TweetSuite Plugin – Tweetback Spam

Posted in Plugins, Wordpress How To

I have been very frustrated lately.

One thing that frustrates me is when I’m working on a project and it’s not going as fast as I would like it to do.

There are other things that frustrate me as well.

Today, my frustration has been with a plug-in.  I installed Tweetsuite a while back. One of the features that I like about it is that it automatically posts my new blog post to Twitter. What I don’t like about it is that it inserts a number of random Tweet backs.You might not see these in your WordPress blog but when you go and have a look at your database you might be shocked like me to find 36,000 tweetbacks in there clogging up space in your database. That just makes a slower blog for you.  Not only that, but the tweet backs are more spam and are not relevant to my posts which would not make a good experience for a visitor.

So I spent the morning trying to figure out how to get rid of the tweetsuite tweetback spam.   First stop, of course, is the developer’s blog and the wordpress forums.   No joy there.  Everyone else has the same problem and they are still waiting for an answer from the plugin developer.   Time to figure it out myself.

Out of all the things that I do fixing up stuff is the thing that I hate the most. I find it frustrating, annoying and time-consuming. The only thing that eases the pain is that I reward myself with chocolate after any sort of fix up operation :)

I don’t profess to know anything much about databases but I knew that’s where the tweetback spam lived so I would have to go in there and kill it off.  If you have another better method for doing this let me know.  My method just involved pressing buttons to see what worked :)

First of all, I deactivated the tweetsuite plug-in. I then went to PHP My Admin and located the table for WP — Tweet backs. I initially thought that if I emptied the table by deleting the entries (30 rows at a time) that would be the best solution.   That thought was short lived when I realized there  were 36,000 entries. So, on to Plan B.   My clever thought for plan B was to empty the table and so that’s what I did.  Problem was that although it emptied the table those pesky tweetbacks still displayed on the site.   So, finally the light dawned and I went back to PHP My Admin and dropped the table. Now the Tweet backs spam has all disappeared from my blog and the database has been cleaned up.

I still like Tweet suite and will keep using it, but this time on activation I haven’t inserted the option for  Tweet backs.

Now for coffee and a chocolate biscuit.  I feel like I have earned it :)

Have fun with WP :)