djByron [Dan Byron]husband, father, christian, musician & technophile ( but not a dj )

Ran accross Twerp Scan today and wanted to pass it along to all those using Twitter. Everyone using Twitter knows that “spwitter” or twitter spam is becoming an issue. Not a day goes past that I don’t get at least a couple messages in my inbox letting me know that somebody is now following me. Ok, cool… Or not… Turns out that the person now following me is following 10K but only 10 follow in return. So what’s up with that? Spwitter is a relatively new way of spamming where a user will follow as many as possible hoping for a few “courtesy follows” in return. That user can then send their spam messages and/or links out to those who are now following them.

Enter Twerp Scan… Now granted from the start this is not a tool that you’ll use every day due to the limitations of the Twitter web site, but it is useful none-the-less. Basically what it does is scan the list of people following you and allows you to filter by a few different criteria. The two most important, and telling criteria are 1) the number of people they are following and 2) the followers-to-following ratio. Once you go to the site and check it out it’s pretty self-explanitory. Here’s a very brief walk-through.

1. Filter Criteria:
   First, set the basic filter criteria of who you would consider a spammer. This includes the minimum number of people they are following (begins at 500 and goes up from there.) There’s also a drop down list to select the followers-to-following ratio.

   

1. Login:
   Next sign in using your twitter username and password. NOTE THAT this is a login prompt coming directly from Twitter and not from Twerp Scan. This is a really cool feature because it means that you’re not giving your login information to a third party site but rather to Twitter. Really nice.

   

2. Seek and Destroy:
   Probably first thing to do is click the “verdict” column header and see what is considered spam and handle those accordingly. I simlply drag the link to another FireFox tab and “block” the user if they are indeed spam. Another column worth sorting by is the “~R” (or ratio) column. Usually spammers wil have a hign followers-to-following ratio (meaning that they follow many but few reciprocate).

   

So go check out Twerp Scan and see just how many of your followers are legitimatly interested in your conversation.

Note: I started this post earlier this evening but I had a chance to post it, Chris posted almost the same thing! Great minds eh.