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Annoying Spam Filters
August 26th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> Leave a comment
Most email users will have received the occasional email from a verification service aimed at blocking spam to your intended recipient by making you jump through at least one hoop to prove that you’re not a bot. They’re a pain in the neck. Please don’t use them, they clog up the internet and hurt genuine users more than they hurt spammers.
Now, a similar system seems to have been launched for Twitter users. I’m not going to name it because I don’t want to encourage anyone to use it, it’s just as much as a pain in the neck as those email verification systems.
I discovered its existence when I tried to follow a new Twitter user and got a message telling me to register with the service before I could follow him. No way. Thankfully, the story has a happy ending, I tweeted the user in question, told him I wasn’t going to jump through hoops just to follow him, and he agreed, immediately canceling the service and explaining that it was simply a test. Fair enough. We’re now good virtual buddies.
These kinds of tools seem sensible in principle, but like I say they hurt the genuine user more than the spammers, who simply ignore them and move on to the next million people on the bot list. They do work in the sense that you won’t ever see the spam bots, but you will also miss out on some potentially wonderful connections if you deter new people from connecting.
The mantra should be to think of your genuine users first, and spammers last.
If you’re being followed by serious numbers of twitter spam followers, give TwitBlock a try. It ranks your followers on the basis of various factors, including their follower rates, ratio of followees to followers, and number of tweets. Someone with a crude or lewd avatar and a TwitBlock rank of 200+ is most likely a twitter spammer, so block them.
