Table of Contents

• About the project
  • Disadventages
  • Solution
  • Accepting follow requests
  • Interval
  • Messages
• Getting started
  • Installation
• Usage
• Contributing
• Contact
• License

About the project

Instagram will stop showing you the exact amount of your follow requests once it reaches a thousand users (or 200 on the browser version). They never publicly announced why, but the most likely reason for this is, so the private accounts with thousands of followers will not take advantage of this. Without this limit, the people that own these accounts have the opportunity to clickbait thousands of users into requesting a follow without having to show them any content at all. The official Instagram app on IOS or Android will show a maximum amount of 1000 pending follow requests, but on the browser version just 200.

Solution

• The only solution for counting past these limits is by scraping the list of the recent 200 users that requested a follow in the browser version of Instagram. You can store the users in a JSON file along with a count for every user in that list. Everytime you get a new follow request, one of the users in the list on Instagram will be replaced with a new user. Since all previous users are stored in the JSON, we will who the new user is and we can append him to the count.

Disadventages

• One disadvantage is that the code requires to be running 24 hours a day to keep track of new incoming follow requests. Therefore, there has to be a decent amount of logins per day to make this work, but it's dependent on how many new follow requests your account gets. While Instagram has never publicly announced how many times you can log in per day, the script will try its best to avoid your account getting any type of punishment. The interval between every run will be based on the number of requests it got in the previous run.
  

• Another disadvantage is that you have to start with less than 200 pending follow requests, to have an accurate count. Otherwise, it will only take the 200 most recent requests and start from there.

Accepting follow requests

Since it's recommended to start your count when your requests are below 200, there is an option to automatically approve all your pending follow requests. For each run, 200 users will be accepted until your pending requests are below the 200 limit. Once it's below 200, a file named accept.json will be created, so no more requests will be accepted when appending them to your total amount in username_pending_users.json. Note that none of the users that get accepted will be appended to that JSON; only the users that request a follow after accepting is finished will be appended to the count. If you have already accepted followers, but wish to accept again, then you can delete accept.json. By changing accept to True at line 625, all your pending follow requests will be accepted. If it's set to False, it will just directly move on to counting your incoming requests.

if __name__ == "__main__":
    '''
    To accept follow requests -> Scraper(accept=True)
    '''
    Scraper(accept=False)

In this example, Scraper is set to False, so none of the current pending follow requests will be accepted.

Interval

The standard interval between each run will be randomized between 2400 and 3000 seconds. It will be shortened as you get more requests, since you can only get to see the 200 most recent users that requested a follow. By shortening the interval, you can avoid letting new requests get past 200, so your count will stay accurate.

if self.new_requests >= 50:
    self.waiting = random.randint(2400, 3000)
                    
if self.new_requests >= 100:
    self.waiting = random.randint(1800, 2400)

if self.new_requests >= 150:
    self.waiting = random.randint(900, 1200)

Once your run has finished and the amount of new received requests is below 50, the standard interval will be used.

Messages

Since the code has to be hosted somewhere to get an accurate count, it won't make it easy to access your console very quickly to look at your total amount of requests. That's why a message will be sent to your account at each run which will include the amount of requests, the current date, etc.

As shown in the picture above, you will also be notified when your account is still accepting requested users instead of checking for new incoming follow requests.

Getting started

Installation

1. Clone the repository.

https://github.com/semmoolenschot/Instagram-Request-Scanner.git

2. Install the requirements.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

At the beginning, you will be asked to log in with your Instagram account. Your username and password will be encrypted and stored in secrets.pickle so you don't have to manually log in every time the script runs. There will also be a sessions folder created which will also include your credentials encrypted with the same key as secrets.pickle . The sessions folder is required to log in with the API, so the messages with your data can be sent to your account. Once you're logged in, it will automatically get your pending follow requests and a countdown for the next run will be displayed.

As you can see, your follow requests will be shown past 200 while the browser version of Instagram still only show 200 requests.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

Contact

sem@moolenschot.nl
Reddit
Instagram

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.