough not to confuse semantics but iconic as keywords, such as campaign slogans, taglines or hashtags.
Make keywords contain special words that are so highly emotional or so intensely offensive that people outside the target group won't use them.

Regular Expression#

Things become complicated when it comes to regular expressions. Not only do we have to understand the syntax of regular expressions (in python), but we also have to cross the hurdle of configuration language's and Python's character escaping concepts.

You can test your (configuration language escaping is not concerned) regular expression on convenient online websites, this website for example. Our advice is try not to use too complex expression, or split one rule with complex expression into multiple rules with simpler ones.

User Source Rules#

ids#

Where to get them? Somehow you can get them from another automatic twitter processing tool. If you want to get one user's id manually, maybe you can find it in the Twitter Web Client's XHRs via browser developer console? And there are some online websites that allows you to get the id of a user with its name, google "Twitter user id" and you'll find them.

The type of list elements can be number or string.

User Filter Rules#

follower, following#

At least one of less_than, more_than fields need to be set.
This sounds not straightforward, but the less_than needs to be bigger than the more_than because the order of comparison is: more_than < number < less_than
The equal-to-edge cases (number=less_than or number=more_then) are regard as falsy (not trigger the rule).