Twitter spam sucks in so many ways it’s not even funny. One good way to reduce the amount of spam you get AND to reduce the load on twitters servers is to simply unfollow the bad and the ugly. Why unfollow? Because by following back spammers and useless ‘stuff’ you are only serving to aid the evil swarm. But this isn’t all about spammers. This is about removing followers who are just bad, annoying or down right useless (or hindering) to your cause/goal/aim.

I previously wrote about Twitter spam (and my plans for a anti-spam twitter project) here, so if you have a minute check it out and let me know what you think. Also, there is a lot of good info for you on using TweetDeck to cut down on Twitter spam.

Before reading on, I have to state this: This article is only about unfollowing users on Twitter in-order to clean up your following’s list. This has NOTHING to do with whom you choose to follow in the first place nor about how to grow your followers. It’s also very likely that following any tips will decreases your amount of followers. You have been warned

So lets talk about something very important first.

Why You Should Unfollow Twitter Followers:

Unfollowing Twitter followers will clean up your profile, improve your following/followers ratio and help you manage your followers. Cleaning up your profile doesn’t actually ‘do’ anything per-say. But it will help make twitter a better place and help stop the grown of the spam cancer. Plus, you’ll probably feel better for knowing that everyone you follow is a genuine person who doesn’t spam.

Having a better followers/following ratio makes you look better, sort off. If you have 10,000 followers and follow 10,000 people then people will know that you have some authority. People are also more likely to follow you if they know that you will follow them back. But on the other hand, you’ll have people following you who will never contribute to your cause and follow you only so you will follow them back and improve their numbers.

If on the other hand have something like 10,000 followers but only follow 3,000 then people will really perceive you to have a lot (more) authority. People like authority. But then again, a bunch of people will also not follow you because you won’t follow them back.

That all depends on how you and others use Twitter. But as far as I have ever known, seen, read or learned … there is nothing wrong with having more followers than whom you follow. Might actually be good for you too!

As for helping you manage your followers: why would you want to follow ‘bad’ users? I’m using bad very generally here, mind you. Sure there are Twitter lists and groups/lists/folders/whathavenots in programs (like TweetDeck and HootSuite), but still why follow users who will not contribute to your Twitter experience?

Top 3 Types Of Twitter Users To Unfollow

The most obvious reason is:

1) SPAM.

If you get any spam from a user or notice someone spamming, block them immediately. Better yet, “Block and Report Spam” (as you were taught in the video on the other twitter post). The big question with this one is:

Is this person really spamming or are they just over zealous with their marketing?

Fair question which I’ll cover in another post. But for now, it’s generally safe to say if it smells like spam it probably is.

2) Obnoxious, mean or generally annoying users.

Why keep following someone who is mean and rude? That just doesn’t make sense. If someone is pestering you, especially in ‘real life’, what do you do? You usually ignore them and stay away. Doing so on Twitter is very easy and it’ll save you a lot of headaches.

No body likes a bully, so don’t give them power by remaining a follower.

3) Users constantly Twitters useless tweets

Whether it’s a form of spam or it’s just the way they use Twitter, someone use constantly tweets useless things (like quotes all the bloody time) is probably not someone you’d wanna follow.  Of course that is your choice to make, but by follow someone who is:

• only tweeting quotes
• only pushing their products and nothing more
• Tweeting completely random tweets that don’t seem to do anything with one another

by following such people, you only waste your time and precious Twitter resources (as anyone who’s been on Twitter for a while will tell you that Twitter doesn’t exactly have a lot of computing resources).

Stop spinning wheels and remove useless people from your Twitter life!

Clean up your account and take out the garbage! It’s starting to smell!

Phew, spam smells the worst.

Those are the three types of ‘users’ I plan to start unfollowing tomorrow. What types of people do you unfollow on Twitter, do you not unfollow? How about Follower/Following management? Do you use any of that?

Let me know in the comments. Hopefully together we can create an awesome “Twitter Special Report: Efficient Unfollowing” together!

