Following the lead from seeing @trib (aka Stephen Collins) twitter policy, I figure I’d outline my policy on follows and bans.

First, I have four twitter accounts - @stephendann, @drstephendann, a classroom teaching account and @saschacat.  The last one is my cat’s twitter account. Blame @el_gato for the inspiration.

Primary Account Follow policy

@stephendann is my primary account, point of contact, and generally where I’m likely to respond.  My follow policy there goes like this - if I know you, you’re on. If you’re a friend of a friend, most definitely welcome.  If you drown my twitter page more than a few times in a week, um, you’re great and all, but I’ll leave you unfollowed so I can drop by and read the updates. I tend to follow people I know in RL, people from conferences (@Canberrabarcamp), or the tweets of a limited number of bloggers.

Primary Account Auto Ban Policy

• if you’re over 5000 follows and under 500 followers, you’re automatically considered for a ban list. Note: Exceptions are made for robots tweeting from other planets. That’s cool.
• If you’re over 10K follows, goodbye, you’re automatically banned.  You won’t notice.
• Anything that smells of corporate or automated follow is banned. If I could double kick ban and with boot to the face, I’d do that for any internet millionaire spam twitters.
• Ex-partners of bitter breakups are preemptively banned for both our sakes. Neither of us need us. (this is a proactive policy on most social media. Consider it a social firewalls)

Secondary account policies:

• I have reserved @drstephendann for use in livetweet events.  The test drive of the account happens at the APSA conference. If the account will be in use, I’ll let you know if you want to follow along for the event.  I’m going to experiment with the follow / not follow protocol
• @saschacat - The cat hasn’t been taught to use his twitter account yet.  I’m doing that later this month. The cat is mostly likely to follow other cats.  Four paw pride and all.
• The classroom account(s) won’t be following anyone who isn’t in the class when it’s in use.  If you’re not enrolled, you don’t need to know about it.

Mostly, if you’re worried I’d think you were a spam account, direct message me and it’ll be enough to prove humanity. If I have doubts, and you’ve messaged, I’ll message back.  If you’re an automated responder spam chat device, I’ll taunt you mercilessly until your little coded heart breaks (I have had YahooChat spam bots leave the conversation channel on me).