Update The @OhMyVag account has been unsupended! It just took me opening a ticket and it was back in three days. Now I don’t know what to do with it
The image below is a screencap of a recent support ticket I had opened with Twitter. A little back story is in order:
I run 25+ “retweet” bots on Twitter. One day three were suspended, then eight more, then those eight were reinstated that same day like someone made a mistake. The first three were still suspended.
I’ve dealt with this one time for @shutupmeg and was able to get the account reinstated but had to promise that I would not use the retweet function provided by their API. Manual retweets would have been ok but at the time I figured I’d leave retweeting for that account off for a while.
So over to open a support ticket I went. You’ll want to read that ticket and I’ll provide a bit more info. While these accounts were suspended I went over to check @delbius. From what I can gather she’s the head of Twitter’s anti-spam “and all that jazz” team. People usually contact her directly to have issues taken care of. I noticed that @redscarebot was also suspended at around the same time my bots were. Someone alerted it’s creator, the creator (if I remember correctly) and someone else mentioned it to @delbius and it was unsuspended. The only difference between my retweet bots and @redscarebot is that he adds a word or two mentioning communism along with the retweet.
As you could imagine I was pretty miffed as to why that account was allowed to stay up while mine were not. Looking back at the support ticket you can see that once I called their support out on this I had a very hard time getting a response from them. I asked again and again leaving days between updates with no reply.
I finally received an answer. They obviously know that I have a large-ish set of bots that all do the same thing and work the same way. Twitter wants to lower the “annoyance factor” of retweet bots and felt that via this support ticket was a good way to inform me of that. Now, I know they can be annoying and I’ve gone through great lengths to ensure that my bots aren’t as intrusive as others that I have seen. Take @poutine_bot for example that breaks my “Don’t RT an RT rule.” You can see more information on how I try to be less annoying than you’d think in my blog post Things to consider when you make a bot on Twitter
Anyway, as you can see below I have someone on Twitter’s support team telling me to convert every single bot that I have from doing a “manual retweet” (like “RT @username tweet”) to using the API retweet function. If you remember what I mentioned earlier about @shutupmeg’s suspension I specifically agreed not to use that function as it lead to that account’s suspension. You can view that support ticket here http://bit.ly/cXpJoo
What’s really amazing is that I was threatened if I don’t do this, all of those other accounts would be suspended as well. Now once you start talking about all of them, to me, it becomes something that needs to be formally stated. Not something to be thrown in to a support ticket. Coincidentally, I did not change one thing about the other bots and four months later NONE of them have been suspended as stated by “Ben” in the support ticket below. No one contacted me personally about this and no one ever told me the date that this change had to be made.
Moral of the story: It’s a crap shoot with Twitter’s support and rules that may apply to one person won’t apply elsewhere. You won’t get any explanation about what they are basing their decisions on even though to onlookers everything looks the same. Once you question them enough they’ll respond back with empty threats. That’s what I see from you Twitter, an empty threat.
(click on the image to see a larger version of it)
This space usually isn’t for anything personal but since it deals greatly with a project of mine it still fits. By now most people that know me have seen the New York Times article I was mentioned in (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/fashion/29twitter.html) First I want to say that the article was very well put, not demeaning on the “scolds” to me, and altogether fun.
I have read the comments on the Times website, tweets floating around, etc and have one question. What article were you all reading? I’m going to summarize and these numbers won’t be accurate, but:
75% want us to “get a life”
15% think we could spend our time on this earth for a higher purpose
19% other
1% are English majors and love this
I just want to make something clear about how @CapsCop works. It’s all automated and it’s fairly stable. This bot can run while I’m six feet under as long as there’s money in my bank account to pay for my server, I would never care enough to do all of this by hand. Honestly I don’t even care about who uses caps lock or not. This started as a 100 line php script I made in 10 minutes to satisfy my curiosity and has grown in to something that causes me to get death threats on a random phone number.
For those that say I should use my efforts to do something more useful: I have been programming for almost 10 years now and it’s not like this is the first thing I have ever made. Some of my projects are serious and most are not. None of them have taken off like this. None have gained the attention from the media. None generate the kind of response that @CapsCop has. I’m not going to say that my other projects are awesome but your media outlets choose what to cover and promote, not me.
It fit what I needed with one exception, the next track would play automatically. Since the source code was available I was able to add a new option to that script. By adding autonext=false to both url’s in the html source you will prevent the next track from playing.
So this was the first website Ive ever created. Because of that it was fairly buggy and took a while for me to add simple things. I was playing with the CodeIgniter and figured doing quizcreate.com all over again would be an easy thing to do. Have a look around.
p style=text-align: center;stronga title=quizcreate.com href=http://quizcreate.comquizcreate.com/a/strong/p
With over 30 retweet bots on Twitter combining over one million retweets I’m probably the craziest one making these bots. While these bots are simple in nature there are a lot of things to consider while developing a retweet bot.
