[twitter-dev] Re: Spammers in followers list
An added benefit to this approach is it adds a disincentive for SPAM. Spammers don't waste time on things that no one will ever see... -ch On Sep 8, 9:12 am, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: As we're all aware, there has been a huge influx of spammy followers (e.g. @Girl12345.) These accounts are deactivated quickly enough, but we're seeing cases where they accounts hang around in the user's follower list. From the application's point-of-view, there's no way to know that the @Girl12345 account has been suspended so it goes to load more information (e.g. the relationship status.) This results in a 404 being returned. For the user, this presents a couple of problems: 1) They are being shown users who no longer exist and get errors if they try to query these users. 2) Some users find these (mostly adult) followers to be offensive and don't want to see them. I'm thinking about how our application might go about helping with these problems, but I can't find any good solutions. The main problem is that the followers list contains old data (that hasn't expired from a cache.) Would it be possible for Twitter to delay the addition of followers to the user's list? Presumably, most of these spammy followers are identified in the first 24-48 hours. If a user doesn't get flagged in that period of time, then they get added during the follower list update. -ch
[twitter-dev] Re: Spammers in followers list
Its going to be hard to please everyone, if there is a delay when followers are actually being added to the list, then users will be confused or annoyed why the following numbers are out of sync. People generally expect realtime changes, especially on twitter where many people use it to have realtime conversations. People get annoyed when you make them wait 10 seconds let alone 24 hours. Ideally, twitter could update the cache of the users who the offending account was following.. Not saying its an easy solution, but twitter knows every account that the user was following and looping through those users to remove the spam account in theory would not be too difficult. Quick and dirty solution would be to just invalidate the cache for the users that who the spam account follows, but that would put extra load on their backend.. They do have some method of keeping the list realtime, as when valid users follow or un-follow it is pretty much instantaneous, it just a matter of doing the looping to unfollow everyone that the offending account follows using the existing code path. I am sure someone at twitter has already thought of this, but its not very high priority for them. Someone has to write the script for the abuse team to use to perform this action and I think the developers are probably pretty busy already.
[twitter-dev] Re: Spammers in followers list
Speaking here more as a user than just as a developer - this approach would both not work and annoy many users. It would not work because it would merely delay the blocks which are the signals (among others I assume) to twitter that an account is a spammer - i.e. until people know that an account has followed them no one will know that the account exists (or very very very few people) and thus no one will have started to block the account. It would also depending on how implemented mean that users who, like myself (and many many many others) use multiple means of accessing Twitter would see different information via different means (i.e. perhaps see users in their followers list via the web who aren't there via applications/api calls?) Already the emails vs online list of followers is NOT very accurate - I have been seeing followers on my followers list who are NOT generating emails to me about the new follower (though others on the list before and later after a new follower are generating such emails). I try to go through my followers list and purge spammers (and block them) once a week or so - an amazing number of clear spam accounts are NOT being auto detected and blocked of late. Shannon On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 9:50 AM, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: An added benefit to this approach is it adds a disincentive for SPAM. Spammers don't waste time on things that no one will ever see... -ch On Sep 8, 9:12 am, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: As we're all aware, there has been a huge influx of spammy followers (e.g. @Girl12345.) These accounts are deactivated quickly enough, but we're seeing cases where they accounts hang around in the user's follower list. From the application's point-of-view, there's no way to know that the @Girl12345 account has been suspended so it goes to load more information (e.g. the relationship status.) This results in a 404 being returned. For the user, this presents a couple of problems: 1) They are being shown users who no longer exist and get errors if they try to query these users. 2) Some users find these (mostly adult) followers to be offensive and don't want to see them. I'm thinking about how our application might go about helping with these problems, but I can't find any good solutions. The main problem is that the followers list contains old data (that hasn't expired from a cache.) Would it be possible for Twitter to delay the addition of followers to the user's list? Presumably, most of these spammy followers are identified in the first 24-48 hours. If a user doesn't get flagged in that period of time, then they get added during the follower list update. -ch
[twitter-dev] Re: Spammers in followers list
This is the app I wrote using the API. It looks at the ratio of follower to followed and blocks folks. Feel free to check it out and offer your suggestions. http://dogearedpress.com/curtains/ On Sep 8, 12:57 pm, Shannon Clark shannon.cl...@gmail.com wrote: Speaking here more as a user than just as a developer - this approach would both not work and annoy many users. It would not work because it would merely delay the blocks which are the signals (among others I assume) to twitter that an account is a spammer - i.e. until people know that an account has followed them no one will know that the account exists (or very very very few people) and thus no one will have started to block the account. It would also depending on how implemented mean that users who, like myself (and many many many others) use multiple means of accessing Twitter would see different information via different means (i.e. perhaps see users in their followers list via the web who aren't there via applications/api calls?) Already the emails vs online list of followers is NOT very accurate - I have been seeing followers on my followers list who are NOT generating emails to me about the new follower (though others on the list before and later after a new follower are generating such emails). I try to go through my followers list and purge spammers (and block them) once a week or so - an amazing number of clear spam accounts are NOT being auto detected and blocked of late. Shannon On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 9:50 AM, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: An added benefit to this approach is it adds a disincentive for SPAM. Spammers don't waste time on things that no one will ever see... -ch On Sep 8, 9:12 am, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: As we're all aware, there has been a huge influx of spammy followers (e.g. @Girl12345.) These accounts are deactivated quickly enough, but we're seeing cases where they accounts hang around in the user's follower list. From the application's point-of-view, there's no way to know that the @Girl12345 account has been suspended so it goes to load more information (e.g. the relationship status.) This results in a 404 being returned. For the user, this presents a couple of problems: 1) They are being shown users who no longer exist and get errors if they try to query these users. 2) Some users find these (mostly adult) followers to be offensive and don't want to see them. I'm thinking about how our application might go about helping with these problems, but I can't find any good solutions. The main problem is that the followers list contains old data (that hasn't expired from a cache.) Would it be possible for Twitter to delay the addition of followers to the user's list? Presumably, most of these spammy followers are identified in the first 24-48 hours. If a user doesn't get flagged in that period of time, then they get added during the follower list update. -ch
