1. Go to http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/
2. Download and install ActivePerl

1. Right-click on this link and save the zip file to your Desktop: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/121222/zen-twitter-tools.zip
2. Extract the contents of the zip file using your favorite Zip archive utility: right-clicking in Windows XP & Vista, 7-zip, Win Zip, etc.

1. Open “My Computer”
2. Click on the zen-twitter-tools folder with your left mouse button
3. Holding down the mouse button, drag the folder over to your C: drive
4. Drop the folder on the C: drive

Note: If you’re using Vista or Windows 7, you may receive a “permission denied” message and have to create this folder first.

1. Click on the zen-twitter-tools directory in Windows Explorer
2. Right-click on the credentials.xml file
3. Click on Open With
4. Click on Notepad
5. Change the username and password to your own Twitter account credentials and select File | Save

1. Right-click on block_in_names.txt and open it in notepad
2. Right-click on block_in_tweets.txt and open it in notepad
3. Add words to block in block_in_names.txt
4. Add words and phrases to block in block_in_tweets.txt

Take great care and put much thought into this. The matching algorithm is very aggressive. In technical terms it uses case-insensitive, greedy matching. Take responsibilty for your actions: you are defining rules for a robot program to perform actions for you in your absence.

This means that if you say that you want to block Twitter names containing the word “an” it will also block “Anthony” and “Brian” and all your other friends with the consecutive letters “AN” or “An” or “aN” or “an” in their name. Britney will not block Br.it.ney or B.r.i.t.n.ey or B_r_t_n_y. If you block the word follow, you’ll block all your #Follow Friday friends.

This also means that if you want to block tweets spammers tweeting the phrase “100 followers in a day” that you will also block your friend who DM’s you saying “Don’t you hate those spam DM’s promising 100 followers in a day?”

It’s very difficult to match all possible permutations. In general, you want your block words and phrases to be as long and specific as possible to avoid blocking people who have done no wrong.

At this point, I hope you have some insight into 1) some of the difficulty of writing programs like this, 2) why Twitter needs to get involved, and 3) why a community-based system like Askimet could be more effective, 4) why you’ll want to monitor the agressive-block.log file to find people who have been blocked my mistake and unblock them.*

* This is that “more harm than good” stuff that I mentioned at the beginning.

This program runs from the CMD tool, also known as the Command Prompt or DOS Prompt.
1. Run CMD.exe: Search for CMD or Start | Run | CMD
2. Change directories to your zen-twitter-tools directory: cd \zen* or cd \zen-twitter-tools
3. Run the command: perl account_verify_credentials.pl

Example: C:\zen-twitter-tools>perl account_verify_credentials.pl

You entered your username and password incorrectly if you get this: Login failed. Verify credentials.xml
Edit the credentials.xml file and correct the problem.

You’re good to go if you get this: Successfully logged in as [Your Name]

1. Run the command: perl aggressive-block.pl

There is no output in the above screenshot, indicating that no one was blocked (there were no matches in the last ten tweets in your stream or in the last ten direct messages to you).

Here’s some fake examples on how it’ll look when the program blocks someone:

C:\zen-twitter-tools>perl aggressive-block.pl
You are now blocking @B.r.i.t.n.e.y: Spam Bot Britney
Type: Mention
Blocked @B.r.i.t.n.e.y
for having “B.r.i.t.n.e.y” in screen_name:
@B.r.i.t.n.e.y

You are now blocking @Br.it.ney: Fake Britney
Type: Direct Message
Blocked @Br.it.ney
for saying “Join my Mafia Family!” in this tweet
@YourGoToGuy Join my Mafia Family! http://fakeurl.com

If you specified text that matched your friends, you’ll need to manually unblock therm, either by 1) searching for their name in Twitter or by 2) running the block_destroy.pl program from the command line.

Note: The program logs all it’s blocks in the aggressive_block.log file, so review it often. You can also see the people you’ve blocked using the command: perl block_blocking.pl

This is looking more and more like a bad idea. Twitter Give Us The Tools to Save Ourselves From Pron Spam! Clone Askimet for Twitter!

Ah, this is hard part because it is different for every operating system, even better different Window Versions. So you’ll to google this for instructions for your particular operating system. On older versions of Windows, the scheduling program is called “at” as in run this program at this time. On Linux and Macs, the command is cron.

On newer versions of Windows, go into the Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Task Scheduler.

You want to schedule a job to run this command several times daily:
c:\perl\bin\perl.exe c:\zen-twitter-tools\aggressive_block.pl

You’ll have to experiment with the frequency, but the program only checks the last 10 tweets or DMs in your stream, so you’ll probably need to run it every 5-15 minutes. You can’t run it too frequently or you’ll run out of Twitter API tokens.

Only after creating this program, did I realize that ultimately this program is just a band-aid which will most likely cause more harm than good. I feel that Twitter should aggressive tackle this problem. Sign @gassho’s petition if you agree.

Why is this a problem? Read this.