I’m using my blog for the FAQ because, well its just easier to edit and allows for comments.  You can comment here or @twittfilter.

.. “wait, what is TwittFilter?” Oh, then you should go here first.

Ok, a few things up front though. Twittfilter was something I wrote for myself over a year ago. Bit by bit I would allow friends on the system and bit by bit I added functions that I needed or wanted.  A few months back, I decided to make this a normal product and allow others on the system.  As  you can imagine, there are many messages and functions that work for me but may not make sense to others.  I tried to make this as user friendly as I could, and still working on it, but clearly, there is a way to go.

Also, I do not dev for IE, so UI issues with IE are when I can catch them. I will not hold back a feature just because IE does not play nice.

FAQ

Note: as a user, you only get 150 calls to twitter per hour.  If you have other twitter apps running, and have just finished a heavy ‘tweeting’ session, you may be out of ‘tweets’.  Give it a rest for an hour and try again.

I cannot Sign in/ Sign up:

I am moving everything to OAuth.  So if you find any screens that ask for username and password, then its part of the old system and needs to be removed.  Please let me know.

I cannot signout using IE:

Sigh.  Yes, IE is troublesome at times.  Sometimes it grabs cookies and just does not want to let go.  There is a program I use called IECookieView (here is the link) to remove cookies one at a time in IE.  To use, close all copies of IE you have running, open this program and select twittfilter.com.  Press the ‘delete’ key on your keyboard and reopen IE.  You still have all your cookies with exception to twittfilter.  I’ve done this a few times and it works every time.  I’m still trying to find a better solution, but this is a known problem with IE and not that easy to solve.

I just signed up for twittfilters email service, friendfilter.. Now what?

A typical cycle is about 12-24 hours.  So give it a day.  Also, if you do not have a new follower, or if your new follower scores below a zero, which can happen, you will not see an email.  Also, each time you go to your address book, I automatically check for new followers.  If I find a new follower, I log it and thus, that new follower will not show up in your email.  I may put a check mark in the future to NOT check for new followers to insure all new followers go through the email system.  Also, I’m planning on building a system that will allow you to set your own scoring rules so that you can test new followers yourself.  As you can imagine, this will be a large chunk of work, so it may be summer till we see that. (well, sooner then I thought).  A rough version is running.  Go to your settings-edit account (upper right) and then select tune my scoring system. Let me know how it works for you.  (there is one known bug, if you have someone in your database that was rejected by twitter, or is blocked, it will kill the process.  working on that).

I’m getting way too many emails:

You can set the level at which you get emails from friendfiilter. By default, you are set to get emails from all new followers unless they are below a score of 0. yes this can happen, normally (but not always) its spam. To change  your settings, go to twittfilter.com -> ‘Edit account and options’ and select the min score (stars) required before you get an email.  I would recommend you start with 3 stars and go from there.  You can also tweek your scoring to make it harder to get a high score.

How do I unsubscribe?

Go to twittfilter.com -> ‘Edit account and options’ and select ‘off’ for both email services.  This will delete you from the email system. Twittfilter uses cache to login, so it does not store your password.

What is the difference between Score and Stars?  What do they mean?

Score is how I internally refer to rating for a follower. Score and Stars are the same things. When I first started putting a UI together, I though it would be fun to use stars or grades (A -F) Unfortunately, I think stars are confusing people, especially since the default is 0 stars (score of 0).  When I get a change, I’m going to change score to a grading system, A to F.  I think that is universally understood.  I hope.  It will be odd to see a grade E though. 🙂

Do you have an iphone version?  What about BlackBerry or other mobile devices?

Yes, I have an iphone version running most of the features that are on the live site.  You can access it by FIRST logging in via the normal site and THEN going to twittfilter.com/mobile. In time, I will automate this process. The HTML/AJAX code should work on the blackberry, but for some reason, I am not getting cookies from the blackberry device. I do not have a blackberry, nor is there a good BB web browser emulator out there, so a BB version will have to wait till I get my hands on one. I have not tested with Andriod yet, but it should work. Again, I do not have one, so I cannot test it.

Whats the story with OAuth?

Its taking me a bit of time to rewrite all of my tools (and there a number of them) to use OAuth.  I’m getting to it as I can.