Loading Profile...
I see a way twitter could more effectively block spam.
I frequently get email like the following:
so-and-so is now following your tweets on Twitter.
A little information about so-and-so:
1 follower
1 tweet
following 630 people
Note the pattern. Very few followers. Very few tweets. Following a huge number of people. I know without looking that this going to be a spammer who's posted one link to their porn site or whatever it is they want people to go see, and I block them without even looking. But it's an annoying waste of my time.
I'd like to suggest that you do something to make it harder and less profitable for people to do this. For instance:
I understand there are commercial accounts that legitimately follow a lot of people (though I think that also is a nuisance, BTW). But we can tell the difference in those by seeing how long they've been around, how many followers they have, how many tweets they've got. Plus, if a legitimate business gets suspended they will contact you and identify themselves, whereas a spammer will shrug and go bother someone else.
so-and-so is now following your tweets on Twitter.
A little information about so-and-so:
1 follower
1 tweet
following 630 people
Note the pattern. Very few followers. Very few tweets. Following a huge number of people. I know without looking that this going to be a spammer who's posted one link to their porn site or whatever it is they want people to go see, and I block them without even looking. But it's an annoying waste of my time.
I'd like to suggest that you do something to make it harder and less profitable for people to do this. For instance:
- Limit the number of people that can initially be followed to 20, until they have been following 5 people for a week without being blocked by any of them.
- Disallow posting links until the account is 3 days old.
- Automatically suspend anyone who adds people to follow, so quickly that they're obviously using a bot.
- Only send eight people per day notices that they're being followed by a particular person, so that you can have time to see whether several of the early ones block them -- again, until the account has been around for a certain amount of time and is following a certain number of people.
I understand there are commercial accounts that legitimately follow a lot of people (though I think that also is a nuisance, BTW). But we can tell the difference in those by seeing how long they've been around, how many followers they have, how many tweets they've got. Plus, if a legitimate business gets suspended they will contact you and identify themselves, whereas a spammer will shrug and go bother someone else.
3
people like this idea
I like this idea!
Tell me when this idea gets some attention.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
-
Inappropriate?I agree with all of the above. I also support adding a captcha to the signup process so that fewer obvious fakes make it through. All of them can be sourced to the same email address by just doing something+something@something.com anyway. Limiting it to one account per email address doesn't actually work.
The only problem with a captcha is that some blind people might not be able to use the service as easily, but perhaps adding a captcha to actually post a tweet for the first three days of an account's existence would be useful.
I’m hating spam more than ever.
