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Good evidence of spam on twitter, or as I like to call it -- spitter. Can someone help rid me of them?
OK, so I wrote a quick little PHP script that posts to the Twitter API (thx guyz, u rock!) every hour with a message from the Unix fortune program. Pretty slick I thought, because I (1) like reading them, and I was feeling nostalgic, and (2) I really want an RSS feed of them to use in my email signature (something I don't have yet). After I created this thing, I subscribed to the feed myself using my own twitter account (ten7) and like to see the little messages. However, I think there is just one other legitimate user following fortunetweet whose name is m4cks.
Anyway, here is my problem: in about the span of 1 minute, I got told that I had 9 new followers! "Sweet!!" I thought, hoping that the program was magically discovered and would set the twitter ablaze with its popularity. Not so. Turns out all the new followers are the names of current presidential candidates with numbers appended at the end, for e.g. ChrisDodd53, DennisKucinich4, etc, etc. Then, another blast of new followers, all starting with "slick_*". Curiously, none of the posts that any of these characters have are legible, or make any sense. In some cases, there are not even links to the pages that they are evangelicisizing.
So... could you please look into this? I think these guys are spammers. And if you could remove them, then great. I'll be sad that fewer people are following my own little robot, but I'd rather bave twitter be spitter free.
(Oh, and feel free to use the word "spitter"... I have a TM, R, (R), Pat. Pend. and all that other good stuff to earn me mucho royalties on it :)
Anyway, here is my problem: in about the span of 1 minute, I got told that I had 9 new followers! "Sweet!!" I thought, hoping that the program was magically discovered and would set the twitter ablaze with its popularity. Not so. Turns out all the new followers are the names of current presidential candidates with numbers appended at the end, for e.g. ChrisDodd53, DennisKucinich4, etc, etc. Then, another blast of new followers, all starting with "slick_*". Curiously, none of the posts that any of these characters have are legible, or make any sense. In some cases, there are not even links to the pages that they are evangelicisizing.
So... could you please look into this? I think these guys are spammers. And if you could remove them, then great. I'll be sad that fewer people are following my own little robot, but I'd rather bave twitter be spitter free.
(Oh, and feel free to use the word "spitter"... I have a TM, R, (R), Pat. Pend. and all that other good stuff to earn me mucho royalties on it :)
I’m so sad and frustrated. Bleh.
2
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Tell me when someone solves it.
The more people who report this problem, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who report this problem, the more it gets noticed.
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Inappropriate?These people are not spammers because they following blindly (I use the term "people" loosely here).
They might be spammers when people follow them back, but then again someone is agreeing to reading what they post.
Auto-follow-back is a bad, bad practice. And it leads to these types popping up like mushrooms. It's a shame it can't be limited. It's amazing people add blindly others without caring whether it makes sense or not. The whole point of twitter is lost as you can't truthfully argue you're following what 5 thousand people tweet.
I’m depressed by stupid attention-wanting behaviour.
