Subscribe RSSI discovered this morning that Twitter had suspended the Fauxlowers app, making it impossible to join, log into, or otherwise use your account. The most likely cause: complaints about welcome DMs from people who fauxlow too many people on Twitter.
Welcome DMs have been optional since just after this site launched, and they’ve always been customizable. Yes, they were turned on by default, but the checkbox to turn them off was on a short form that each member had to complete and submit before their account became active. So the welcome DMs had been authorized by those they were sent for. (Yes, I understand that some people only looked at the first item on the form before submitting it — sorry folks, I’m not going to accept blame for that. The option was never hidden or obfuscated in any way.)
So why would someone complain about the welcome DMs? Because they’re following way too many stinkin’ people. Thus they get more welcome DMs than they want.
Uh, folks. When you open the communication lines, something might come through. If you’re getting more messages than you want, stop opening your in-box to so many people. Twitter is a social site, not your business mailing list manager. (I have no problem with people using it to broadcast to potential customers since it’s a strictly opt-in site. Just don’t expect it to be limited to “ads go out, money comes in”. If you follow people, DMs come in too.)
Here’s what’s changed on Fauxlowers.com today:
People are going to blame others for problems of their own making — nothing I can do about that. So I’ve made a few changes and asked Twitter to reactivate the app. (Note that I’m acting based on my best guess at why we got deactivated — as far as I know, Twitter never sent any sort of notification or explanation).
- I’ve removed the standard welcome DM feature completely. From now on, only upgraded members can send welcome DMs, and there’s currently no way to dynamically include your current Fauxlower ratio in the DM.
- Upgrade tweets are limited to one every 3 hours (I noticed that some people were tweeting 5 or 6 upgrade tweets in rapid succession, which I imagine could look spammy to some of their followers.)
Hopefully we’ll get reactivated and our services will resume again quickly.
Like This Information?
...or use one of these to spread it around:
Related Posts
- New Stats Added to Fauxlowers Profiles
- Tag Your Fauxlowers Profile…Or Someone Else’s!
- Scheduled Tweets, “Free” Upgraded Accounts, etc.
- Who Has the Most Influence on Twitter?
- Welcome DMs Are Now Optional
January 28th, 2010 at 5:09 am
Automated tweaks and dms are not the way to go. Only the serious tweeters can succeed on this playing field.
January 28th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Twitter has replied to my inquiry, verifying that it was complaints about welcome DMs that got us suspended. They asked for confirmation of what I’ve written above about the changes to welcome DMs. It sounds like we’ll get reactivated once they get to my my response to their response.
February 2nd, 2010 at 7:55 am
[...] xavierv on 2 février 2010 Le 27 Janvier, le fondateur de l’application Fauxlowers a annoncé sur son blog que Twitter venait de suspendre son application. Effectivement, si l’on cherche [...]
February 2nd, 2010 at 10:00 am
In case my response to the French blog post linked to above doesn’t get approved, here it is:
—————————-
A few parts of this post didn’t come through clearly in Google Translate, so I’m not quite sure whether you suspect that my app was doing something malicious, or whether somebody else who was doing something malicious was trying to make it look as if Fauxlowers was responsible. I can tell you, my app never did anything that wasn’t clearly explained in advance to everyone who joined. The only thing Fauxlowers did after someone granted it access to their Twitter account was:
1) Send out ONE tweet with the person’s stats and linking to their profile on Fauxlowers.com. (This was recently made optional.)
2) Send ONE welcome DM to each NEW follower with pretty much the same information (stats and profile link). This has been optional almost since Fauxlowers was launched (but I think some people didn’t bother glancing at the form they were submitting, so they didn’t realize this, even though I tried to make it as clear as possible, and it was easy to disable). This feature has now been removed from the site to avoid future complaints from people who don’t read the forms they submit.
“As a reminder, you should be extraordinarily suspicious of any third party that offers to artificially inflate your follower count.”
Fauxlowers has absolutely nothing to do with inflating your follow count, so this statement is clearly not aimed at my site. Also, since Fauxlowers uses OAuth to access Twitter accounts (NOT passwords), resetting one’s password doesn’t affect it. So if the alert Twitter sent out had anything to do with Fauxlowers, it wouldn’t have been talking about passwords, it would have been talking about your Connections control panel. And there would have been no need for them to tell users, because they could have simply deleted all of Fauxlowers’ connections — or, as they did, they could just deactivate the Fauxlowers app.
In short, Fauxlowers has absolutely nothing to do with any phishing attack. Anyone who thought they’d been phished must not have read the clear and detailed explanation on the Fauxlowers.com homepage of what Fauxlowers was going to do before they gave it authorization to access their account.
February 5th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
We’ve been reactivated (whew!) Apparently my response to Twitter support never got attached to the ticket for some reason, which is why it took this long. Good to be back online!