Ask HN: TWASE - Open Source or something else?

4 points by jchivers 14 years ago | 4 comments

Three years ago I built an anti-spam engine for Twitter - http://twase.com

I've not spent much time maintaining it since, and I have around 3 active users today.

My current plan is to take the source and db schema and dump it on GitHub, but to get it up + running on your own server(s) isn't easy as it's got quite a complex backend.

However, spammers/bots are still rife on Twitter and I can't help thinking that Twitter clients and/or 3rd party developers who integrate with Twitter could license it from me (to pay for my time maintaining it) and I could further extend it, maybe resulting in less annoying spam.

What do you think?

PdV 14 years ago |

Hi James :)

I guess it would depend on what do you want to do with it.

If you want people to license it from you - simply dropping it at GH will not get you more $ from the licenses. You should rather try to somehow promote the service.

I understand that the idea of dropping it on GH is two-sided. On one side try to keep alive it in one way on another and on the other side, try to get some more engineers involved on it. Again, simply dropping it on GH will probably not change much.

Maybe a good idea would be to look around different OS projects and try to simplify twase and include the technology in some OS projects that could benefit from it?

In addition to that you could request a IP/recognition note and a reference for commercial requests on adaptation of the code to specific needs?

Cheers :)

jchivers 14 years ago |

Hey Andrzej, thanks for the feedback - sounds very logical. You're right - dropping it on GitHub will not make any $'s, but it might enable one or two other developers to get some value from it, and if I'm honest, that's ultimately what I want.

I'm not worried about making money from it per se - but would be happy to keep it maintained, updated and bug fixed if I could derive some nominal fee from it (I guess licensing).

I designed it to be extremely modular, so developers could add new spam checks and tune it to their needs with a minimum of fuss - it just might take some time to get all the components installed + running (I could create an install script methinks).

Thanks again!

jchivers 14 years ago |

Thanks pepijndevos. twitblock is a good anti-spam tool for users, but it's not an API like TWASE, so 3rd parties cannot integrate as easily.

I agree though that basic anti-spam filtering that'll catch the majority of spammer accounts is fairly basic, but it's still something you'd have to maintain and keep up with (as it's a somewhat moving target).

pepijndevos 14 years ago |

I know of at least 2 other Twitter spam filters, one of them: http://twitblock.org/

Maybe some Twitter client will license it, but I doubt it. It's not that hard to get basic anti-spam running, I've done it myself once.

One thing I'd still like to try is using Akismet.