Thanks Taylor, I appreciate you taking a look.
It's interesting that "the account is suspended, not the application". One side effect of this appears to be that while users who have authenticated continue to remain authenticated to our application, the OAuth API appears to be refusing to issue tokens for new users - presumably because our account is suspended? Anyway, on to how we would avoid this in the future. Simply put, in this proving stage for a new application we try to quickly approach a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and we were quite ruthless in throwing out features / enhancements if there was another manual way of doing something in the very short-term. In terms of gaining feedback from our users, the approach we took of sending @messages to the authenticated users clearly upsets the Spam Gods and therefore isn't a suitable mechanism - we should of invested in a different approach. Here's four things we could of done differently to achieve a similar outcome that wouldn't upset Twitter: 1. Collect the users email address before, or after they authenticate with OAuth and make it part of the profile we store. We could make this a mandatory or optional step for using our application. Either way we'd have at least some email addresses and permission to email users directly so we could send the survey to them. We would make it optional given we allow anonymous users anyway! 2. Provide a link or callout on the homepage with the survey for returning users. 3. After some period of use, popup a call out in the application asking users to provide feedback. Annoying yes, but valuable to us in this early stage and we need only do it once. This has a big advantage in that it would capture both Authenticated and Anonymous users. 4. On close of the application, popup a survey link. Of these options a combination of 2 and 3 would probably be the most suitable for us, especially if we made sure that once a user had seen a message they didn't see it again (or perhaps if they saw message 3 and cancelled, they'd see message 2 on return and never again if they cancelled after that). Cheers, Tim On Oct 5, 8:14 am, Taylor Singletary <taylorsinglet...@twitter.com> wrote: > Hi Tim, > > We looked into your request but unfortunately cannot expedite resolving it > right now. In this case, the account used to post the tweets was suspended > -- not your application. While there's obviously a good deal of overlap > between API policy/enforcement and account policy/enforcement, this kind of > suspension falls squarely in the "account policy" camp. The support team's > response time is actually quite good right now, and I imagine you'll be > hearing back from them soon. > > Thanks for the keen understanding on what went wrong here -- since there are > obviously many developers who might find themselves facing the same scenario > at some point, can you share a bit on what actions you'll take to avoid this > in the future? > > Thanks! > Taylor > > > > On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Tim Bull <tim.b...@binaryplex.com> wrote: > > Our application (twitter.com/distlr) has had it's account suspended > > and I need this reviewed. I (think I) understand why it was > > suspended, which was stupidity on my part rather than anything > > malicious or bad on the part of the application itself. > > > We follow a very lean start-up approach: > > > * We had the idea for Distlr and immediately interviewed people and > > asked them if they'd use it. > > * When they said Yes, we prototyped it with @anywhere and put it in > > front of them, then surveyed them and asked if they'd use it. > > * When they said yes, we developed a very alpha version with full > > OAuth integration, incorporating their feedback and put it front of a > > bigger audience. Around 60 people registered and 400 used it > > anonymously. > > > Unsurprisingly if you follow the thread here, I then went to survey > > these 60 registered users - I created a Google Form and then (being > > very lean and not trying over engineering things) started sending the > > messages from the Distlr account to each of the registered users. > > > "@usera @userb @etc Thanks for using Distlr. Would love your feedback > > via this short survey:http://bit.ly/distlrsurvey"; > > > After several of these, the Distlr account was suspended. > > > Immediately when this happened, I've slapped my forehead with the > > biggest "Doh!" you've heard. As I've explained in the ticket, this is > > more user stupidity on my part rather than anything malicious the > > application itself is doing. > > > It's holding us up because while the ticket is Open, I'm loath to move > > the app to a new account as it may look like we are trying to be > > underhanded, which we absolutely aren't. Unless Twitter knows > > differently, I really don't think the app itself is misbehaving, I > > think it's just these survey links which have caused the concern. > > > How long are these support tickets taking to be reviewed (it's been > > open over 17 hours now) and is it possible that someone from the > > Twitter dev support team can help out with getting it reviewed sooner > > please? If we have to wait, we have to wait, but we'd love to > > progress forwards with the feedback we did get from the few people > > that filled out the survey before the account got suspended. > > > The ticket ishttp://support.twitter.com/tickets/1256917 > > > Thanks! > > > Tim Bull > > > -- > > Twitter developer documentation and resources:http://dev.twitter.com/doc > > API updates via Twitter:http://twitter.com/twitterapi > > Issues/Enhancements Tracker: > >http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list > > Change your membership to this group: > >http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
