Twitter - locked account (sorry, don't know where else to ask for help)

[Silmelin]

I finally decided to join Twitter, for the LOTRO Anniversary and nothing else, but a few seconds after creating an account I got this:

Your account has been locked.

What happened?
Your account appears to have exhibited automated behavior that violates the Twitter Rules. To unlock your account, please complete the steps below and confirm that you are the valid account owner.
What you can do:
To unlock your account, you must do the following:
* Verify your phone number

This to me sounds like they are lying about the "exhibited automated behavior" and are just out to get a phone number from me. The problem is I don't have a phone number to give them and I didn't give them one while registering either so they can't confirm that I'm the valid owner by using that...

I tried checking their help section but it just said to give them a phone number, and that they had sent an email with the same info but they haven't.


I also tried to register to Twitch, but when I click register and fill out my info in the pop-up, it turns white and then nothing happens. I tried with both Firefox and IE

I really hope there won't be anything Anniversary-related you need to register to these places to be part of because they obviously don't want me there

[Faerilea]

Funny that. The exact same thing happened to me yesterday when I tried to make a second account. I was in the process of making a tweet and then it locked my account for "automated behavior". I also was not going to type my phone number. Very fishy

Hopefully it just bugged out.

[Nosdracir]

Not adding a phone number is being "detected" as automated behavior, unfortunately. Quite they want to text a code to the phone to verify that you are a real person and not a 'bot.

Twitter has a lot of problems with automated account creation from companies that sell followers, likes, retweets, etc..

You can use Twitter in "read/only" mode from a browser. For example, the URL: https://twitter.com/lotro will display messages from SSG about LOTRO. I use this to check for server down, servers up, shutdown warning, etc. messages without logging in.

[Silmelin]

Ah! Well, that's sad. I have been using it as read only up to now, but I'm tired of not being able to reply. I ended up sending in a message (though it took me a while to figure out how) to Twitter and it said that they will reply in a few days. Hopefully they can tell from that message that I'm a real person xD

[Cordovan]

I've heard of this happening to folks on Twitter. While I can't really speak for Twitter (obviously), based on anecdotal claims, it may be related to retweeting a bunch of stuff prior to posting? I know adult site bots have a tendency to do that. You can always use a Google Voice number or something if you need to.

But to answer the LOTRO-related bit: While we might do giveaways on social media, we'll be doing them in numerous locations, and will not be doing a "follow us on Twitter and get X"-style giveaway.

[Silmelin]

I've heard of this happening to folks on Twitter. While I can't really speak for Twitter (obviously), based on anecdotal claims, it may be related to retweeting a bunch of stuff prior to posting? I know adult site bots have a tendency to do that. You can always use a Google Voice number or something if you need to.

But to answer the LOTRO-related bit: While we might do giveaways on social media, we'll be doing them in numerous locations, and will not be doing a "follow us on Twitter and get X"-style giveaway.

Thank you for the reply! I finally managed to get Twitch sort of working (crashed my browser on and off) so I could take part in the Anniversary and chat at least somewhere

Google Voice number? Never heard of that before, so I'll have to look it up =) Google doesn't usually like me though, they tell me that to sign up for an email or Youtube or to use Googledocs they need a phone number XD


About Twitter, I'll write here what I did and what happened in case someone else gets their account locked right after account creation like happened to me =)

After sending a message to their support I waited a few days and a reply appeared. I thought it was their real reply since it took a while for it to arrive (it was just an an automated reply though). It told me the same as their support page, which was to give them a phone number. I tried to reply but got the auto-answer that my ticket had been closed.
It turned out that they don't read the support tickets, they have something that checks them automatically and sends out a reply depending on what you pick from the list of problems, so if you pick that your account has been locked, you'll get an automatic reply telling you to give them a phone number, BUT at the bottom of the mail it tells you that if that doesn't work you can contact them.
I replied to the mail right away, repeating my problem, and this message they read I had to wait quite a while, but now I have had my account activated again, no phone number needed, and I got an apology too =)

Going to follow LOTRO on Twitter as soon as I have time to figure out how Twitter works (busy gathering Anniversary Tokens today)