On Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:17:25 +0000, hax0rsteve
<hax0rc...@btinternet.com> wrote:
I know a number of people who use twitter as a read only source of
information (for instance they may follow only news outlets and
celebrity
tweeters) and therefore may have large follow counts with zero
tweets.
This may not be a use case that you are familiar with, but it is a
valid
use case.
Also, I don't know if you are aware of the current limits on
following,
etc, which are described here, my apologies if you already are :
http://support.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/15364
As for the OP, well, a) if this is what you (or your users) want,
just parse
the follow messages looking for numerical postfixes and offer the
user
the user the option to block them, there is no need for an API call
specifically to do this.
And b) again, you are missing a use case, there are lots of genuine
accounts
that have numerics postfixed to them, some people use birth years,
and some
people - perhaps finding that the screen name they wanted is not
available
in a naked form - will have chosen [screen name]76 or some similar
format,
or picked a year with some historical connection with their chosen
name.
It is not safe to simply assume that ending with numerics is
sufficient to
indicate that the account is used only in the delivery of spam, be
that tweet
spam or simply follow spam.
While the assumption may hold in a large number of cases - and I am
not aware
of any empirical data that shows what this number is, though I'd be
interested
to see one - it will undoubtedly include some false positives.
HTH
hax0rsteve
On 25 Mar 2011, at 15:00, Adam Green wrote:
What if Twitter just suspended anyone who followed more than 1,000
users without ever having tweeted? But then their membership would
sink dramatically. How about not allowing following past 100 users
without tweeting at least once. What is the point of these accounts
anyway, unless they are being built up and then sold? They can't be
used for spam, since they don't tweet, and generally don't have URLs
in their profiles.
On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:47 AM, Dean Collins <d...@cognation.net>
wrote:
Lol, someone want to write me an app that blocks all users where
their
username ends with two or three numbers.
This is getting ridiculous.
Seems like something that would be pretty easy to achieve via the
API don’t
you think?
Cheers,
Dean
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1. There are plenty of good spam detection and filtering algorithms.
The ones listed here, however, are simple hacks unlikely to work without
extensive manual intervention. The same can be said for ManageFlitter,
TwitCleaner and similar services. They give you a start, but you still
have to wade through hundreds or thousands of positives to weed out the
keepers.
2. A first name followed by a few numbers is a common legitimate screen
name - just having a name like that isn't necessarily an indication of a
spammer. Here's how it works - Bobby asks Kelly if she's on Twitter.
Kelly says "No" and signs up. She starts with the screen name "Kelly",
finds it's taken, so she adds her age or the year she was born. If
that's taken too, she'll maybe get clever and pick something like
"PiercedChick", or she'll pick a few random numbers and get in as
"Kelly117". (Now don't go blaming me if you start getting followers with
names like "PiercedChick117.")
3. The User / Twitter spam reporting process could definitely be
improved with a few simple steps. I don't have any data - that would
have to come from inside Twitter - but the two most common types of spam
I see is spambots riding Trending Topics and spambots replying to
keywords. In either case, the actual spam tweets sent are usually easily
found via Twitter Search. Given that, what I do when I get a spam tweet
is perform the search, then go through the resulting page and manually
report a page or so, depending on how much time I'm willing to spend on
this.
So here's what I'd propose: Twitter sets up an email address or some
other mechanism to receive these search patterns. When someone gets
spammed, they can send a copy of the tweet to Twitter, in addition to
doing a "block and report" on the spammer. Twitter could then create the
search pattern, run the query and suspend the accounts automatically.
What would be even nicer would be if we could report an individual
tweet as spam directly from Search or the timeline. But that's a bigger
software engineering task.
--
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"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." -- Paul
Erdős
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