I know a number of people who use twitter as a read only source of information (for instance they may follow only news outlets and celebrity tweeters) and therefore may have large follow counts with zero tweets.
This may not be a use case that you are familiar with, but it is a valid use case. Also, I don't know if you are aware of the current limits on following, etc, which are described here, my apologies if you already are : http://support.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/15364 As for the OP, well, a) if this is what you (or your users) want, just parse the follow messages looking for numerical postfixes and offer the user the user the option to block them, there is no need for an API call specifically to do this. And b) again, you are missing a use case, there are lots of genuine accounts that have numerics postfixed to them, some people use birth years, and some people - perhaps finding that the screen name they wanted is not available in a naked form - will have chosen [screen name]76 or some similar format, or picked a year with some historical connection with their chosen name. It is not safe to simply assume that ending with numerics is sufficient to indicate that the account is used only in the delivery of spam, be that tweet spam or simply follow spam. While the assumption may hold in a large number of cases - and I am not aware of any empirical data that shows what this number is, though I'd be interested to see one - it will undoubtedly include some false positives. HTH hax0rsteve On 25 Mar 2011, at 15:00, Adam Green wrote: > What if Twitter just suspended anyone who followed more than 1,000 > users without ever having tweeted? But then their membership would > sink dramatically. How about not allowing following past 100 users > without tweeting at least once. What is the point of these accounts > anyway, unless they are being built up and then sold? They can't be > used for spam, since they don't tweet, and generally don't have URLs > in their profiles. > > On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:47 AM, Dean Collins <[email protected]> wrote: >> Lol, someone want to write me an app that blocks all users where their >> username ends with two or three numbers. >> >> >> >> This is getting ridiculous. >> >> >> >> Seems like something that would be pretty easy to achieve via the API don’t >> you think? >> >> >> >> >> >> Cheers, >> >> Dean >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> 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 >> > > > > -- > Adam Green > Twitter API Consultant and Trainer > http://140dev.com > @140dev > > -- > 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
