Approving Followers To Reduce SPAM

Debra, follow-spammers bog down twitter for all of us.

Let me add to the suggestion that twitter could include the number of people the requester already follows, and is followed by, to help us gauge if this person is real or just a spambot.

Thanks, KC. I understand the bogging down, and I understand that it's annoying wading through the emails, but I wonder if blocking them accomplishes anything.

I agree with your suggestion about including follower counts, etc., in the email notification.

Fwiw... blocking counts for something when a spam report is logged for a particular account. As part of their evaluation of that account, Twitter support looks at the number of times that the account was blocked by other people.

Ah, thank you, mdy. That makes sense.

one BIG problem: how would i follow a new person over SMS/IM (if IM was working) with a captcha?

I use Twitter for my business and if I have followers with links to porn or to malware on their pages one of my legitimate followers could end up there for whatever reason.

This would tarnish my company image and is a real hassle. I second requiring approval for followers... as an option. I want to allow public access to my tweets and to appear on the public timeline but I want to approve or deny anyone who is going to show up in my list of followers.

It's definitely a valid request, however that means you're going to inconvenience EVERY user on Twitter EACH time they try to follow someone. That's a ton of collective hassle. Instead, a better approach might be a more-one time inconvenience, such as verifying an account. Alternatively, dong something to limit the number of people that can be followed in a given time period — like one minute.