Don’t play Mobsterworld
September 16th, 2009
Spam always ruins something good. And right now, Mobsterworld is ruining many people’s Twitter experience – including Marie’s!
It starts with an invitation, apparently from a friend, sent through direct message, that takes you through to this site:
Note the tiny dark writing inviting you to read the terms of service. You’ll find that by scrolling down to the foot of the page:
This is utterly slimy behaviour. Written in small print at the bottom of the page in a colour that’s almost the same as the background.
And if you read these terms, you’ll note that this game automatically invites all your contacts, unless you specifically choose otherwise.
That’s not good. And because of the way they’ve set up their site, it’s not easy to spot.
Back to Marie: she got a message apparently from someone she knows and trusts, and clicked play. When the automatic direct messages started, she thought someone had spammed her, and changed her password. Several times.
Eventually Twitter decided in its automated wisdom that Marie had tried signing in too often, and she is now locked out of her account. Meanwhile, the mobster messages keep coming from her account.
(You can follow her in the meantime here)
Twitter needs to put these cretins out of business. Alone, us users can’t. This is where we need Twitter to step in and lead.
Twitter is great when it’s about real, human conversations. It fails when automatic messages take over.
We’d appreciate your feedback and comments about this issue. Thanks!
Update: Marie’s back! And we found out how to stop playing Mobsterworld – go to Settings -> Connections and remove the Mobster World Application. Thanks to this blog where I found those details.
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