docs: record the scraping warning and stop the automation

Instagram flagged the account on 2026-08-21 -- not a suspension, an
interstitial at /accounts/scraping_warning/ saying it suspects automated
behaviour. Dismissed; account healthy. All three timers are disabled.

The sequence is worth keeping because each step misled differently. The daily
timer fired and exited 0 having fetched nothing: yesterday's manual run was
19h earlier, under the 20h floor, so a silent no-op on the one surface that
cannot be backfilled reported as success. Chrome was separately OOM-killed, so
no browser was running to notice. The recovery run then drew 400s from the
stories endpoint on all six profiles.

Cookies were exported and checked before assuming a block -- sessionid
well-formed and unexpired -- which cost nothing and ruled out the local
explanation. Only then did the browser reveal the interstitial.

Records the four things to fix before re-enabling: the floor defeats the daily
job, a skipped stories run must be loud rather than exit 0, the daily cadence
is itself the most machine-like pattern we run, and chrome-devtools.service
has Restart=no.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UXfdJu7QhSJLr47K7koTDF
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-21 23:29:08 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent db0b97dcec
commit 99fb24ad21
+55
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@@ -247,6 +247,61 @@ A stories-only run adds few files and often **none** — profiles frequently hav
no active story. "0 new" is a normal result, not a failure. `fileCount` in no active story. "0 new" is a normal result, not a failure. `fileCount` in
`/api/archives` is stale by design; use the per-profile `/files` listing. `/api/archives` is stale by design; use the per-profile `/files` listing.
## 2026-08-21 — scraping warning, automation stopped
**Instagram flagged the account.** Not suspended: an interstitial at
`/accounts/scraping_warning/` reading *"We suspect automated behaviour on your
account"*. It was dismissed in the browser and the account is healthy — feed
loads, still signed in. **All three timers are disabled.** Do not re-enable
them without deciding the cadence question below.
How it unfolded, because each step misled in a different way:
1. **09:13** the daily timer fired, exited 0 in one second, logged
`done; 0 step(s) failed` — and fetched nothing. Yesterday's manual run was
18.919.2h earlier, just under the `--min-interval 20` floor, so all six
sources were skipped. **A silent no-op on the one surface that cannot be
backfilled, reported as success.**
2. **20:28** `chrome-devtools.service` was OOM-killed (5.1 GB peak, ~1w3d CPU).
Unrelated to the above, and it does not break fetching — gallery-dl reads
the cookie *file*, not a live browser — but it meant no browser was running
to notice anything was wrong.
3. **23:19** a manual recovery run passed the floor (33h) and every source
failed with `400 Bad Request` on
`/api/v1/feed/reels_media/?reel_ids=…`. Six identical failures across six
profiles is not a per-profile fault.
4. Cookies were **exported and checked before assuming a block**:
`sessionid` 77 chars, printable, colon-delimited, 360 days to expiry;
`ds_user_id` present. Decryption was fine, so the fault was server-side.
This check costs no Instagram requests and should always come first.
5. The browser then showed the interstitial. The 400s were the challenge
state, not a ban.
### What has to change before automation is re-enabled
- **The `--min-interval` floor silently defeats the daily job.** Any manual run
in the preceding 20h makes the scheduled one a no-op. The floor exists to
stop an *aborted restart* re-enumerating profiles — a minutes-to-hours
concern — and a stories fetch is one request per profile. `stories` should
use something like `--min-interval 8`, not 20.
- **A skipped stories run must be loud.** `0 to sync, 6 skipped` currently
exits 0 and looks identical to success. On this surface a skip is a real
loss, and it should be visible in the journal without reading the log.
- **Reconsider the daily cadence itself.** A job hitting story endpoints for
six profiles every morning is the most machine-like thing here, randomised
delay or not, and it is what was flagged. Every-few-days, or on-demand, may
be the honest answer even though stories will be missed.
- **`chrome-devtools.service` has `Restart=no`** and died silently for three
hours. It needs `Restart=on-failure` and probably a `MemoryMax=`, or it will
be dead the next time the cookie needs refreshing.
### Cost of the pause
`official_artms` and `0ct0ber19` both had active stories on the evening of
2026-08-21 that will expire uncollected. That is the price of stopping, and it
is the right trade: spending requests on story endpoints minutes after
clearing a scraping warning is exactly the behaviour that was flagged.
## What changed on 2026-08-20 ## What changed on 2026-08-20
One session, three separate pieces of work. Recorded because the reasons are One session, three separate pieces of work. Recorded because the reasons are