topics in Twitter tagged with spam

Add a "Spam" flag to user profiles

Make it easier to see the spammers
On the "person X is following you" email:

1. put the number that the person is following/has following.
2. include a block button directly on the email
3. include the last 5 posts from that person
4. put a block button on the mobile version, too

I love TRACK. Now I'm TRACKING "CES", also "MACWORLD" but some SPAM appears. May be a Blocking or Filtering app will work fine.

Last week, Mashable wrote an excellent post called 'Is Twitter About to Have a Big Spam' problem. One of the suggestions that was proposed is requiring captcha when following new people on Twitter. Yes, this would probably result in complaints from people who like the one-click follow option that is available today. But there are just too many people abusing the one-click Follow feature today through the use of bots and screen-scraping tools to "mass follow" hundreds of people in a short amount of time in an attempt to build their audience on Twitter.

There are a few ways to make the captcha less intrusive to users who are not abusing the Follow feature.

1. Only require captcha after someone has followed a large number of people (e.g. 200) in a short period of time

2. Only require captcha sporadically - e.g. after adding the 25th friend, after the 50th friend, etc.

Please consider adding this feature soon because we don't want Twitter to turn in to MySpace and there are clear signs that it's going in that direction.

Not having the New Follower email for the past couple of days made me think about how often I need to know about new followers. I decided that getting an email alert seconds after someone starts to follow me is overkill and becomes a distraction, especially when the new follower is a spammer, which is about 50% of the time for me.

How about adding a consolidated version of that email with two options: weekly and monthly. Most discussion forums include this type of "digest'" option and I think it would work perfectly here.

Many people are turning off the 'New Follower' e-mail because of the spam-bot's that have invaded Twitter in the past few weeks. This solves the spam problem but it's really hard to find recent followers who are legitimate friends.

We really need a feature for analyzing recent followers. This would go a long way towards controlling the spam. Here’s a proposal for how this feature would work...

Click a button called 'Analyze New Followers'. I suggest that this button shows up on the Followers page.

User is asked: ‘New followers since when?’

Options for this are presented in a drop-down box with these options
- in the past day
- in the past 3 days
- in the past week
- in the past month
- show everyone that I’m not following

After making the selection, a sortable list is presented showing:

* User ID (links to Profile page)
* Number for Followers, Following, and Followers / Following Ratio
* Profile photo
* URL of the new Follower’s Web Site (if they have one)
* Flag users who have a high level of blocking (Twitter - is this info available?)
* Date that they started following you
* How many people have they followed in the past 24hours
* The last few tweets from each new follower (make this a mouse-over option)

Finally, the list should include checkboxes / buttons for bulk following or blocking.

Concept:

Twitter spam mitigation via SURBL applied to young Follow ratio inequity accounts

Synopsis:

Twitter should use SURBL checking against all published URL pushed by early life accounts for 90 days where a Follower to Following ratio is greater than ~100:1 as part of building a minor reputation score.

Details:

Based on what I have noticed since being on the service, there are a lot of spammer and developer possibilities right now. As Twitter operations and devel hooks have cranked down on certain areas there has been gravitation to other exploits or testing of the system.

A typical spammer account has the following characteristics:

1) < 10 followers with auto follow NOT selected
2) following +1000
3) +1 post with a obvious SURBL hit i.e. a spamvertized URL
4) Less than 90 days old

Considering how Blogger has dealt with these issues and other form based services, Twitter should use SURBL filters.

Proliferation:

Of course, obfuscation via shorter URL services might crop up overnight but these are also easily tracked in the XMPP aggregate to a manageable level. Consider that 100 new accounts of the form {girlname}{bigint} are likely not real people, are bots, and bots bent on spamvertising a single URL.

Secondarily, as with any emerging reputation system there will be shill creation and shill for hire if a follower reputation is created based on auto-follow classification.

Third, it is likely that any internal algorithm will eventually be gamed as the corpus of user creation maps to larger and more automated applications. 90 days is a sliding scale that will require tuning.

Afterword and Suggestions

While I appreciate the effect of growing net new accounts for Twitter via bot techniques of spammers -- it starts to feel like Blogger. I'd like to suggest that Twitter consider

a) SURBL implementation guided by community inputs and tempered by anti-spam leaders

b) shortly thereafter ratify or endorse a SURBL compliant (stated) URL shortening service

Conclusion

Enforcing reputation and checks against SURBL removes a key vector being used by these namespace and follow approaches by the current run of spammers on Twitter.