Arno Breedt's dashboard

I have to +1 for Kee Hinckley's inline suggestion too.

+1 +1 +1 for the karma/reputation idea. If we are ever going to have an online society/economy, we need to start building up personal credibility in a real way. People are on the internet for the long haul now. I, for one, would like to see a reputation return on all the years I've spent on the internet helping people on various forums and IRC channels.

Oh, and if any GetSatisfaction.com moderators are listening: when are you going to support OpenID logins?

For that matter, Crystal, when is Twitter planning to support OpenID? Perhaps to associate one's existing OpenID with a Twitter account, for added credibility?

The above comment assumes that enough clicks on the "report spam" link will automatically suspend the account. Unfortunately this is one of those places where human interaction is still the best possible filter.

How about a "report spam" link, which then submits the job to a queue of Human Interaction Tasks on Amazon's Mechanical Turk? This will place the spammers under human scrutiny.

Or how about a queue where Twitterers can go and check all the possibly-spam accounts, and give their vote on whether they think it's spam or not? This will keep it in the community, and people will feel that they have a hand in improving the service that we all use.

You could even hook up a Bayesian engine to the vote queue and let it learn from the humans :-)

This kind of response is the sort of thing that gives one a warm fuzzy feeling about Web 2.0 in general. It is totally awesome that Twitter has come to the table on this, and listened to the community in this way.

Needless to say, I'm not looking elsewhere for my microblogging needs anymore :-)

"My" spammer wasn't the above account, but http://twitter.com/juancarzola. This account is quite cleverly done, it quotes random proverbs and sayings from $proverb_website and intersperses them with spam links. Also, quite suspiciously, following the account's external website links all seem to lead to pages which have been suspended.

Spammers are getting smarter... The spammer you should watch out for is not the v14gr4 spammer but the social engineer.

Thanks to everyone for the replies.

Look, I understand that you have a login process. I also feel that honouring my Twitter login would have been a VERY nice touch, especially to an already frustrated person.

There are a couple options wrt the spam issue. One is to make the proposed "report as spam" button actually just flag the appropriate account for human moderation.

The other option would be useful not only for spam but to handle other abuses: the "block" option might pop up a little JS window / take you to a page (urgh) that will give you a few tickboxes, wherein you can tell Twitter exactly WHY you're blocking said person.

So maybe you block someone and tell Twitter it's for spamming, and the account gets flagged for spam. Block someone just for irritating you, and it just blocks him. Block an account for, say, distasteful content, and it gets flagged a different way for human moderation.

I think that expanding the functionality of the "block" option is the sanest option, as it doesn't only serve one option as a "flag as spam" link would.

Any opinions?

Firstly, there's no way to just report some twitter account as an obvious spammer account. That's stupid in itself.

THEN, when I want some answers, I get redirected to a separate site that:
(a) doesn't accept my twitter login
(b) requires me to register AGAIN, just to be able to click a link saying "I also have this question".

Why not just ANSWER THE BLOODY QUESTION? The question is:

Where do I find a webpage, or a link to an email address, to which I can report a spam Twitter account?

This is really a stupid and complicated process, quite obviously designed for the sole purpose of link farming.

GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!

I'm registering here. Why? For the sole purpose of telling everyone about the evil of this website.