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Hit a new record today with finding 4166 spam accounts in 24 hour period. Pretty excited about it. I’ll hit half a million spammers in no time at this rate

In the last couple days, I’ve scaled up my Twitter Spam Assassin to such large numbers, that I cannot report all the spam that I’m finding anymore. Because I’m not report all the spam I’m finding, the number of spam accounts that stay active spamming people is increasing! I messaged Twitter to help me by …

Today I discovered that twitter has an api method for looking up 100 different users (unfortunately not supported by Tweepy). I was excited to find this gem, because now the process of vetting accounts I think are spam is a lot easier and faster. So now I run a script that looks up all accounts that …

As my avid readers would know, the biggest issue i have right now is hitting API call limits. Today to help reduce that problem, I added code to check my db if I’ve already analyzed a twitter account or not. I purposely left this out before because its very possible that an account isn’t spamming when I …

One issue i’ve seen come up time and time again is an error “Not authorized”. Tweepy was giving me this error while pulling from the public timeline. Each time I get this error, my connection to twitter would be severed and would have to reconnect. When I saw this error a lot, i would try …

Tonight I hit a milestone in the Twitter Spam Assassin experimentation. I have found over 10,000 spammers and have reported them to twitter! Feels good to hit my first milestone. Will blog again when I hit 50k! http://sparks.sparktheorylabs.com/tsa

Although Twitter Spam Assassin is still in alpha, I’ve decide to launch the public site early. There you can see in live time how much spam has been found and reported and other metrics. Enjoy!! http://sparks.sparktheorylabs.com/tsa

Houston Twitter, we have a problem. I started to play with actually reporting spammers to Twitter today and apparently Twitter has a limit of reporting spam! Considering I can’t find mention of this in any of their documentation I was a bit surprised. But I guess it makes sense. Whats to stop someone from maliciously …

Last night at around 1 am i hit Twitter’s search api rate limit which caused my Twitter Spam Assassin to stop working for several hours. The search api rate limit is very similar to the REST api rate limit, but is completely separate. The REST api limit is 350 an hour but the search api is publicly …

As I am scaling up on Twitter Spam Assassin, I am starting to notice scaling issues. I had a cron setup on my servers to run tasks every 5 minutes. This functioned just fine when dealing with a small database, but as the number of spammers found grows, the amount of time it takes to …