dagray's dashboard

Most of my followers are spam. This would be a nice feature and admission on Twitter's part.

i've been trying to raise this same issue with a site called "soundcloud". side issue, but the idea i had for that was that perhaps users could be voted down to a point that triggers a vote to ban them for abusing the system.

another idea would be to have no notification to the user who has been followed, thereby dropping the incentive for the spammer to randomly add people.

Oh, we're calling them Spitters. I like it. I was calling them barnacles. I can call them spitters, though. either way :-)

Yes: they're abusing Twitter as an automaton to create link farms promoting their own websites - and don't give a d*** that they're degrading Twitter's performance in the process. I hope Google has algorithms to spot and disfavour websites thus promoted. :-{ – Eridanus, on June 12, 2008 22:20

The problem with that is that these folks start up with 1--so the first 999 people would have to deal with it. I really think that the e-mail (or message on the twitter site) notifying that so and so WANTS to follow you, and your yes or no reply would be easier. Although yes, you'd still have to check it out and decide each one. The other option is for the twitterfolk to somehow put a cap on how many somebody is following or at the least, an alert to them so that they can check it out. Something has to be done. – smgct, on June 11, 2008 18:56

Or perhaps Twitter could add a user setting that allows you to request that anyone who follows you with 1,000+ (or 10,000+) gets automatically blocked.

It looks like these people are trying to use Twitter to increase their search engine rankings.

Email approval would likely be the easiest way to go. I did get one--one that I approved. Why not on the spammers though?

Another thing that should be added to the New Follower email is whether or not you are already following that person. FYI - I saw this on a blog post by Jason Alba.
http://jasonalba.com/2008/03/17/2-twi...

I think if twitter implement a metric people will just work round it. However I know that if someone is following thousands of people and being followed by 5 that it's spam.

I get several spam follows a day. It sucks.

I like it because it allows you to take action from the email without having to deal with going to their profile page for the follow or block. – mdoeff, on April 17, 2008 02:31

It'd be neat to simply put more of the user's profile into the email -- the picture, the last few tweets, the stats, and the follow button.

I get all that if I click through, but it'd save a click and make it a bit more efficient.

I was thinking -- you know how when you're a moderator of a Yahoogroup, you can be notified via email if there's a message waiting for your approval? And you can approve or reject a pending message depending on what email email address you send your reply to? Maybe Twitter could explore something like that...?

So when we receive the 'username is now following you' email, we have several options:

1. We can do nothing. In which case, the person is now following us and we've chosen not to follow them back.

2. We can click reply (since there's a special reply-to email address) and without typing anything further, just send the email. In which case, we have now chosen to follow the other person back.

3. We could forward the email to a unique, system generated email address (that's indicated in the email). This tells Twitter that we want to block that person.

4. We could forward the email to another unique, system generated email address that's also indicated in the email that tells Twitter we want to report the person as a spammer (in which case a spam report is generated and the other account is also blocked).

Unfortunately, it can't just be a generic email address (such as reportspam@twitter.com or blockuser@twitter.com) because one particular user can be targeted by someone who spoofs hundreds of email addresses and sends spam reports or block requests to that generic email address.

Without a system similar to this, we'd still need to go to the Twitter website and login before we can block someone or report them as a spammer.

Hallelujah! I want that nice eMail that Twitter sends me to have all the details I would normally have to go and waste time finding out on the Twitter site. How hard could this be for them to implement? I bet it would take 40 seconds.

I got followed by myzine.com today and it seems that this user/website is into questionable adult content, at least it looks that way. I get enough porn spam in my email inbox already, I don't want it on my Twitter account too.