I had an idea a couple weeks ago and so I tweeted about it:

Nobody took up the challenge. So after finding a couple hours of my own, and wanting to get better with Backbone.js, I made it. (Wrote mostly with CoffeeScript because OMG CoffeeScript)

laterspam.org (note, this is on the most anemic, cheap, virtual machine Amazon offers, it’s not quite ready for heavy use so be gentle.)

It looks something like this.

In my experience there isn’t much of a spam problem on Twitter. Yes, it’s annoying to mention something about your iPad and have a spam bot or two tell you how you can get a free one just by “clicking this URL,” but I feel like that happens once or twice a month at most.

I normally just mark the thing as spam and move on. But the last time it happened I clicked over to see the account’s timeline and saw they had been at it for quite some time. Even tweeting innocuous tweets in between the mention spam which I guessed was to throw off Twitter’s own spam algorithms.

I didn’t make this because I am fed up with Twitter’s spam. I made it because after spending a few weeks now dealing with MLKSHK’s own spam problem I was curious about Twitter’s rate of discovery. For the most part I’m curious how long after I report spam that an account is deactivated. As I got deeper into my spam problem I found myself enjoying figuring out ways to deal with it, how quickly my algorithms caught and removed it, and mostly just because I‘m a sucker for seeing my code automatically take care of admin duties.

So I built laterspam.org because I thought people might get a little satisfaction out of marking something as spam and knowing Twitter did something about it.