Service tweaks

To be honest, as of late I haven't really logged into the FollowWatch account or done much with it the past few weeks because of stressing over getting my taxes done. Well tax day has come and gone, so that's a burden off my back.

Before I mention the tweaks, I wanted to talk about invites for a quick moment. If you're queued for an invite, nothing's going to happen to your place on the queue. You won't be removed. You only run the risk of being removed from the queue if you unfollow the page. Queued users are deleted from the front of the list as invites are sent out to those individuals. When a block of X (could be any amount) invites are being handed out, it automatically goes down the list of people in the queue in order they joined the queue. It generates that person's unique invite, deletes them out of the queue, and attempts to send the invite. DMs can't be sent to people who don't follow you, so if you're not following, that invite fails to send. If that invite fails to send, it's deleted and the process moves on to the next person in the queue until X invites are successfully sent. What this also means is, following/unfollowing/following again won't affect your position in the queue UNLESS the attempt to invite you already came by.

And most importantly, the big reason invites are delayed, twitter's moving way too slow these days, don't want to break the app for the people already signed up.

Regarding the tweaks, made some adjustments to report processing. Most users report more than once a day, but some keep it once a day and stick with the defaulted 12 am eastern report hour as their single hour. Still though, even for most users, their followers don't change in the hundreds daily. But there are a couple users of the application who do. And most of their changes are adds not drops. Leveraging their follower information for their reports reduces the number of calls to twitter which brings speed improvements to the reporting process when there are a lot more users to process reports for in a particular hour. It also increases capacity for number of people that I can allow access into the application. So some more invites should be coming soon.

The other adjustment corrected a bug. Well, not so much a bug, but a nature of the design of the system. After reports are generated, the follow changes recorded (adds/drops) gets deleted from the system. The "bug" occurs when twitter's running sluggish and causes one hour to overlap another, where changes recorded for the current hour were deleting with the changes recorded for the previous hour. Changes have been made to eliminate that conflict.

Mikeyy Worm

Opened up a test page to check all the vulnerable points to spread the Mikeyy worm (intentionally getting my page affected by it). What I found were:

1. twitter.com/infecteduser
2. twitter.com/infecteduser/followers
3. twitter.com/infecteduser/friends
4. twitter.com/infecteduser/status/any-status-id
5. twitter.com/yourpage/followers?page=any-page (if you are followed by an infected user on that page, with or without "?page=number")
6. twitter.com/yourpage/friends?page=any-page (if you are following an infected user on that page, with or without "?page=number")
And if you are already infected and trying to fix it
7. twitter.com/account/settings

From what I've gathered, twitter appears to have stopped the worm from spreading from points: 1, 5, 6.

2, 3, 4, 7 appear to still be vulnerable.

Unfortunately I was not able to test to see if there were any other points for this worm to spread because Twitter closed the test account I created (for strange activity no less).

As I've posted on both my personal account and the followwatch account, this thing spreads through user's real name. So if you do become infected, you should turn off javascript (so that you won't reinfect on #7 in the list) and update your real name field. Additionally it changes your More Info URL, makes your profile public (unchecks Protect My Updates), and changes your background color to "Mikeyy". To remedy the last one, go to http://twitter.com/account/profile_settings and go into "Change design colors"

This is all the information I have available to assist everyone. Must get some rest right now but hope this information helps.

Login Errors

Some people may have been getting "Invalid Password" errors incorrectly. This issue has been resolved. The twitter library used to verify your credentials used a POST request (i.e. think submitting a web form) instead of a GET request (i.e. think visiting a web page directly) to the verification page. Twitter made updates on Wednesday which prevented requests requiring GET format working under POST format. I wasn't aware the library was using the wrong format.

FW Updates

As of late I haven't done much with FollowWatch. Since the initial 1000 invites ran out, there's been a growing list of people waiting to use the service. A few days into the queue, 200 invites were sent, and a few days later 100 more invites were sent. Given Twitter's recent growing pains, it makes more sense to hold off on giving out more invites as Twitter's stability corresponds with the application's ability to do its job and simply put less users on our end while Twitter works their issues out leads to better stability for Twitter and consequently, better stability for the app.

Today saw some intermittent issues with updates getting sent out. What appears to be the issue either returning an empty or incomplete list of your followers during one stat run and giving the right stats on another stat run. This filled the database with changes like duplicate added/lost followers as well as reporting followers you already had as added followers. Cleared out all that information, and not sure if the API is acting correctly now or still giving trouble.

I read a tweet regarding the invite system that states the following: "Artificial scarcity to improve perceived authority?" First, scarcity is definitely not artificial. We can only query the user information of about 20,000 users in an hour. That means, 20,000 unique names can be looked up that get listed in the gained/dropped column. But even that's not completely true because of Twitter's speed & load issues, which make looking up 4,000 names more often than not take as long as 30 minutes to process. There are real limitations to keep the service flowing and opening the flood gates would quickly debilitate it and make it as unreliable to those using it as Qwitter turned out to be. Secondly, there is no attempt to be perceived as an authority of any sort on follower stats. Whipping up a service of similar fashion to this one shouldn't pose difficult for anyone. It took me a matter of 5 days from concept to site launch, may take you even less.

Finally I don't appreciate people berating me with negative comments because they haven't received an invite yet. This is an add-on service to twitter provided by me as a personal courtesy. This is a hobby not business. And the more you make it feel like business, the more I think about closing the whole queue process off and just inviting people at whim from my personal account.

I also wanted to note: changing your username disrupts your stats if you're already registered, and changing your username before you get an invite from the queue will end up getting you bumped off the queue when your invite is delivered/attempts to get sent out.

Server E-mail Issues

Whenever you follow @followwatch, the e-mail gets received by a program which automatically follows you back and sends you an invite (or puts you on the queue and informs you you're on the queue). Unfortunately sometime last night, from the logs approximately 10:15 pm Eastern US, the mail server stopped accepting mail. This is an issue that I'm investigating. I mention this just to say that anyone who followed the page after the time e-mails stopped getting in was not put in the queue. Once the issue is resolved you will be put on the queue, so don't worry about that. I just wanted to keep everyone informed about that.

On a side note, 100 more invites were sent out last night.