Hi there!

TwitterSieve is a little application I built to help you automatically prevent spammers and bots from following you on Twitter. It is not affiliated with Obvious Corp. or any of the folks who work on Twitter.

The idea is pretty simple:

  1. Fill out the form below and receive a unique @twitter.manifestdensity.net email address
  2. Change your Twitter account settings to send "new follower" notifications to that email address
  3. Incoming followers will be automatically evaluated and, if they run afoul of the limit on total following or follower:following ratio that you set below, they'll be blocked
  4. You won't be receiving new follower emails anymore (my widdle server can't send that much mail), but you can keep tabs on the situation with a personalized RSS feed

Sound good? Then go ahead and fill out the form. After reading this, of course. Oh, and this.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can do so by emailing , by following @sbma44 or by leaving a comment on my blog.

Finally, be sure to visit some of the other folks who are making Twitter safe for democracy like Twitter Blacklist and Twitter Twerp Scan. If you know of others, please email me and let me know about them.

as in http://twitter.com/this-is-my-name
I know, I know...
Is the prospective follower following many more people than have bothered to follow him? If so, it's a good indication that he's a robot. The folks at Twitter Blacklist suggest a value of 5.0 for identifying spammers by this ratio, and that sounds about right to me.
What is the maximum number of people that a prospective follower can be following? In other words, if they're following a million people and then try to follow you, do you want to let them? If you don't want to use this setting, just set the value very high.

 Why yes, I have read the note about security and no, I would never dream of attempting to sue or otherwise take action against the creator of this service, since he has quite clearly disclaimed any responsibility for any data submitted here, and is doing all this out of the goodness of his heart.

A NOTE ABOUT SECURITY
In order to block users I need to keep track of your Twitter account credentials. This is dangerous! I've been doing web development for many years now and have taken all the steps I know of to prevent SQL injection and other nasty business. But I can't make any promises. Before you sign up for this service please, PLEASE change your Twitter password to something that doesn't also allow access to your email, bank account, or nuclear reactor control system. Again: I make no promises, cannot make any guarantees, and will not be held legally liable. If you're uncomfortable with this, please don't use this service. Submitting the above form indicates that you understand and agree to these terms.

A NOTE ABOUT FLAKINESS
If the script fails — and it does sometimes fail — the prospective follower won't be blocked (they should still show up in your personalized RSS feed). There are a bunch of reasons why it might fail, from network timeouts to Twitter going down. Due to a lack of control over Twitter and a lack of expertise at Ruby, there's not much I can do about this. If you're an experienced Rubyist and would like to look at my pathetically amateurish code, I'd love to hear your suggestions.