Twitter is one of the premier social media applications, but due to it’s size and open nature it is also one of the easiest to spam. The very open community nature of Twitter and it’s feed system have been exploited by spammers time and time again.

Twitter has some tools, filters and options in place to help you fight it, but just like anything in life nothing is foolproof. In today’s video I’m talking about my idea for a Twitter Anti-Spam Project (outlined below the video) and how you can utilize TweetDeck’s newest filter features and a few of the existing ones to keep yourself safe from Twitter SPAM.

But take this with a grain of salt: This is not a fool-proof system and it can result in false-negatives and false-positives. But it’s definitely better than nothing at all.

In the video you’ll find out how to use TweetDecks features to filter out SPAM and CRAP.

Twitter Anti-Spam Project Proposal:

My idea is to have a central filter system which is not directly on the twitter system. If it were it would but significant strain on Twitters systems and plus, there are plenty of legitimate Tweets coming through that might appear spammy at first. Twitter cannot and will not take such a position to go around blocking random tweets.

Thus we need a separate system that will allow complete user level control with well defined filters. Here are my basic requirements for the system:

• Be separate from the Twitter core
• Have an identical API to Twitter so that any existing applications would only have to use our servers address instead of Twitters to pull FILTERED tweets from
• Ability to filter by:
  • Names
  • Locations
  • User rating
  • Tweet source: api/web/tweetdeck (more on this one below)
  • Profile image type
  • User profile scores
    • Tweet rate
    • Tweet types: RT? all quotes? gibberish? all sales with link tweets? ect..
    • Link in tweet or not
    • Link spam detection: check link for automatic anti-spam linking techniques (ie, adding useless trailing characters to bit.ly links to make them appear unique)
    • Following to Followers ratio
    • Profile age
    • Profile spam rating
    • Profile usage rating (kind of like what those twitter sites do where they give profiles a rating from A+ to F-)
  • Link spam detection (same as the one above under profile but more general setting for all links)
  • other things not thought of yet…
• User contribute to overall ratings of other users and spam is filtered out through the help of everyone. Similar to what Gmails spam detection does. (Hm, hey Google, can we get a copy of your spam protocol to help us here? )
• Ability to report faulty detections
• Per user settings which can override global settings
• Follower vetting
  • Automatic
  • Manual
  • Semi-manual
• other things as well that haven’t been thought of yet.

We all love twitter to some extent, actually some of us dislike it. But either way if you are on Twitter no doubt you’ve been hit with some form of Twitter Spam. Whether it was spam direct messages or just annoying people so only spam tweets day in and day out.

Today I have a video for you about how to Identify a potential Twitter spammer, how to filter them (quickly) and some e-mail tips to thin out the junk Twitter mail we all get. Below the video you’ll find all the fun links and sites that I mentioned in the video. Before the video though, here is a list of possible ways to identify possible Twitter spammers:

1. The follow significantly more people than are following them
2. They only post affiliate links day in and day out
3. Their username is complete gibberish
4. They only post quotes and/or R
5. T’s. Never commenting or interacting with anyone
6. No profile photo -> this isn’t all tooo much of an indicator, but 99.99% of REAL profiles will have a real looking profile photo
7. Their tweets look like a one way conversation

There are others, but those are the biggest for me. Watch the video (after you click the read more button) to learn more about it and see some tool Anti-tweet spam settings and (free) tools!

Fair warning: it’s a big video: 38MB! If the video is too big  to load on your connection let me know at piotrkrzyzek @ gmail.com and I will replace it with a lower quality version! I’ll also put up a link to a youtube version soon.

You can view the video in the full 1280×1024 format by clicking this link: here.

