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Background: This question came after one I've posted on quora.

I got way too many mentions from people I do not know in languages I do not speak. When I've tried asking to a few of them who did write in English, they wouldn't respond why they were doing it.

And all that is making my notifications get unusable: Webpage Screenshot - Twitter (none of that is really for me, except the last 2).

To make it worse, I don't think blocking will help, because I think it's always someone new who's mentioning me. But, for now, it's the only thing I can do, I guess. I currently started doing this manually. Maybe I'll write an iMacros script for it...

I like to tweet them back to let them know they're doing something wrong - they all mention me but they're not really trying to reach me. It would probably be fine if I just blocked them, but well, I'm a perfectionist and I think that's the right thing to do.

Twitblock is no good. It found no spammers and, the few that it did find among my followers were not spammers at all (except for 1, whom I never got any notifications from). I do not know of any other tools which could be useful, so I suppose there's some room for suggestions!

Any ideas, pretty please?

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4 Answers 4

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You can write a script that checks your mentions every x minutes, and for each new mention it does the following steps :

  • If you follow the user, do nothing (it's a friend or someone you know).
  • If you don't follow him and it's the first tweet from him, do nothing either (it can be a perfectly legitimate tweet).
  • If you don't follow him and he previously mentionned you several times without first getting a reply from you (very important so you don't block legitimate users that simply try to have a conversation with you) then block him and flag him for spam.

If the spam has something in common like a link or a hashtag you can also use that as a filter to automatically block them.

Check the Twitter API documentation for more info about developing such a script.

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  • This sounds very promising. Do you have any working script I can try? I'm currently completely out of time to try writing one myself from scratch, but I'll definitely try this eventually!
    – cregox
    Commented Mar 26, 2014 at 19:41
  • You can look into this code which should at least get you started, even though it doesn't implement any of the things I mentionned in my answer so you'll have to implement that yourself.
    – user48214
    Commented Mar 26, 2014 at 20:02
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What I did was changing my handle. I just couldn't handle it all!!

Only thing I'm sad about is that I had such a unique handle I didn't even realized it before I changed it - now I can't change back because it was only 5 characters long. :(

I was just going to "move it" elsewhere.

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I don't think there is anything that can be done. There are way too many tweets that are sent at once and way too many new spammers that come up every day to keep a proper track of the spam that comes up.

Anyways there is a setting in Twitter's Website, that lets you see replies from only people you follow. Although that doesn't fix the problem as a whole but should prove to be somewhat useful.

enter image description here

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  • Yes, I also think that, and I saw that Interaction option, which is somewhat useful indeed... But I'm not asking to solve my main problem here. Just to automate a bit a task that I'm already doing on twitter. ;-)
    – cregox
    Commented Feb 22, 2014 at 15:55
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Check out Lionytics for Twitter. www.lionytics.com I started using it for free when it was in the test phase but now I pay for it cause I got so fed up with crap spam! Might not be what your looking for but it does a lot automatically. Just sayin

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  • So you mean twitter.lionytics.com - 10 bucks per month is too much for something that will probably not even work (in my case). It sounds like a good path to go, though.
    – cregox
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 4:42
  • If you have an affiliation with the product, please disclose it in your answer.
    – jonsca
    Commented Mar 21, 2014 at 20:27

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