I believe the 'Accept' is used when you are in private mode and you get notice that someone wants to follow you. So they don't check if the user is in the request queue. Bad bad programmer.
It's not just a false display, either; it's a real follow: I tried it against my main account using a secondary account, posted a tweet, and then checked Twitterrific on my main account. The new tweet was right there at the top.
Yeah, block them, then they won't be able to follow you. Although if your timeline is not private they can still read your feed at twitter.com/yourname
Good lord, how would twitter recover from that? Possibly by undoing follow's between the moment this bug has surfaced and the moment they suspend following. Meanwhile they'll loose a huge number of legitimate follow request. Terrible stuff.
Or find all statuses that have the pattern of "accept <valid_username>" and then removing <poster> from the <valid_username>'s followers.
That's not the hard part.
The hard part is that it seems that twitter wasn't checking accept messages to see if they were actually requests behind them or if the accepting user is actually a restricted account. So now they have to implement a mechanism that associates follow requests with follow acceptance.
Currently, the exchange is probably something like this behind the scenes:
me: @restrictedUserIWantToFollow lemme follow you
them: accept guyWhoWantsToFollowMe
Everything simply implemented as twitter messages to facilitate cell phone usage. However, the accept message just assumes that there is a valid request being made and adds them to your followers.
That's quite funny. I just wanted to try this out and received an internal server error. Now all my followers are gone nor am I still following anyone. Twitter strikes back!
looks like they are getting on top of it, it is on mashable, and i now have 0 followers and am following 0. nice fun, best pr would be to clean it up, and publish who did what and when (hahah)
DO NOT DO IT! I just attempted an Accept BillGates and both my "followers" and "following" are reset to zero. this better be a bug. http://twitter.com/faramarzhashemi
Actually, I didn't do it .... and everything is set to 0's on my profile as well. Either it's part of their clean-up, or their attempts to fix this accidentally wiped everybody back to zero.
49 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadHow do you find it?
wow.
That's not the hard part.
The hard part is that it seems that twitter wasn't checking accept messages to see if they were actually requests behind them or if the accepting user is actually a restricted account. So now they have to implement a mechanism that associates follow requests with follow acceptance.
Currently, the exchange is probably something like this behind the scenes: me: @restrictedUserIWantToFollow lemme follow you them: accept guyWhoWantsToFollowMe Everything simply implemented as twitter messages to facilitate cell phone usage. However, the accept message just assumes that there is a valid request being made and adds them to your followers.
Assumption: the mother of all foul-ups.
http://twitter.com/borakrc