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 <[email protected]> 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