The website which I mentioned which allows you to vet followers is SocialOomph. It does more than that, I use it for a few automated messages and the auto-reply message I give to my followers for example. But it has some REALLY great vetting tools, which I don’t use at the moment sadly, that will not auto-follow back for 3 days. Giving you 3 days to manually vet all followers and by the end of the 3rd day it will do some pre-determined action (follow/ignore/block). SocialOomph is a FREE website, but they do offer a Pro version for a price. The vetting and auto-reply messages are in the free version. So happily get that

The anti-spam checking website I mentioned is Twerp Scan (http://twerpscan.com). It’s a little bit slow, but that’s ok. It’s all javascript that’s why. It didn’t work in Chrome nor IE, but it did in Firefox after clicking the continue button several times. The continue button I’m talking about is a message from Firefox telling you that the TwerpScan code seems to have stopped working. But it really hasn’t … it’s just taking forever. So just click continue whenever it shows up and you’re followers will be loaded.

The twitter settings site is: http://twitter.com/settings/notifications

The Stop Twitter spam site (rather outdated but still useful): Stop Twitter Spam Tools And Setttings

Spam, spam, spam. Gotta hate it all sometimes. I logged in today and saw “10 new comments”! I was ecstatic. Though, I look a little bit down the page and see “10 new spam comments” … dammit! Sure I had 10 new comments, but all spam. Great. This spam problem is only getting worse and worse it seems. Since my last post about spam, there has been a small wave of spam. This blog isn’t exactly big but it get’s its fair share of spam. I can only imagine how much spam the big blogs get. I feel sorry for them.

Today’s spam report is about three new jerks to watch out for. The first and most annoying, in my opinion, is Mike’s Money Site. I’m not going to like to it directly because I do not want to give the guy any more traffic than he’s already getting. `Mike’ has set up a automatic blog comment spam program which I have to admit is a pretty darn good idea, as much as I don’t like it. What it does is post a short and kind comment, though rather generic at times. Also he uses decently well crafted text as it tells the blog owner things like: your post was informative, good post, “Cool post, just subscribed.” Things like that make a person wanna not believe it’s a spam comment, sadly it is.

Now the very interesting part which uses some good social engineering and psycology. The comments all ‘seem’ to come from a real person. They have a real name, they have a gmail mail account, there is a person’s picture that comes with the comment and the link goes to a real site! All very convincing right? Well, if you follow the link you get to Mike’s page. Which, in essence, is a sales page (though pretty crappy for a marketting sales page). On the page is tells people that by getting the seemingly “free” e-book they can easily make $1,000 USD a week just like he did by working only 10 hours. Yeah well … B.S. Maybe it actually works, maybe it doesn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that the comment is spam. His site makes promises using some rather decent sales silver tongue language:

Sign up for the right programs and don’t fall for scams. Google Cash Secret is absolutely free, has been featured on ABC and CNN, and will teach you to work with the most reputable company online, Google. This program is the ONLY official ways to make money posting links on Google- don’t fall for imitators!

Instead of working harder, work smarter. The Google Cash Secret kit has everything you need to increase your earnings without spending more time working.

Save your free time. Remember, you can make $5,000 a month or more working part time. I made $5,000 working only 10 hours, and you can too. So, after you get your Google Cash Secret kit, be sure to set aside some time to spend with your loved ones- you’ll have plenty of time to work, but the whole point of having more money is to have more free time.

He even warns (which I found very amusing):

Let me tell you, there are a lot of scams and lies out there about how to work on the Internet! There are sites out there that will promise you hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a day for doing absolutely nothing. Well, if there’s one thing my dad taught me, it’s that you don’t get something for nothing. Of course, these companies will often charge you hundreds of dollars for the privilege of working with them. So don’t fall for the scams!. I knew that if I really wanted to make money online, I had to work for a reputable online company that wouldn’t rip me off.

Right, well. His offer of ‘free’ did sound interesting so I went to investage his free “offer”. I clicked his link and a very interesting page popped it. “Error 403: Invalid Country”. Say what? Invalid country? Last time I checked, all countries on this planet were legal, albiet some better than others though still legit. And if you are wondering, no I am currently not in a 1st world huge country like the USA, Canada or any ‘rich’ EU country. So if this was a legit site, why would it have something like “invalid country”? What kind of legit website does that? Just doesn’t make sense. (Note: There are good reasons to block some countries access to your site. Could be for security reasons, or you want only regional access to your site, or one of a plethora of other reasons). A sales site like that should not be limited like that.

