Recently active ideas in Twitter tagged with spam

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

Lately, I've been getting spam profiles following me nearly daily. It's getting rather annoying and someone needs to do something about it.

To help solve the problem, I believe we need to have some sort of spam repository.

If someone flags another profile (not just blocking them), anyone after that the flagee follows has the flagee automatically added to a list of potential problem profiles to be confirmed. Once the flagee was confirmed enough times, they're automatically taken out of the repository until someone else adds them. You wouldn't have to call it a Spam or anything, keep it vague to make sure no one feels singled out.

Just an idea. I'd love to work with getting this setup. Something like Akismet (blog comment spam blocker; http://akismet.com/) for Twitter would be amazing and pretty easy to impliment.

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

Add a "Spam" flag to user profiles

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.

Twitter is having all kinds of down time. I'm sure a lot of it is due to the system's use by spammers. We could ALL benefit by steps taken to reduce spamming on Twitter.

How about making it a bit tougher to set up a Twitter account? To make it a little more difficult for spammers to set up multiple accounts to spread their spam via follow?

For example:
- Require a verifiable e-mail address.
- Allow only one Twitter account per address.
- Prevent a new Twitter account from being set up from a cancelled e-mail address.

And then prevent anyone from following more than a certain number of people based on who is following them. For example, prevent a user from following more than 10 people for each person who follows them. Or only allow a certain number of new follows per hour/day/week/whatever.

Or maybe prevent users from having more than a certain percentage of tweets that include links. For example, no more than 75% of tweets can be links.

And automatically prevent duplicate tweets. Or the same link being shared over and over by a single twitter user.

And encouraging people to simply BLOCK spammers. Then look at which accounts are being blocked and delete the obvious spam accounts.

Come on, guys. Do SOMETHING! Between down time and spamming, Twitter is quickly losing its charm.

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.

I think we should all be able to approve users who want to follow us and also users should have to type in a CAPTCHA to reduce spammers who go around "following" everyone (ie. shameless plugs). I'm just sick of having to manually block all of these spammers who "follow" everyone.

Just search summize for Squidoo! You'll find 1genitalherpes and cureforherpes, partybaff and partybfe, sportsbetting, MAYBE BettyA1 (she's talking about Cyprus, not the typical spam stuff).

And of course, I could never forget PatrioticTees.

I'd like to see some changes to the list of people who are following me.

1. Like others, I'd like to be able to easily see who recently began following me. I think this would best be done as a sort.

2. It would be nice if there was a little status next to each follower, with the following information: a. how many other people this person follows and b. how many people follow this person.

I find that I'm usually not interested in following someone who also follows over 1000 other Twitterers, since that often seems like spam. Of course, there are always exceptions.

It would be really helpful if new follower notifications Twitter sends via email included the number of followers this person has. I get notifications from random people and I've never added anyone who follows more than a few hundred people (usually people trying to game twitter). That is, the notification email "So-and-so is following you" is much less helpful than "So-And-so is following you. She is following 30,000 people."

I think it would be a good idea to set a time frame for people to allow somebody to follow them. I have blocked just about every person that has started following me because I don't think that they are even reading my tweets. If they were, they would have noticed the posts that say "message me first or I will block you." Is there a term for people following well over 30,000 people? I know they are not reading all those posts.

An option to allow people to follow would be an excellent feature to add. Maybe a timeframe e.g. if I have not allowed a person to follow in X amount of days they are removed from my list. This would be an excellent way for people to keep their account spam free.

Just an idea.....Thanks for reading.

- Solucid

A very nice and useful feature would be the ability to filter out (block) tweets from one's feed that contain user-specified words or phrases.

It will also go a long way towards curbing porn and other spam once it hits Twitter.

It appears that the only way I can prevent people from following me is to protect my updates. Now I don't really care who reads my updates, but it does annoy me when someone I've never heard of follows me and 10000 others. Is it not possible to separate out the two functions of "make updates public" and "allow anyone to follow me"?

What I have in mind is that anyone who wants to follow me would need to be approved, but that my updates would not be protected. Apart from pleasing *me*, this would go a long way towards eliminating the spammers (and possibly even helping Twitter handle resource issues?)

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.