Questions:<p>1. Who are you/What is the business? It's okay to answer this, no one's going to blame you for advertising. People seem to just be curious, it just seems critical to the story.<p>2. What were these gamers doing to your business? What specific things were they doing to circumvent your revenue model? I notice promotion codes were passed around in that chat you posted a picture of - how did you get that picture? Are they doing anything else to avoid paying for your service?<p>3. When did this happen/what is the timeframe for this? The tweet happened, and then after what period of time did your user influx happen? How long did it take before they became problematic?<p>4. Where was your interaction with them taking place? Email? Does your website have a tool for live interaction with your customers? What frequency were you interacting with the gamers vs. your "real" customers?<p>4. Why do you think they felt the need to treat your business so poorly? Do you think their general entitlement attitude is based on using generally large-scale products, products which don't get impacted quite as negatively by their behavior?<p>6. How are you dealing with this? You mention straight-up blocking these problem users, and in these comments you talk a bit about how you determine they're gamers, but could you elaborate on this? I think it's pretty clever that you're looking at bio data from Twitter, but are you doing anything else?
Story seems to lack...well a story. What was your business? How did you try to convert the gamer influx as paying customers? Did the gamers in question note they started to get blocked? etc.<p>Give some substance.
Thought I should point something out. Followgen seems to be a favorite-spam service.<p>Someone posted an article a few days ago about how to do this yourself and was slammed pretty hard for the technique (though I tried to defend it a bit): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6147210" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6147210</a><p>>Basically their attitude towards paying for my software was "fuck that". But obviously gamers are willing to spend on some software (like Steam).<p>I think you're conflating "gamers" with 13 year old boys who play too much xbox. They probably pirate all their PC software.<p>This was interesting, but I would have liked a little more detail. I didn't understand how they were abusing the system until the screenshot and then it was over. How much damage did they do initially? How effective was the blocking?
followgen.com uses an invalid security certificate.<p>The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided.<p>(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)