@Saurabh is suspended

Twitter. How can I live without it for a single day. Action, inaction, attention, ignorance, work, play, meetups, tweetups, its everywhere.


I went to Delhi and when I came back after about 4 days, I discovered that my twitter account @Saurabh has been suspended. Their support page says that they suspend an account if
  • Impersonation: You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others
  • Privacy: You may not publish or post other people's private and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, street address or Social Security/National Identity numbers, without their express authorization and permission.
  • Violence and Threats: You may not publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others.
  • Copyright: We will respond to clear and complete notices of alleged copyright infringement. Our copyright procedures are set forth in the Terms of Service.
  • Unlawful Use: You may not use our service for any unlawful purposes or for promotion of illegal activities.
I have been using twitter since 2007 and have about 1400+ followers and 8730 updates. As far as I can remember I have NOT impersonated anyone, breached privacy, threatened anyone, violated copyright or used it for unlawful purposes. Wonder why is twitter showering me with all the attention after two years of use?

Mails to twitter support remain unanswered as I write this blog post (I did get an automated response telling me things that I already know). My previous experience with twitter support has been really great (when I changed my handle from @s4ur4bh to @Saurabh). Wondering what is taking so long this time.

I really want my account back. And I dont know how to do it. May be a tweet to @biz, @ev and @twitter asking them to reconsider? Any volunteers for the same? Or any other tips maybe?

UPDATE (2009Jun 30)
Zishaan pointed that my website SaurabhGarg.com is reported as unsafe by Google. And may be that is what is causing Twitter to block my website. I logged into my twitter account and it DID point my website as "[ unsafe link ]".


For the moment I have changed the url to point to this blog. Hope this would help expedite the process of removing suspension.

And this brings me to another problem. How do I fix my website? Twitter is important but SaurabhGarg.com is more important!! It cant be marked as a site "that may harm your computer". More help?

5 comments:

Rajesh J Advani said...

If you use Firefox 3 to go to saurabhgarg.com you can click on the "Why" button which will give you details of why your site was blocked.

Specifically, there is malicious code from a .cn domain on the site.

Are you using a counter or some other services on the website? Sitemeter had some issues a while back, where they were allowing their sponsors to include JS on your web-site via the sitemeter scripts. Check your counters and any widgets you might have added.

I'll try to access the site from a protected machine to see if I can get more details.

Anonymous said...

The problem with saurabhgarg.com is an IFRAME attack - http://unmaskparasites.com/security-report/

This might help -
http://blog.unmaskparasites.com/2009/04/15/malicious-income-iframes-from-cn-domains/

This is very very popular attack these days and has affected many sites. [Even I'v faced it but could get out of it neatly]

Hope this helps !

Danish said...

i think its ridiculous that while it is becoming difficult to avoid bots, twitter should suspend legitimate user!
I visited ur site and cannot understand why Google marks it unsafe! Anyway,the only concern of the service providers should be spam,but that's unlikely in your case

SG said...

Rajesh, Rina, Danish,

Thanks a ton guys. You were great help. I dont know if twitter account would come back but I would clean the site for sure.

Only problem is that I would have to edit each page by hand. Time I realized importance of backups and archives.

Thanks again,
Saurabh

Rajesh J Advani said...

> Time I realized importance of backups and archives.

And of security! You need to ensure that your website isn't hacked again like this (I'm assuming that's what happened this time).

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