Instagram today has become a treacherous land to navigate through, it has more traps and mines than Afghanistan after the war. One wrong move and you will feel the wrath of Instagram gods.

But fret not! We’ve come up with these recipes to guide you through the trial of becoming a master of your own Instagram fate.  Follow these guides and at least you have a bigger chance to live a normal life as an Instagram citizen:

1. If you’ve just created a new Instagram account, DO NOT start Liking or Commentingon other people’s photos straight away. This is what fake accounts usually do. Instead, DO start with posting your own photos, at least 10 of them, but not at the same hour, do it 2 a day. After one week past, you can start with your liking or commenting.
2. DO complete your Instagram profile, including uploading your profile photo and write a short bio. Do not expose yourself to Instagram hunt and destroySentinel bot.
3. DO NOT stop posting photos! Again this is a typical things that spammers do. DO post more and post regularly. Twice a week is enough if you can’t do daily post.
4. DO NOT Like excessively! This will surely get you banned. The limit is 350 per hour, but I suggest not to max your quota.
5. DO NOT Follow people en-mass! This is considered to be a spammy and bot-like activity. The limit is 20 per hour. And remember that you can only follow as many as 7500 people, no more. So choose who you follow wisely.
6. DO NOT post multiple duplicate comments – including emoji. As soon as Instagram detect you doing this it will put you straight away in ‘detention‘! You won’t be able to comment anymore for as long as you are in this proverbial dog house. For how long? Nobody knows.

If you manage to get the notorious ‘Action Blocked‘ message from Instagram, well … you better pray that Instagram will let you in.  I’ve heard from various users that the ‘detention’ time can range from a few hours to a few weeks!!!

7. DO NOT mention users that don’t follow you on other people post, unless they mention you first!This usually happens when our photo has been selected to ‘win’ some competition/weekly challenge etc. and we have people congratulate us.  Your first instinct would be to thank them, each of them.  Well, try not to do this to much, and definitely not by mentioning more than one people in one comment.  It sucks I know, but as I mention at the beginning of this post, this is the new paranoid Instagram.
8. DO be careful when you use Like or Follow Bot services. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that you refrain yourself from using these services. However I won’t deny that there are cases where the use of these bots have its merit. And I am not going to stop you from doing that as long as you understand the risk that you are taking. Instagram and its parent company Facebook has been getting better in detecting these type of activities lately, so don’t say I didn’t tell you so!
9.  DO NOT ignore the Community Guidelines! There are probably tens other things that can get you locked out from Instagram that we don’t know the reason about. So I urge you to read (again) the Instagram community guidelines and try to follow the rules written in there.

Now all of these feel like as if we are living in a dictatorship country, and a little bit of sledgehammer solution, but this seems to be what Instagram had decided to do to try to curb the spammers, fake accounts and bots.

It’s better to be over cautious nowadays, because once you get banned there is no way to tell when or if you will get your account back!

Read full article: How to avoid getting banned, blocked or disabled by Instagram