stochaztic

Not sure what caused the recent surge of interest in this old video I've seen from analytics and posts like this, but happy if people are enjoying it. The EarthBound romhacking scene is a small but fun one.

Yes, I ran the RoboRosewater account, which is where most people saw the concept I believe. I had a few documents with thousands of cards of output, went through them for any notable ones, and formatted and posted them. Probably 5-10% of the output made my personal cut for notability.

Due to both the second part, and that of the 7 accounts that we know this happened to, they messaged us just hours after tweeting that we weren't picking up their tweets, it doesn't sound like a match. The logged-in account also had no history with the accounts in question; we were actively in a call at the same time trying to figure out why that person could see tweets the others couldn't. I'd be happy to discuss details and specific tweets if you want.

Here's one way they do it that isn't documented or widely known: an account can get "searchbanned". While your account is searchbanned, your new tweets can't show up in other people's search results unless they follow you. There is no indication when you've been seachbanned or when the ban is lifted, and no documentation on its existence or how to get un-searchbanned. We know because we gather community input on a specific hashtag, and have gotten complaints that specific people's contributions weren't included, because they didn't show up in the search.

Interestingly, we had one person's account whose search results still showed searchbanned tweets. They would not show for that person if they logged out. We also could not find out why that person's account in particular could see them.

As the person who built the version that got popular enough for the Gartic company to build a competitor, I can say some developers are also the worst at having any design sense whatsoever, or adapting to competition ;).

I am morbidly curious if the simple website ads are sufficient--unlike myself and this author, they clearly have a lot more than just one person working part-time on their version, so presumably it brings the company money somehow.