[twitter-dev] Re: What causes suspension?
Dave Alex, Great to hear from you guys on this forum. My account was re-instated and I'm glad to be back in the fold. I understand the plight of your company, given the explosion in interest. Its difficult to get to every support message, and given the rampant amount of spam, I understand your need to be aggressive with it. With that in mind, I have a few points: #1) I would pay money to have a direct support line. If it weren't for this forum (and in particular, a friend of mine pointing me to this thread) I would have had no other way to contact Twitter employees and explain my position. (yes, I submitted several help tickets, plus emails to suspen...@twitter.com) My twitter account is a valuable communication tool and I would gladly pay for a subscription offering no additional features other than a direct avenue for support. #2) In the past, I designed and built decision trees and other intelligent rule-based systems for the US Military. The techniques used incorporated a measure of uncertainty, is adaptive and can be tuned according to expected behavior patterns. As a mental exercise while I was suspended, I started designing a rule set that could provide better spam account detection based upon history, account details and current usage pattern. If you're interested in seeing the ideas, please DM me (@capttaco) and I'll be happy to share. #3) Finally, you don't send an email to the account informing them that their account is disabled. Nor do you provide a reason. In my particular case, it took me nearly two days to figure out it was my website that was hacked and was the cause. I understand you can't be too transparent in your process here, but some sort of notification and perhaps a high bin of possibilities would help greatly. All of this said, I love twitter as a communication tool and as a platform. I only want to see it prosper and it is in that spirit which I wrote the ideas above. Thanks, Rob Rhyne On Jun 24, 2:15 pm, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com wrote: Craig, I'll work with the support team to make sure the link gets updated and the article broadened. We appreciate your understanding here. Thanks, Doug On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for the clarification, Doug. I can totally understand the trending topic abuse: I looked a trend the other day and was really surprised at the amount of crap that came up in the search. I think it's pretty important to enumerate the triggers used for suspension. It doesn't need to be the exact algorithm (which could be used to defeat your efforts) but rather something like what you said above. Something that we all can point users to so they can say ahh... that's why. -- which I'm sure Louie is doing right now. Anyone who's dealt with SPAM is aware of how frequently the rules change: the point is that users need to be kept apprised of how they are affected by these constant changes. I'd also suggest that you fix the link on the bottom of the http:// twitter.com/suspended page. The one that explains how to contest the suspension would be a good candidate (since that's the first thing a real person who's been suspended wants to know.) Maybe there's another link on the page that goes to a list of the suspension triggers. You could periodically update that page to reflect the current reasons for suspension. -ch On Jun 24, 10:25 am, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com wrote: There are both automated and manual spam fighting tools we use in house. One of the reasons for suspension is aggressively participating in multiple trending topics within a short amount of time. It appears that Mantia was flagged for this reason. If your users are suspended, it would be best to send them tohttp://help.twitter.comanddirect them to the official article [1]. Spam and abuse are not a white and black issues, they are also far from static. Both of these reasons make it difficult to give definite criteria for avoiding a net. 1.http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/15790 Thanks, Doug On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 9:57 AM, richardhenry richardhe...@me.com wrote: As someone who followed Louie, this is very weird to me. Nothing he did looked remotely spammy/offensive/disingenuous. #freemantia -- Richard (@richardhenry) On Jun 24, 5:43 pm, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: One of the guys I work with recently had his account suspended: http://mantia.me/blog/twitter-suspension/ We've been having a bit of fun with it: creating a #freemantia hash tag and even a website http://freemantia.com But at the bottom of it all, I realized that we (third-party developers) don't really know what causes an account to be suspended. And yet we all have users of our products/services who can have an account suspended. I'd like to be able to tell them
[twitter-dev] Re: What causes suspension?
Rob, We are not in the business of support and have no plans to monetize our support staff :) We all understand the frustration of delays but as a developer you can always contact the API team (see http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Support) with your development oriented needs. The general support staff is with one week of the oldest ticket in the queue so it may take a little patience to have your general problems resolved. Thank you for the offer to help our team. If you are seriously interested in getting involved, please do apply to work with us. You can learn about that here [1]. As a shameless plug, the API team is in need of some engineers. Please apply! Finally, there is an internal project to add email notifications to suspensions. This should remove some of the frustration for users that find their account has been suspended. 1. http://twitter.com/jobs Thanks, Doug On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:30 AM, capt.taco capt.t...@gmail.com wrote: Dave Alex, Great to hear from you guys on this forum. My account was re-instated and I'm glad to be back in the fold. I understand the plight of your company, given the explosion in interest. Its difficult to get to every support message, and given the rampant amount of spam, I understand your need to be aggressive with it. With that in mind, I have a few points: #1) I would pay money to have a direct support line. If it weren't for this forum (and in particular, a friend of mine pointing me to this thread) I would have had no other way to contact Twitter employees and explain my position. (yes, I submitted several help tickets, plus emails to suspen...@twitter.com) My twitter account is a valuable communication tool and I would gladly pay for a subscription offering no additional features other than a direct avenue for support. #2) In the past, I designed and built decision trees and other intelligent rule-based systems for the US Military. The techniques used incorporated a measure of uncertainty, is adaptive and can be tuned according to expected behavior patterns. As a mental exercise while I was suspended, I started designing a rule set that could provide better spam account detection based upon history, account details and current usage pattern. If you're interested in seeing the ideas, please DM me (@capttaco) and I'll be happy to share. #3) Finally, you don't send an email to the account informing them that their account is disabled. Nor do you provide a reason. In my particular case, it took me nearly two days to figure out it was my website that was hacked and was the cause. I understand you can't be too transparent in your process here, but some sort of notification and perhaps a high bin of possibilities would help greatly. All of this said, I love twitter as a communication tool and as a platform. I only want to see it prosper and it is in that spirit which I wrote the ideas above. Thanks, Rob Rhyne On Jun 24, 2:15 pm, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com wrote: Craig, I'll work with the support team to make sure the link gets updated and the article broadened. We appreciate your understanding here. Thanks, Doug On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks for the clarification, Doug. I can totally understand the trending topic abuse: I looked a trend the other day and was really surprised at the amount of crap that came up in the search. I think it's pretty important to enumerate the triggers used for suspension. It doesn't need to be the exact algorithm (which could be used to defeat your efforts) but rather something like what you said above. Something that we all can point users to so they can say ahh... that's why. -- which I'm sure Louie is doing right now. Anyone who's dealt with SPAM is aware of how frequently the rules change: the point is that users need to be kept apprised of how they are affected by these constant changes. I'd also suggest that you fix the link on the bottom of the http:// twitter.com/suspended page. The one that explains how to contest the suspension would be a good candidate (since that's the first thing a real person who's been suspended wants to know.) Maybe there's another link on the page that goes to a list of the suspension triggers. You could periodically update that page to reflect the current reasons for suspension. -ch On Jun 24, 10:25 am, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com wrote: There are both automated and manual spam fighting tools we use in house. One of the reasons for suspension is aggressively participating in multiple trending topics within a short amount of time. It appears that Mantia was flagged for this reason. If your users are suspended, it would be best to send them tohttp://help.twitter.comanddirect them to the official article [1]. Spam and abuse are not a white and black issues,
[twitter-dev] Re: What causes suspension?
