[lukashed]

"I stopped these at first with IP banning, and switched to Rack::Attack for throttling per-Twitter-ID."

I wonder what Twitter-ID he means. Is there an API to get a numeric ID for a given handle that stays the same even when you change your username? If he means the username, wouldn't it be possible to programatically change the username after each request and thus avoid the throttling?

[koopajah]

Each twitter account comes with a unique numeric identifier in addition to your handle. If it didn't you wouldn't be able to login with twitter on some websites when you change your handle.

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/platform-objects/users

EDIT: After rereading your comment you might have been asking if it was possible to retrieve this id with a simple API call and not with OAUTH. It is possible with "users/show" as explained here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/users/show

[lukashed]

Thanks, good to know. Though in the current version of the API (1.1), there is a rate limitation of 180 requests/15m (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/users/show), which could become a problem quite quickly on a website of that scale.

[ceejayoz]

The rate limit is done against the user's access token, not the server itself. A billion users gets you 180 billion requests in 15 min.