Twitter Fail Army: Activate!

July 20th, 2010

It seems like everyone has their own army these days. @thebloggess has an army. They formed after @WilliamShatner blocked her (the nerve!) and continue to do good works in her name. @craigyferg has his own Robot Skeleton Army, which may or may not really do anything, but have given him his lovely sidekick Geoff Peterson. Even @JustinBieber has an army. Heck, he even has his own Navy. Clearly a navy where no one has to ask or tell.

We don’t have any army. But we want one. We aren’t delusional enough to believe we’d get a spit and polish, precision-team of highly trained militia. Ours would be more like the Confederate army. They didn’t have the training or the pretty uniforms, had to provide their own weapons, and as we recall, actually lost the war, but those guys had heart.

What we do have are followers with whom we get to interact on occasion. Every now and then, they send us fails they found in the nooks and crannies of twitter. So, instead of an army, we have our own little band of spies. Now that we think about it, a covert group of spies is way cooler than an army.

When one of our undercover pals sends us something worth sharing, we bestow upon them the coveted, fleeting honor of Honorary Fail Bird Handler.

In the category of “Worst twitter spammer,” Honorary Fail Bird Handler (anonymous) shared this gem this week:

We’re guessing @mlmsexmoney678 heard that if you use the right keywords (and what is more popular than mlm bussiness sexyspot money?) people will flock to your stream to buy what you have to sell. We suppose anyone can buy a free iphone, but, would they? If so, @mlmsexmoney678 is onto something good.

In an email titled, “You’ll never know who is reading,” @codem sent us this lovely conversation, which starts out with an average, ho-hum, made it all the way around the twitterverse and back, retweeted retweet:

Followed, not surprisingly, by a snarky reply

Lo and behold, somebody at GFI was sitting with bated breath at his keyboard, repeatedly hitting F5 on their twitter search so they could jump in with their hand extended like a used-car salesman trying to hit his quota.

We can’t hold it against @GFISoftware for living up to their potential. Geeks are expected to be socially awkward.

Now we’d like to introduce you to @EJWalle, today’s queen of cluelessness. Alert Honorary Fail Bird Handler @SmurfGalak brought her to our attention. It’s a long story. Let us sum up.

Here’s the skinny: @EJWalle followed @SmurfGalak. @SmurfGalak followed back, even though @EJWalle had some spammy tweets. She should have known better.

In other words, “I don’t care one whit* who I follow, I’m not looking to make actual friends or anything.”

Things don’t go quite the way @EJWalle planned:

So, @SmurfGalak offers an explanation

and is promptly unfollowed. Goes to show some people just don’t appreciate good help.

Ever the slow-learner, @EJWalle complains again about the monster she created.

But the poor thing just can’t stop. Hooked on the bot bug, she continues her death spiral:

There’s clearly no hope for @EJWalle or @mlmsexmoney678, and there’s plenty where they came from. If you’d like to become an Honorary Fail Bird Handler and learn the secret handshake, send screenshots and/or urls of the funny, silly, really bad, or awesome fails you find to tweetfail@gmail.com or DM us on twitter.

This post will self-destruct in 30 seconds….

—–

*4 whits = 1 iota.
8 iotas = a rat’s ass.
16 rats asses = a damn.

Filed under Bad Bot, Clueless, Spammer | Tags: Another obscure reference no one will get, from the inbox, yes it is a mixed metaphor | Comments (2)

Just Ducky

November 26th, 2009

The Fail Bird Handler has a broken wing. Actually, she just had right rotator cuff and bicep repair, which doesn’t fit the theme of this blog, so we’ll stick with “broken wing.” That is why postings have been sporadic of late. Hopefully, this will also explain any typos that get past the editing process, because we are using Dragon software to dictate, and it doesn’t understand us completely. But then, no one really does.

Our good friend @stinginthetail sent us a helpful alert :

So, naturally, we had to take a look.

We are always amazed, well actually more like amused, when spammers, scammers, and schemers get so offended when they’re called out. Of course, we take exception to the term “follower-chasing”and call it what it really is: “follower-whoring”, which is a delightful term coined by Honorary Fail Bird Handler @Bytor back in August.

The most valuable followers on twitter are earned by posting good content and interacting with your tweeps. Buying friends on twitter has the value of a one night stand. By doing so, you show that you don’t care who they are, and certainly don’t want to develop a relationship with them. You just want a connection, if only for a day.

@AlanDB92 may be a perfectly nice, honest, friendly tweep. However, his quacks and waddles make us think otherwise.

We’re heading back into the land of Vicodin and Benadryl, which on this Thanksgiving Day makes us very thankful.

Filed under Scammer, Spammer | Tags: aggressive following, Clueless, posts that will piss someone off, waiting for the hate mail | Comments (2)

Not Touching You

October 11th, 2009

Mo-o-o-o-ommmmm! Make him stop!

Spammy, give your sister a break, would you?

But Mom, I’m not going anything! I’m not even touching her. I’m just sitting here minding my own business.

Mo-o-o-o-ommmmm!

Just ignore him. If you don’t pay attention, he’ll stop.

That’s kind of the way it is with spammers on twitter. Some people don’t get that, though, and have an aneurysm every time one of these losers follows them.

It’s easy to waste a lot of time and energy checking out followers and blocking the ones you don’t want to follow back, but here’s the thing: you don’t have to do anything. You can just leave them there, gathering spam dust, and eventually, they’ll drop off. Having them follow you costs you nothing, and doesn’t change the value of the tweets you read, because if you’re not following them you won’t see their tweets and won’t be tempted to buy anything.

Make it harder, and spammers will get smarter. It’s the natural evolutionary process of spam. Twitter spam started by slithering along its belly in DMs, dragged its knuckles into the public timeline, and now stands upright while abusing hashtags and trending topics. Give spammers a captcha and double opt-in, and they’ll just write a little program during their break from emailing 419 letters to take care of the whole thing.

You tell ‘em. Except, if they’re blocked, you won’t really, because they won’t see this tweet. Not that it would matter, since their motto is “so much spam, so many people to spam.” No one said they were creative.

If you’re only going to interact with people you already know, you can IM, text, email, or call them. The beauty of twitter is meeting new people, learning new things, sharing new ideas. It doesn’t happen if you don’t let someone new into the mix.

Yup, this is that social networking thing that twitter is all about. Having no followers, and no one to talk to. If you have no followers, no one will care to read your tweets, because they won’t see them.

We hate spam. We hate spammers even more. Every spammer, every spammy tweet and DM wastes bandwidth, which overloads twitters servers and sends in the Fail Whale, or returns a 503 error, or just causes a blank page when we try to check the stream. We hate that.

Hopefully, as twitter grows an evolves, they will find ways to stem the tide of spam. Until then, since we can’t send a jolt of electricity through the intartubes to electrocute each one of them as they talk about their new Kindle or cash gifting scam, we’ll just keep ignoring them and spend our time and energy exchanging ideas with our buds. Like how to make that electrocution thing work.