At twiends one of our key goals is to try and maintain a high quality community. With up to a 1000 people signing up on some days this can be a very difficult thing to achieve. To help us in our mission we've introduced an automatic twitter approval process. When you link your twitter profile our system will go and have a good look at it. We look at various aspects of the account to try and determine its validity. Through experience we've learnt that accounts that show certain characteristics have a good chance of being fake or spam accounts. We've also learnt what to look for to identify good honest individual accounts. Twiends will automatically approve your account when it meets all the right criteria.

Here are a few things we look at:

Account Age – Twitter accounts that have just been created will have to wait a day or two before being approved. We do this to stop people from creating fake accounts on the site. If your account is brand new then please try logging in again tomorrow – there’s a good chance it will be approved then.

Profile Setup – Please make sure you have set up your twitter profile, especially your profile picture. People on twiends want to participate with other people, not anonymous new users. Take a minute to set up your profile on twitter and all will be good!

Tweet Activity – Twitter was built so that people can communicate. We look for a certain amount of tweet activity before approving an account. People want to follow others who make interesting tweets, not dormant or silent users.

Content - We do not permit content that is offensive to the broader twiends community. As such we cant approve your account if it features spam, adult-only content, violence, or hate-speech. In some cases your account may be rejected after it was initially approved if we find this type of content.

How to get approved:

Of course, we know that computers can never make perfect judgments, so there's always a remote chance that your twitter account may be incorrectly classified. If your account has not been approved yet then we'd like to offer you this advice to get it approved:

1) Take a good look at your twitter page and try and identify why it may have been rejected. Think about other fake accounts you've come across and whether your account is showing any of those characteristics.

2) Look for obvious stuff. Have you made a couple of tweets? Do you have a profile picture set? We obviously can't discuss the exact details of what our systems look for, as people would only just find a way to game it.

3) If your account looks good, and you are now tweeting happily with your friends and followers, wait a day or two and log in again. Our systems will take another look at your profile and will most likely approve it. You don’t need to relink it.

Here are some other important things to note:

- If your twitter account is rejected it will not affect the rest of your twiends experience. You can still add websites and facebook pages.

- If you repeatedly unlink and link multiple twitter accounts (in a brute-force fashion) your whole twiends account will be marked for review.

- If your account has been rejected due to inappropriate content then you will need to clean it up before applying for approval. 

Finally, please don't contact us or send us hate mail if your account is not approved. We have this process so that you and all other twiends members have a good experience on the site. We cannot approve the account for you manually if you contact us. As of this writing there are roughly 400 million twitter accounts in the world. Our analysis has shown roughly half of them to be dormant and fake accounts. Twitter does do a good job of removing them from the system over time, but unfortunately we have to deal with them after they’ve just been created.

Please note we will delete forum comments asking for an account to be approved. Please just use your twitter account normally for a day or two and it will be approved. This is the only way we can determine it is real.

Thanks