O.K, I just went over the edge dealing with Twitter spam. Today, I am getting a bunch of Direct Messages from all the folks who got "phished" and did not protect their password. Then, there are the inappropriate followers. Today, I was going through my "followers" for the week and trying to eliminate inappropriate ones.

Some people ask why I care. Well, I have my twitter account set up to follow everyone back. Why? Because too many people ask, "Why don't you follow me?" I could only follow the people I know, but just because I don't know you does not mean I find you unimportant. Most of my Twitter-friends I never meet in person.

Since I have over 18,000 followers, there is no way I can check them all. Of course, that is what some people suggest, but basically that means I need to spend way too much time or pay someone to do it. I am not willing to do either. So, what I do is I watch the names when I get the email notification of new followers. For the vast majority of time, they are just names, and I don't worry about it. Sometimes the twitter avatar is obvious--and you block it.

Sometimes, they are questionable though--they might be something inappropriate or it might just be a name.

Let me give you an example. These folks followed me:

www.twitter.com/thebabesproject.

OK. Do I block or not?

I look at their avatar, and can't tell by that. But I'm not feeling too optimistic. So, I click the link and it works out fine. Turns out they are all about "coming alongside women, facing crisis pregnancy and offering positive alternatives to abortion, through adoption or parenting." Whew. They followed me because I was speaking somewhere on adoption.

But, I could give examples that, upon opening, were quire embarrassing (including once sorting through the names in public), but you get the point. So, I have to check, but I have made a covenant with my eyes, know that I should flee certain things, and am trying to figure out how to do it. It seems there is only one way to do that and that is to look at the profile. And, therein lies the problem--some background pictures are pretty graphic.

So, I tweeted and asked how others handle it.

I received this article. Good stuff.

Here is the advice I have received thus far:

Stop using Twitter.
OK. That was helpful. ;-)

Create a private profile.
Hard to do that when you have a lot of followers and have to approve them all. That is just not realistic for me, but it might be helpful for some.

Use Truetwit.
Truetwit is pretty irritating and everyone has to sign up for it to be validated. It is like those irritating email messages I get sometimes from people who want me to validate my identity--I don't do it so they never get my email, I guess.

Turn on email notifications and block the inappropriate ones from the email.
Yes, I do that. And, it works great 90% of the time. That is how I normally do it. I try to read every email just to be sure it is not obviously inappropriate.

Use one of the handheld options, they don't show the background.
Another good idea, but you can't always tell from the avatar and the username. It is similar to the email option. If avatar and username are offensive, you can block them.

Get your wife to go delete the inappropriate ones.
That one is problematic when you have 18,000 followers and don't know who they are. My wife is patient, but not that patient.

Tweetie, Twitterriffic, and apps like that do not open the full profile with the background pic.
Helpful, and a step in the right direction. But, it is the 10% that do not have an obvious pic or name.

Use Twitter Karma.
It does not seem to be able to load users with as many friends as my account. It timed out every time and eventually just said "error." It may work if you have fewer followers.

Install PowerTwitter for Firefox.
Just did that. Nice add on. But still no solution. Glad I added it though--I like it.

So, what did I do? Well, the suggestion that seems to work for me is TwitBlock. I ran its "search engine" on my followers and, whala, found dozens of inappropriate followers.
It said, "339 accounts worth examining, but please think before you block."

As best I can tell, it found ALL the spam (and a lot of non-spam) but I could tell from the description. It's free and easy to use.

So, for now, that's my plan. But I'd love to hear if you have any additional ideas! Leave your feedback in the comments.