Twitter and spam?

[daj]

I recently thought I would try out the Twitter feature of Cumulus and I have had it running for about 10 days. It's amazing how many 'followers' I am getting that are complete rubbish -- most are I guess 'bot' accounts and if you look at any of their tweets they are all for viagra/weightloss tablets. I've been deleting all the followers who are rubbish but I am struggling to keep up. I got 12 within the space of a few minutes last night.

I know I can set the account so that I have to approve sign ups, but that would be a pain too.

Just curious if others have the same problem?

[steve]

I have 14 followers, most of them are genuine. Are you tweeting anything other than the boring Cumulus weather updates? Or something else that might be attracting spammers?

[daj]

No, just the standard Cumulus stuff

www.twitter.com/gosweather

I have also just spotted that there has not been a 'tweet' since 6 Aug - Would errors appear in the debug log?

[steve]

I have also just spotted that there has not been a 'tweet' since 6 Aug - Would errors appear in the debug log?

Yes, Cumulus writes the response from twitter to the debug log, so any errors should appear there.

[daj]

Ok, I will await the next tweet attempt

My current debug files is 2.5gb! So I've archived it to start afresh

[steve]

My current debug files is 2.5gb! So I've archived it to start afresh

It grows a bit even when switched off, unfortunately, and crashes after a while if you leave it switched on. I keep meaning to replace it, perhaps with another instance of the 'diags' logger, but even that has its problems.

[daj]

My twitter started working after a restart of Cumulus. I guess it has had something to do with the DoS attack on Twitter of late.

Doesn't really explain why I get so many 'spam' followers.

I will be considering my position over the coming few days as to whether I even bother tweeting the weather.

[steve]

My twitter started working after a restart of Cumulus. I guess it has had something to do with the DoS attack on Twitter of late.

I suspect that the Twitter code in Cumulus doesn't cope very well with Twitter not responding.

[w5afw]

As I understand it, cumulus uses API to upload to twitter. According to what I have read, twitter is blocking many automatic uploads from API. I am sure this accounts for the fact my cumulus uploads are not getting to twitter. Maybe others are affected the same way. The input from those who upload frequently looks to twitter a lot like the attack uploads. When they get caught up, I will slack my uploads off to once every 2 hours. Maybe every 10 minutes is too frequent for their system, and realistically, and such a frequent upload schedule may be depositing more information than is practically useful. Cheers, Lex

[KetteringUK]

Think my Twitter has been a bit irregular since updating to the latest beta.

http://www.twitter.com/ketteringuk

[steve]

since updating to the latest beta.

I'm pretty sure that's a coincidence. I haven't changed the Twitter code for a long time. More likely to be the problems that Twitter are still having.

[KetteringUK]

Think my Twitter has been a bit irregular since updating to the latest beta.

http://www.twitter.com/ketteringuk

Debug log is showing only this...

9142.5899 : 13:16:40 EW data line 07 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF
9142.5899 : 13:16:40 EW data line 08 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF
9143.4588 : 13:16:49 Updating Twitter
9143.4588 : http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
9143.4791 : 13:16:49 Twitter Response Code: 0 Response =
9143.5836 : 13:16:50 USB device is plugged in
9143.5836 : 13:16:50 request EW data block, written = 9, addr = 000000

[steve]

I think that's saying that Twitter didn't respond.

[w5afw]

Posted by twitter yesterday: "Due to defensive measures we’ve taken against the ongoing denial-of-service attack, some Twitter clients are unable to communicate with our AP...

We are working as quickly as possible to restore our full service."

anyone else still having problems uploading reports using cumulus?

[steve]

Twitter is still quite broken, particularly for software that uses their API (rather than humans posting directly), and even more so for software like Cumulus, which has a very simple use of the Twitter API.

It will be affecting people in different ways at different times. Twitter have no forecast for when the problem will be resolved (as the attack is apparently still ongoing).