On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 04:23:40PM -0500, TJ Luoma wrote: > On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 4:19 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky > <zzn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Twitter, what say you? Developer community, what say you? > > > > Twitter, Inc. can't even keep up with porn spammers reported manually > using the "Report As Spam" links, what makes you think they would be > able to keep up with an automated version?
As Ed demonstrated in his original message, this particular class of spambots can be detected and auto-blocked quite easily. With the information he provided, I (and I expect many others on this list) could create an anti-BritneyBot-bot to do so in very short order, if not for the potential legal/TOS issues which could arise from doing so without Twitter's official sanction. It's not a question of keeping up with them; Twitter could use Ed's suggested technique to shut them all down en masse at the cost of less than one day of a single employee's time (and they may have other techniques they could use which would be more effective and/or even quicker to implement). It's a question of will and of policy. -- Dave Sherohman
