Twitter – How to Manage and Block Multiple Mentions at Once

spam-preventiontwitter

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?

Best Answer

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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