The Twitter Blacklist And Another Greasemonkey Script

If you, like me, use twitter on a regular basis, you maybe like this one.

There's a new great site around called The Twitter Blacklist. It was created by Earle Martin and intends to gather a list of all the spammers and morons who either try to use the service to promote their nonsense products/websites or simply just are attention addicts. In both cases, these people are blindly following as much other people as they can. The best indicator to see whether someone is a twitter spammer or not, is the ratio between how many people they follow and how many follow them.

1:5 = twittercaster, 1:2 = notable, 1:1 socially healthy, 2:1 newbie or social climber, 5:1 twitter spammer. - Evan Podromou

Since a couple of days the twitter blacklist has a simple, yet nice API which allows you to check if a certain user is listed or not. This is where Greasemonkey enters the game .

I wrote a tiny Greasemonkey script which looks up the username of the visited twitter profile and displays a nice warning message at the top of the page if it's listed at the twitter blacklist.

Blocking the user then, is just one click away .

I made the script available at the userscript website, you can fetch it here.

I hope this also finds its way into some of the available twitter clients. If the twitter blacklist grows (which it does almost daily) it will make twitter a even nicer place to stay.

And last not least: If you know other twitter spammers which aren't listed at the twitter blacklist yet, remember to report them (details about how you can report a spammer can be found at http://twitterblacklist.com).