As someone who is currently suspended (@capttaco) and has been suspended for over a month, let me add some of own experience to the conversation. First, I'm not a spammer, nor have I promoted anything offensive or disingenuous. I've a software developer, that started using Twitter three years ago when I attended C4[1]. As far as I can tell, my suspension was the result of having a website hacked. The Facts: - Inside of my profile, I linked (as do several people) to my personal website. - Over a month ago, the site running wordpress, was hacked and a malicious link was injected into the top post of my blog. - Overnight (EST) on a Sunday, the site was marked by Google as malicious and my twitter account was suspended. Solution attempts: 1) Upon realizing my site was hacked, I took down the wordpress blog, used Google's webmaster tools to request a review and the malicious warning was removed within a few hours. I sent a support request to Twitter notifying them of how I resolved the issue. 2) After 2 days without a response, I tried logging into my twitter account. I realized that even though I was suspended (and therefore couldn't post), I was able to modify my profile. So, I changed the link in my profile to another site (that Google didn't think was malicious) and sent another support request. Still no response. The lack of customer support from Twitter has been appalling. I enjoy twitter, as a user and hopefully one day as a developer (which unfortunately has been halted, since I can't access my account at all from an API). I'm frustrated, but not nearly has high profile as Louie Mantia. I even tried having some friends intervene (to no avail): http://stationinthemetro.com/blog/2009/5/26/twitter-suspension-please-help-rob-rhyne.html I'm a licensed user of Twitterific, Birdhouse and Tweetie (both Mac and iPhone), which are useless with a suspended account. Also, FYI (to developers), when you're account is suspended the API sends back a generic authentication message that The user is not authorized. It leaves little opportunity for developers to differentiate from a suspended account and a bad authentication.
[twitter-dev] Re: What causes suspension?
Thanks for the clarification, Doug. I can totally understand the trending topic abuse: I looked a trend the other day and was really surprised at the amount of crap that came up in the search. I think it's pretty important to enumerate the triggers used for suspension. It doesn't need to be the exact algorithm (which could be used to defeat your efforts) but rather something like what you said above. Something that we all can point users to so they can say ahh... that's why. -- which I'm sure Louie is doing right now. Anyone who's dealt with SPAM is aware of how frequently the rules change: the point is that users need to be kept apprised of how they are affected by these constant changes. I'd also suggest that you fix the link on the bottom of the http:// twitter.com/suspended page. The one that explains how to contest the suspension would be a good candidate (since that's the first thing a real person who's been suspended wants to know.) Maybe there's another link on the page that goes to a list of the suspension triggers. You could periodically update that page to reflect the current reasons for suspension. -ch On Jun 24, 10:25 am, Doug Williams d...@twitter.com wrote: There are both automated and manual spam fighting tools we use in house. One of the reasons for suspension is aggressively participating in multiple trending topics within a short amount of time. It appears that Mantia was flagged for this reason. If your users are suspended, it would be best to send them tohttp://help.twitter.comand direct them to the official article [1]. Spam and abuse are not a white and black issues, they are also far from static. Both of these reasons make it difficult to give definite criteria for avoiding a net. 1.http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries/15790 Thanks, Doug On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 9:57 AM, richardhenry richardhe...@me.com wrote: As someone who followed Louie, this is very weird to me. Nothing he did looked remotely spammy/offensive/disingenuous. #freemantia -- Richard (@richardhenry) On Jun 24, 5:43 pm, Craig Hockenberry craig.hockenbe...@gmail.com wrote: One of the guys I work with recently had his account suspended: http://mantia.me/blog/twitter-suspension/ We've been having a bit of fun with it: creating a #freemantia hash tag and even a website http://freemantia.com But at the bottom of it all, I realized that we (third-party developers) don't really know what causes an account to be suspended. And yet we all have users of our products/services who can have an account suspended. I'd like to be able to tell them why it happened. I'm so clueless about what's going on that I don't know whether suspension is an automated or manual process. In either case, the decisions being made by man or machine appear to be flawed: Louie Mantia may be prolific, but he's not a spammer or a robot. Can you guys shed a little light on the situation? -ch P.S. If anyone can speed up the process of reinstating the @mantia account, I know it would make someone very happy :-)