You look like less of a spammer if you have quality retweets
This is the most important rule to follow and one that most don’t. If you’re using some feed automated tweeting service like twitterfeed using an atom feed from search.twitter.com you loose all control over your retweets. Tweets with links must be ignored out to help your reputation and to avoid your bot being abused by spammers. Spammers will take advantage of your bots faster than you can clean up the mess.
You will also want to avoid retweeting people that purposely try to trigger your bot. You want spontaneity, not assholes looking to become popular through your bot. Log all of your retweets and limit each person a few per day.
Don’t retweet @replies or @mentions either. That just gets messy very quickly.
Allow “users” to opt-out
The purpose of a retweet bot is to be fun. If someone doesn’t see the fun in it I give them the option to opt out and go the extra mile of removing all retweets from that user. That’s all easily automated and makes people happy.
Log every retweet
Having a database of every retweet is very handy. Not only can you gather good statistics but you can try to hunt down spammers abusing your bots, or make fun lists with who you’ve retweeted the most. Keep a record of the username, user id, date/time, text, original tweet id and retweet id. Do this as early as you can and you won’t regret it.
Be original
No one wants to be hammered with retweets just because they said “balloon boy”. Do your homework and make sure there are no other bots looking for the same phrase you are. Don’t make a bot because of a fad like “pants on the ground” Oh and stay away from cursing bots. There are more than enough of those around right now.
Formatting your retweet
Right now you have two options. Either do an “old” retweet that follows the “RT @username: tweet tweet” format, or use Twitter’s new retweet function in the api. I used to do something like “(@username) tweet tweet” mainly because you save yourself a few characters. I switched to Twitter’s official retweet api method for a few weeks and regretted it ever since. Not every Twitter client has really integrated retweets in timelines. (btw: hurry up with Tweetie 2 for the mac, jeez!) Plus people check their mentions way more than retweets. Retweeting through the api means your tweet is 80% less visible and you want visibility.
Don’t follow people
Not much to be said about this. You can follow yourself to maybe gain yourself some followers, or to get feedback from people. But bulk following random or retweeted users is pointless. You follow people to read their timeline, not to pimp your account out.
While I sympathize with this dilemma I feel this became an issue because mainly she did not want to make an appointment. If you want something replaced at any Apple Store you must see a genius. And to see a genius at the Apple Store it is your best bet to make an appointment. I don’t like that rule but it certainly helps the techs behind that genius bar from having to deal with rows of already frustrated people just standing there.
My girlfriend recently needed a power brick replaced under warranty for an older MacBook Pro and our experience was much, much different than the post I just read. Why? I played by their rules and wasn’t an asshole about it. We made an appointment for a few days later, showed up with the brick and her laptop (in case they needed the serial number), waited while the genuis filled out some electronic paperwork, and walked out the door with a new power brick. It’s that simple.
I’ll admit that I knew ahead of time an appointment was needed. I used to work at that same Apple Store over five years ago. But had we walked in with power brick in hand and were told to make an appointment we would have. Instead this person threw a fit and showed the internet how impatient she is. Make the appointment, be calm, and get your replacement adapter. If you don’t like the store, call Apple and they’ll ship you a replacement.
I deal with a lot of MySQL queries each day and am always unsure of how I should be formatting them and hate wasting time on making them look “pretty.” I mean, php and perl have easy to use code tidiers so why can’t MySQL?
Make sure that you install SQL::Beautify from cpan first (run sudo cpan SQL::Beautify to install)
Then drop the plugin in your Coda plugins folder and make your SQL prettier!
This is my first plugin for Coda so hopefully this is installable on other machines.
I’ve disabled all forms of comments on my page and I encourage you to do the same. Comments are commonly a source of spam, trolls, and awkward moments. Plus with a “fanbase” as small as this blog has, there’s not much of a point to maintaining comments. I get a comment out of every five posts and most of the time it’s for a very old post.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people are linking the “social media” images that I have on my website. I didn’t create these images, and they’re available without having to give attribution, but linking to images on my site is a no no. For the larger offenders I have replaced images requested from your domains with something a little more “colorful.”
If you are interested in using the same icons that I’m using on your site, here they are. Enjoy!
And for those that found some images on your website were replaced with tubgirl… That’s exactly why you should never hotlink images from another domain.
I don’t get it. How is this desk priced at over $700? I kind of get that quality lumber can be expensive. With a fancy paint job that can bump up the price some more. It’s a small kitchen table with matchstick-like legs and some organizers on each end for crying out loud. I don’t consider myself a master of wood (stop your giggling!) but if someone were to make one from scratch and included the price of new tools you’d come way under $700. If this design looked halfway appealing and I wasn’t so lazy I would try making one.
It’s bad enough you’re raping my wallet with this price but you could at least give my eyeballs a reach around.
Normally I wouldn’t care about things like this but the same company also makes a scarf that I would love to own. Unfortunately I can’t justify giving money to a place that, to me, overcharges for something like the above desk. And that’s coming from an Apple enthusiast.
