Quote:
Originally Posted by Jiaz
You should not have to wipe your cookies. And you should use *extra* accounts for this purpose (crawling/downloading) to prevent your main account getting blocked/locked
|
Well, if I had the luxury of downloading only a few pics at a time, you would be right. Unfortunately, I regularly explore and find new accounts, and more often than not, the account already has hundreds or 1000+ to 2000+ posts. Factor in multiposts, and the total number of images can go into 3000+.
Videos, I found, have very little chance of setting off the anti-bot scanners, because larger videos means longer intervals between each download. This is why I do videos before images. For large batches of images, first I tried downloading small hundreds at a time. Eventually got flagged. So, I tried the same thing, but added in wiping the cookies. This prevented getting flagged. I realized that the long intervals did not help, because the total amount of bot activity was being accumulated in the aged cookies.
That method was working if I did a big batch and took a break for some time. Unfortunately, I come across multiple accounts with hundreds of posts. I tried wiping and using fresh cookies in quick succession, but this probably ended up being considered suspicious activity. So, if I have to scrape a profile with 1500 to 2000+ images, I started splitting the total number of downloads across my 3 accounts.
This method has been effective, with occasional slip-ups if I got too carried away. Now, with these new site changes being rolled out, I cannot yet tell the full extent of the changes. The last batch I did had 1460 images. I had to use a single account to download them all, because 1 of my 3 accounts could not cookie login, and the another is blocked by the profile I was downloading from. I split the total number of downloads between two different cookie logins, with a short wait in between, but this time I got flagged.
Could be Insta's system is temporarily on higher alert during the new rollouts. Also, I think Insta is using anti-bot softlock as a cover for collecting birthday submissions from all accounts. I believe this operation is part of their new rollout.