Next time I looked at was the actual link. Another interesting thing, it’s a affiliate link! HA! And all is now known. I didn’t stop there though. I wanted to see if I could find some more information about this looser who was spamming us. His website WHOIS  information releaves not much, sadly. As he is using a WHOIS protection service (which by the way is recommended for some sites, depending on what you are doing. Personal sites are a good place to have a whois protection service turned on.) Though, the service cannot block all the information. His site(s) is hosted at a host called Rat Host, hmm … fitting name. They seem like a decent host, never heard of them though. One point to note though, is that their logo character IS, not is like .. IS the character from Ratatouille the movie. Kinda sad, hope they have a liscense to use it.

Here is a quick list of how Mike’s spam method works:

1. Setup a legit looking sales site. Small, simple, and clean. Something that really seems to offer a great deal of information for free.
2. Run the spam program to spam legit looking spam comments on good blogs
3. Have the comments link back to the spam sales site using very legit looking comments
4. Have sales site promise great things and link people to a affiliate sale.

Rather underhanded yet smart at the same time. Though, the idiot made the mistake of making his things ‘too’ perfect so to say and repeated the same things too many times from the same IP. tsk tsk tsk.

Next we have spam information from the two IP addresses: 66.197.241.12 and 173.1.61.66.

These guys are worth mentioning because it seems they read my post about why spam sucks. Well, these guys still made mistakes but corrected something which almost make me approve the spam comment. Here is what they did right though: they really made a good blog comment! I mean it, informative and rather interesting to read (but still spam). Here is a snippet:

Most spam attacks on forums generally occur in waves, and the software will not spam at full speed initially. Thus, a good strategy for limiting the damage of such attacks is to target new members who have random series’ of alphanumeric characters for their usernames. The multiple instances of a spam bot will have obvious similarities in their email addresses (and will usually be random themselves), allowing members that match the profile of other spam bots to be banned before they even post. As mentioned – proxies are used, making IP bans ineffective, however it is possible to block the posting of threads containing certain text, or links to a certain site. Once a product or site has been spammed, it can be blocked, preventing the software from successfully uploading its payload.

Rather good information to know! Sadly, spam. The comment has links to several useless profiles on legit sites and links to other useless pages which have ZERO relavance to the actual comment! <sigh> Though, I do give credit where credit is due. Good job to these guys for at least spamming with something interesting and making it seem legit (almost).

Remember everyone:

Blogging is like sex: always use protection. You never know who might try to screw you next. For WordPress, turn on comment moderation and use Akismet!

Photo from Brett's Site http://brettduncan.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/blog-spam-crock-or-compliment/

Spam is a ever hated beast in this world. It is the prostitution of all that is good on the internet. Worse than a cockroach and sticks more than a garbage dump. Just like anything evil in this world, the more you try to kill it the stronger it rebounds. Fear not though, there are way to get around many of our spam problems.

For e-mail, there are solutions like Gmail with built in social-spam-detection, as I call it, Bogofilter, Spam Assassin, Razor and many more for e-mail. For Word Press blogs we have the almighty collaborative spam detection plugin: Akismet.

Blog’s have been riddled with spam from all sorts since the beginning and I highly doubt that we will see an end to it anytime soon, but we can fight it. Akisment currently stands at the #1 WordPress commend spam solution. It is free for personal use. Free as in beer, and just as tasty. If you run a WP blog, you will almost certainly need Akismet unless you want a spam LolZ cat “inside youz Blog, spammin joo commentz”.Though, lately things have been changing it seems.

Spammers aren’t dumb, they spam for a reason. It profits them in one way or another, thus they keep doing it. Or they simply way to disrupt systems, annoy the crap out of people or get revenge … who knows. So, why I am I already telling you something you already know? Because ‘they’ are changing tactics, and they are doing it fast.

