With explicit permission from an Instagram user, approved developers have the ability to post comments on that user’s behalf through the Comments POST endpoint and we’re committed to ensuring that developers using this endpoint are creating high quality experiences for our community. To that end, we’re going to begin to require that all comments posted through this endpoint meet the following guidelines, starting on July 19, 2014.

  • The total length of the comment cannot exceed 300 characters
  • The comment cannot contain more than 4 hashtags
  • The comment cannot contain more than 1 URL
  • The comment cannot consist of all capital letters

If a comment posted through the API does not meet one of these conditions, an error response will be returned and the comment will not be posted. A specific reason will be returned to help you resolve the issue before any re-attempts. For example:

{"code": 400, "error_type": "APICommentTooLongError", "error_message": "Your comment is too long."}

In order to provide a good experience to people that use your service, we recommend that you provide meaningful messages so that people understand why their comment was not successfully posted in these cases.

For more information on these guidelines and the expected error responses, please refer to our Developer Site.