Comments on: Diluting Block Counts

By: Justin

Justin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:01:23 +0000

Interesting post. I can’t help but wonder whether you would be better off letting people unfollow rather than block for spam, but I suppose that depends on how you get your block statistics. If every post is a url as well it tends to be fairly spammy. There was a great app called thetwitcleaner or twitcleaner but they got hit by Twitters somewhat odd unfollow rules. Spam is the one thing that makes Twitter pretty hellish so I thank you for what you are doing and hope you will keep it up!

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:02:12 +0000

Thanks [I think]
The Twitter API provides access to your block lists when you authenticate. I suggest you read the about page which contains a privacy statement too.

By: Autymn D. C.

Autymn D. C. — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:18:51 +0000

who’s -> whose

How does TwitBlock know the block lots of each account?

By: craig

craig — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:57:23 +0000

Check out the review we gave you today on Rev2

http://www.rev2.org/2009/09/11/twitblock-junk-filtering-and-blocking-for-twitter/

By: mesmolin

mesmolin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:49:55 +0000

Please consider checking several twitter accounts at one time. I currently need to manage 10 accounts. Thank you for this tool. It really helps.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:44:22 +0000

Thanks David.
TwitBlock doesn’t [yet] analyse Tweets or conversational behaviour. This is for two reasons:
1. A deep scan would take longer;
2. Some spammers steal tweets to pad out their feeds and look “real”.

What’s more likely is we will start to crawl Twitter and identify spam ourselves for a black list. For now it’s largely heuristic. Our best signal is currently the duplicate profile pics. They bring the baddest spam right to the top of the list.

By: David Niall Wilson

David Niall Wilson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:26:07 +0000

Yep, it’s a tough nut to crack finding a blocking pattern that is almost always spam.

One thing though, your app isn’t finding the Twitteradder folks or the Big Twitter Machine and all of that other crap to be spam…you can pretty much bet if an account as any recurring posts that say “GET VIRAL FOLLOWERS HERE” they’re spam…not sure how you find that sort of account. I still manually scan most of my accounts. I hit your link on my toolbar first, but I look to see if they actually talk to people. If there is no direct conversation, or if the posts don’t appear to even be by a single person, but culled from other accounts, I block.

Thanks for the work in this area…it’s much needed.