Kill Filters In Twitter - The Time Has Come!
If you use Twitter for #hashtag conversations, you will inevitably have trolls or spammers start to use your #hashtag. The most annoying thing, in this case, is that there’s no way to keep them out of search columns in the current versions of Twitter clients such as Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck (Tweetdeck has the per-column filter, but they only give you one filter per column and dozens of filters would take up too much space if you needed to filter dozens of spammers/trolls). Fortunately, for me, I’m handy with software and I can filter out these things on my own, and I don’t see tweets from undesirables, ever, but many people aren’t this tech savvy. Mixero, a new Twitter client in private beta, looks like it will include some filtering.
Other than #hashtag discussions, is the case where a user may want to filter profanity or other strings of text, like “Perez H.” (and who wouldn’t filter that nonsense?), for example.
There are a couple options for developers of Twitter clients that would satisfy their users.
1. When your software pulls the tweets from the public timeline containing the #hashtag, check to see if that user has been blocked by the logged in user, and if so, your Twitter client would filter the tweets from that person so we wouldn’t see those tweets. I could foresee the case where someone wouldn’t want this implementation, but it would be quick and easy.
Or, the more desirable, but more complex…
2. Allow users to create multiple Kill Filters
What is a Kill Filter? A Kill Filter filters out/away all messages that comply with certain rules. You could, for instance, get rid 
of all messages written by someone named “@dork”, eliminate all posts from any poster including a web address like “http://dork.net”, or even more advanced filters using regular expressions. To the right is a screenshot of an NNTP client’s Kill Filter editor.
In some #hashtag streams, the trolls and spammers are so bad it renders those tags almost unusable due to the volume of trash they create.
Kill Filters were used in NNTP clients and IRC clients to deal with the same problem - this isn’t a new problem. It’s time the masses, and not just us more technically advanced users, had this functionality in Twitter clients…ASAP! Loic Le Mur, are you listening?
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