A couple of days ago, Hugh quit Twitter to work on writing his book. Now I’m considering quitting Twitter, but nobody’s signed me up for a book.
The reason? Spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam. Well, without the eggs or the bacon. The sheer volume of new followers I’m getting these days who are blatantly spammers is getting increasingly frustrating. Sure, I can block them one by one, or simply ignore them, but if Twitter could implement a “flag as spam” a la Blogspot, then we could help each other and avoid 10,000 other users getting the same spammy follower message.
To add to the frustration, a friend pointed out that spam followers could very well use your RSS feed to create random copy for spam emails or blog comments in the future. I haven’t come across it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.
I guess for now, the less drastic route for me to take will be to create a rule where all notifications of new followers will go straight into a mark-as-read folder. It won’t solve the problem that my feed could end up as spam material for some unscrupulous asshole out there, but it’ll have to do for now.
What this means is that if you start following me and you want to have a conversation, you’ll need to send me a message @vero for me to react and add you as well. Crappy, but it’s the best solution I can think of.
Anyone got a better idea?
Paul Annett
Mark your timeline as private. You no longer receive email notifications every time someone wants to follow you, and potential spammers can’t see your RSS feed.
stop twitter spam
There is an active discussion going on about this exact issue on Get Satisfaction. Please join in with your ideas!
http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/how_would_you_prefer_to_report_twitter_spam
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Tris Fitzgerald
I’ve just started on Twitter, after ignoring it for some time, and am now concerned that my innocent joy in telling the world about the crap trivia of my life could be sullied. Why would spammers WANT to follow me? Am I being thick here?