Is it an exploit or is it a valid command? I don't think we hacked anything, we just typed in some text that causes people to follow us, for all we know that's a new feature of twitter.
I highly doubt that. From what I'm reading on the Intarwebs, a LOT of people just couldn't resist playing with this exploit. If they truly banned everyone who did a force-follow with this hack I think they would lose a ton of people who are frankly only getting marginal value from Twitter.
I know that if I actually had to rebuild my followee list for "testing" this little hack out I would probably decide it wasn't worth the effort to start over again on Twitter.
This is such an odd bug. I guess it goes to show that nobody knows what strange code which should have been removed four years ago lurks in the heart of Twitter.
I wonder if they are going to be able to undo this. Do they have a two sided log of the follow process? If it's just one-sided, they may be able to fix the bug but not to reverse the damage.
I suspect the Summize technology is better than they let on, and they can just do a search for tweets starting with "accept." I doubt there are many legit ones like that.
Wondering if there will be repercussions for people using this, or if they are able to track it? They aren't able to keep a lot of logs due to the volume.
well, i can tell you right now that my followed and following lists were both just now wiped out, and using the accept bug now produces an internal server error.
edit: seems everyone is at 0/0, but the bug still produces an error for me.
> They aren't able to keep a lot of logs due to the volume.
That's pretty much untrue.
Anyway, I don't imagine it's too hard to grep the logs for the last day's worth of POST and 'accept .*' and undo all the follows constructed from that.
Heh, I used this a bunch of times. It did work just fine, I had all sorts of people following me who really shouldn't care about me. And now I have 0 followers.
They appear to be working on some sort of fix right now.
If you look at "following" lists, everything is showing up as zero for me right now, as in it shows that I'm not following anyone. All other users that I check are also showing that they aren't following anyone.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadI know that if I actually had to rebuild my followee list for "testing" this little hack out I would probably decide it wasn't worth the effort to start over again on Twitter.
eg. "accept snoopdog"
This is such an odd bug. I guess it goes to show that nobody knows what strange code which should have been removed four years ago lurks in the heart of Twitter.
Edit: Looks like this probably already happened.
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=accept+conanobrien
I'd had a legitimate 30ish followers, used this bug a few times, now 0.
edit: seems everyone is at 0/0, but the bug still produces an error for me.
That's pretty much untrue.
Anyway, I don't imagine it's too hard to grep the logs for the last day's worth of POST and 'accept .*' and undo all the follows constructed from that.
Somebody is working late tonight.
Thought I could sell it afterwards or something. lol
(horrible ayn rand joke)
If you look at "following" lists, everything is showing up as zero for me right now, as in it shows that I'm not following anyone. All other users that I check are also showing that they aren't following anyone.