Save the Fail Whale, Block a Twitter Spammer

2008 June 16
tags: , ,
by Teeg

A couple days ago, Mousewords mentioned that there was a guy on twitter who kept unfollowing and refollowing her. I said that following numbers had been going up and down for a lot of people, so maybe it was a twitter issue, and she sent me to this page, which discusses “The unusual case of Jmcoon.”

The entire discussion is rather interesting, especially the quote from the twitter letter explaining why someone was banned from twitter:

Your account was frozen for investigation due to a large number of people blocking the profile. Your are following an excessive number of people who are in turn blocking your account. This mass-following behavior is not user-friendly behavior. On their behalf, we’d like it to stop. While we’re working on automatically enforcing specific, declared limits, we are still responsive to activities that alarm our users.

We’ve reduced the number of people you’re following by removing everyone you’ve followed who does not follow your account, and everyone who is blocking your account. Thanks for your understanding in this matter

Until now, I had been avoiding blocking people and had just been ignoring their requests. Now that I know that blocking people helps bring them to twitter’s attention, I’ll definitely be doing it more.

At the bottom of the page, there is a comment from mdy who points out a post on the twitterblog:

The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular”
users – that is, users with large numbers of followers and people
they’re following – perform a number of actions in rapid succession.
This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our
database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time
would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side.

It’s not hard to see now that by blocking those who run autofollow scripts, you’re actually helping to keep twitter up and running. :)

from → Social Media, Twitter

  • Thank you, that is very informative. So I am right to say that social networking is more of gathering a group of individuals with the same interests to form a community.
    :D
  • raj
    This is really good to know, thanks. My friends and I actually started a semi-joking 'Save the Fail Whales' site, mostly for a laugh and because we do like the artwork. I didn't realize how much could be achieved by blocking fake followers. I'll write up and entry and link back here.

    Thanks!

    Raj
    http://www.savethefailwhales.org/
  • Teeg
    @Despil You're right. Actually I should have differentiated my terms better, because what Scoble uses is a script that follows followers. I've used Jessy Stay's script myself but finally gave it up because it was right around the time that spammers started joining twitter.

    What I am referring to are people who start following 1000, 5000, even 101,000 strangers and then wait for people to start following them back.

    I had just been letting these people sit in my follow lists, figuring if I didn't do anything, eventually they'd go away. Instead, as I saw when I looked back yesterday, they've been adding even more people to follow!
  • Blocking people with auto-follow scripts can 'cause some trouble, not all of them are spammers. Like Robert Scoble (ok, I know, some people consider him a spammer :) ).
    I do go on a case by case bases, which works as long as you don't have a lot of new followers every day.
    But if blocking people helps, I am all for it, with all the Julie1984 and such users.
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