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
