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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

do NOT automatically tweet this "Join my crew in Starfleet Commander! http://bit.ly/3SKmIA #starfleet" without asking me.

ffs. That's a lame move. If you need to rely on auto-spamming, something is amiss.

Why would you think people would be ok with it tweeting using your account without asking you first?

I hesitated before allowing access, and actually changed to using a different test twitter account before I did - good job too.

Is twitter actually integral to the game? Or just a cheap spammy way to 'go viral'?

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"do NOT automatically tweet this "Join my crew in Starfleet Commander! http://bit.ly/3SKmIA #starfleet" without asking me.

ffs. That's a lame move. If you need to rely on auto-spamming, something is amiss."

When Twitter Oauth said the app would have the power to consume AND update my stream, I said "Normally I'd punt here, but I'm sure Matt wouldn't be the kinda guy who would push stuff to my Twitterstream without some sort of confirmation."

Dealbreaker. Deleted the tweet and stopped looking at the app as soon as my co-founders phone buzzed with my "tweet".

Social gaming has the massive advantage that users that like your product will tell their friends about you. And yet auto-spam like this leaves a bad taste in the mouth and probably does more harm than good.

Oh, so it is one of those games, I'm glad I didn't click the button...

Yeah, we have a way to turn them off, but are working on possibly modifying the startup flow to be more like Spymaster's current one where it asks you before you signup. Sorry if we came off as too spammy. We'll fix it somehow, just trying to find the best way.

Twitter is useful, it's not entirely integral yet. It will be though as we change things to for instance DM you when you're getting attacked, uses tweets for the internal messaging system, etc.

It's a port of a Facebook app that's doing well, the reason we posted this here but did not for the FB app is that we're not as familiar with Twitter as a lot of people here probably are, and some things change in translation.

>> "possibly modifying the startup flow to be more like Spymaster's current one where it asks you before you signup."

eg 'Is it ok if I send a spam tweet out to try and get some more traffic?'

Good luck with that.

Did you even try the signup process out yourselves before you posted here? :/

AFAIK auto-spam like this is impossible on facebook, where every post to your wall etc must be allowed or denied. Much better.

Well its common to Twitter games, and when I asked Twitter for guidelines that was not one of the things they said to avoid. (Automatically DMing was, for instance.)

That's your defense? Other people are doing it too?

Why not do some popups, popunders, may as well ask for email login and spam the hell out of all their contacts as well, some websites do that.

Not so much a defense, just the rationale behind it. It seems like most people who play Twitter games don't mind, and thus don't consider it spam.

But a better approach (that we'll probably have live within the hour) would be to have it able to be opted out of beforehand. That way people like yourself who might consider it spam can simply not have it, but still play the game.

A big issue is it doesn't SAY that's what your going to do.... or that you've done it!

that's dishonest

Yeah, we're fixing that.

we're not as familiar with Twitter as a lot of people here probably are

Well, here's the 5 second description of Twitter from a guy who sells bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers to probably the only person here who knows less about it than him: when somebody tweets, it interrupts the day of their friends and coworkers. Their friends and coworkers signed up to be interrupted, because they trusted that friend to not waste their time. If that friend wastes their time, they'd revoke the permission and trust that friend less.

You'll pointedly notice the distinct lack of "I think I'm going to ring a few hundred phones on a different continent three times in ten minutes as a consequence of playing a 4X game."

How many people get SMSed every tweet? Or do you just mean DMs. I know I quickly turned off all SMSes other than DMs, but have no idea if that is typical Twitter behavior.

I'd like to know too. All I know is that twitter is not even available via SMS in my country and I imagine a lot of others too but I can't find a list anywhere.

You seem to be totally missing the point here.

Don't spam. Simple. Don't do it.

That's not simple at all. One man's spam is another man's ham. In games where these things are asked for specifically before playing, many people leave them on.

In our game you can turn them off on the options page. We don't make that clear enough, and there's one Tweet that cannot be prevented. We're fixing that.

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