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 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 :-)