A little while ago I recieved a comment from a “Andrew Boldman” who seemed like a nice person. Let me a rather nice comment saying “I really liked this post. Can I copy it to my site? Thank you in advance.” Honestly, I was estatic that someone commented and wanted to use some of my content. I threw a ceromony, threw a party and almost made a press release. And then another comment soon after from “Kelly Brown” saying how much she “really like[d] [my] post”. By the Gods! I have commenters. I was on my way to success … or so I thought.

Soon I received another comment, and then another. And I began to ask … huh, why all of a sudden? As I looked over the comments I noticed something strange, all of the e-mail addressed ended with “ds4ns1ns2.cn”. Well that’s a little bit strange, maybe a firewalled area where they all have to send out using one service? Seems just a teebit odd. I checked the IP … all from the same IP: 89.28.14.35.

And that’s when I knew it … it was spam. All these nice comments and spam. So, where is this comming from and why? Several ideas flow around but one rather good theory goes like this, as stated well by Mark Brain on the Warrior Forum. He said:

It’s possible that they are testing sites which will accept spam or those without moderators to control the spam. After that they will have a list of the sites that are “spam havens” then begin posting the actual links.

A simple google search for “ds4ns1ns2.cn” reveals a plethora of spam details about this. The first page results are loaded with spam complains and details from these people:

Spam spam spam. Checking the first website will give you a list of e-mails which originate from that one IP, and mind you it is no short list.

So what does this kind of spam mean to us? It means we should be locking down our blogs. See, this spam is basically a test to see which blogs they can use to spam in the future. If they find a blog which allows unmoderated comments they will quickly jump on it to and use it as a spam source. Since many bloggers do not secure their blogs enough, this gives the spammers an easy way drive automated traffic to their other spam services. Who knows, maybe these open blogs can even be hijacked to be used for even more spamming.

Also from the Warrior forum:

There’s also a setting many of us use on WP blogs to moderate the FIRST comment from a particular user. Once the first comment is approved, they can post without moderation.

So if you leave an innocuous comment on a recent post, and it’s approved, you can comment-spam the hell out of the older posts without anyone noticing. Who reads the comments on last year’s blog posts?

He’s right. In blogs like that, no one is going to care but the spammers. And they are free loading off of your hard work and might even be damaging it. Heck, there is even a WordPress Support topic about this issue here.

My theory on all of this is that this is a form a social engineering. The spammers are using ‘nice’ comments which entice bloggers to allow them. Now, not only do they find out how linient bloggers are but also which kind of messages work and don’t work on people. This will allow them to craft more and more “natural” spam that might just get through our systems soon enough. Ontop of all of this, once you approve a comment from them most WP blogs are set to allow any comments from that same person / IP again freely.

Once they have one comment approved they might just have free comment access on your blog. The other thing they find out is if your blog is ‘open’. Meaning if you don’t moderate your comments at all, you are SOL and you’r blog will probably be a ‘spam haven’ very soon.

All this data they collect, in addition to any people’s e-mail whom might have replied directly to the spammes plus God knows what else, can easily be mined for all sorts of useful tibits. By ‘mined’ I mean data mined, extracting information/knowledge from given data. Remeber tha AOL info leak a while back and how people drank up all of it? They extracted a lot of data from that, much of which was NOT apparent at first. Same thing could happen here.

So, how do we help stop spam like this:

1. Get Akismet
2. USE Akisment (really, it works and it’s free … as in beer)
3. Force users to enter name and e-mail before commenting
4. Enable “Comment Moderation” for all comments.
5. If a comment looks ‘ok’ but you’re not sure search for it on the internet to see if anything comes up.
6. You can be really paranoid and delete any ‘short’ comments that come your way.
7. Do NOT give the spammers any satisfaction by replying to them via e-mail or comments.
8. Inform any blogger you know who’s blog isn’t secure.

If anyone has any extra comments on how to stop and fight these spammers let us know in the comments. To arms!