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A repeating loop is gumming up the haiku feeds!
A twitter account with the name 'haikutwaiku' has been causing some serious repetition, by using twitterfeed to retweet posts via an RSS feed of the search results from summize.com that contain the word 'haiku'. The problem is that the word 'haiku' is contained in all the retweets, and thus it is retweeted and re-retweeted and so on. I've definitely seen sixfold repeats, not sure if there have been more.
My first thought was just that it's really annoying:
1. The hashtags.org tracking of the #haiku tag has its numbers skewed, and now its popularity is artificially enhanced
2. It's difficult to find the original source of haikus, and the retweets lack the context of the source ("who said it" is at least as important as what's said!!)
3. The haikutwaiku account itself isn't even useful for tracking haiku, because it's loaded with so much repetition.
I do have a workaround for #2: Instead of doing a summize.com search for haiku, I simply search for haiku -haikutwaiku, to eliminate all posts containing that userid. But this doesn't help "fix" the problem, not really. And even worse: all this repetition could be abused to put undue strain on all parties involved (and as we've seen lately, twitter does not need any more strain!)
I reported this to twitter, and so far they've just said that the user isn't going against any terms of service so they can't reprimand the account. But they are looking into doing something. But what? and when?
Not knowing that, I'm turning to twitterfeed, hoping there's something on your end that could fix the problem. Actually, as I'm typing this, an idea is forming... perhaps a simple fix would be to filter out RSS feed items that contain the twitter userid that twitterfeed is feeding. Then pretty much ALL "infinite-loop" situations would be avoided!
This might bother people using twitterfeed to feed from their blog to twitter, if they have a twitter userid that is a common word or name used in the blog entry titles. But would the reduction in spam and overhead be more than worth it? DISCUSS! :)
My first thought was just that it's really annoying:
1. The hashtags.org tracking of the #haiku tag has its numbers skewed, and now its popularity is artificially enhanced
2. It's difficult to find the original source of haikus, and the retweets lack the context of the source ("who said it" is at least as important as what's said!!)
3. The haikutwaiku account itself isn't even useful for tracking haiku, because it's loaded with so much repetition.
I do have a workaround for #2: Instead of doing a summize.com search for haiku, I simply search for haiku -haikutwaiku, to eliminate all posts containing that userid. But this doesn't help "fix" the problem, not really. And even worse: all this repetition could be abused to put undue strain on all parties involved (and as we've seen lately, twitter does not need any more strain!)
I reported this to twitter, and so far they've just said that the user isn't going against any terms of service so they can't reprimand the account. But they are looking into doing something. But what? and when?
Not knowing that, I'm turning to twitterfeed, hoping there's something on your end that could fix the problem. Actually, as I'm typing this, an idea is forming... perhaps a simple fix would be to filter out RSS feed items that contain the twitter userid that twitterfeed is feeding. Then pretty much ALL "infinite-loop" situations would be avoided!
This might bother people using twitterfeed to feed from their blog to twitter, if they have a twitter userid that is a common word or name used in the blog entry titles. But would the reduction in spam and overhead be more than worth it? DISCUSS! :)
I’m annoyed, but I think there's hope!
2
people have this problem
I have this problem, too!
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?Did you try and contact the haikutwaiku user directly? One quick thing they could do to fix any repetitions would be to use the feed http://summize.com/search.atom?q=haik... rather than http://summize.com/search.atom?q=haiku (which is what they currently use) - this would avoid any duplicates being posted.
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Inappropriate?Yes, I did try to contact haikutwaiku (back when s/he was going by twaikusummize) and I suspect the message got lost in the spam. I had to just use an @ message, not a direct, because I had blocked him/her previously, to avoid getting sent six copies of any message mentioning haiku that anyone else sent @me.
Twitter said they were trying to contact the user as well, via the email address on the account. I'm guessing nothing came of it, because haikutwaiku is still going at it.
And now, there's someone (twitgeist) posting the 10 most popular words, and haiku keeps being one of them ... no surprise, since even the tweets listing the popular words are being repeated repeatedly! :P
It's amazing that so much fun is being sapped away by this one seemingly-small (yet disturbingly dangerous) problem...
I’m kinda bummed out about all this.
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Inappropriate?i find ones that i write posted under the haikutwaiku name, weird -
Inappropriate?I got an email from the good folks at Twitter, saying that they haven't forgotten, that they're still working on the problem. I really appreciated that, and so I'm passing along the info here to others following this issue.
I’m less bummed out.
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Inappropriate?So they're not working on the problem anymore... or maybe their fix was to prohibit nearly-identical tweets or something. Or maybe the problem fixed itself, as there are enough people tweeting haiku that @haikutwaiku can't keep up, let alone retweet its own retweets.
We've got a new problem with this twitterfeed user though ... where by "we" I mean the members of the haiku community. We're getting our tweets stolen and retweeted without attribution! I didn't even realize until it was pointed out by another haikuer, but that does put a new twist on the sting.
Now, to those of us in the know, it is obvious from searching that the tweets from @haikutwaiku are copies. But it's not so obvious to newcomers to the genre, and I've seen people try talking to the bot (to no avail, of course).
So, new question for ya: Is there any way within twitterfeed for the tweets to include the original author's name?
If so ... well, then the next problem is trying to contact @haikutwaiku and ask him/her to modify the twitterfeed in that manner. Or beg the almighty creator of twitterfeed to intervene...... :)
I’m feeling like I'm hoping against hope here.. :(
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This solves the problem
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twitterfeed doesn't really know anything about the content of the tweet, it just posts the content of the RSS feed items. If the original twitter username isn't in that content, then there's now way for twitterfeed to know who that user may have been. So unless twitter search included this information in what it returned in the feed, I'm afraid I don't think there's really anything twitterfeed can do.
Of course, if this user doesn't comply with twitter's ToS, then you may want to report him/her to twitter (again?). -
Okay, thanks. I was just checking. This situation is rather odd over all, in that there IS actually a use in having the haiku retweeted (even repeatedly): it gets the stuff seen by more people. But does it cross the line of annoyance? Sometimes.
And it's not impossible for informed people to find the source of the haiku; it's rather easy actually.
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