Hey everyone. You may have noticed that Nikki & I have been having some troubles with another twitter user recently. Not sure if you know who (it’s not hard to find out if you really care) but I’m not going to mention her name on here. The point of this post is to defend our intentions both with this site and with our twitter accounts @RescueAnimals & @LastChancePets. It started several weeks ago when I started seeing people tweeting about animals on urgent lists & realizing how it could really make a difference in getting them rescued. I began by passing on the info on @RescueAnimals but I was worried that those tweets would get lost amongst all the others I pass on so I came up with the idea to create @LastChancePets which would focus solely on posting urgent lists from shelters. I found my information from several sources but there was someone that I tweeted more often. Sometimes I did the typical RT @username format but as I got into it more I found that there was a format that I thought worked best for the animals. I always like my urgent list tweets to read like this: “Location – Animals Needing Rescue by This Date – link – More Info If Room – via @username” This is how I retweeted this person & everyone else’s. There were no problems for awhile. I even got a #followfriday from this person twice. Then on June 20th I tried to ask this user a question about a dog in California because there had been no contact information in her post and Nikki & I really wanted to know what had happened to her. That’s when I found out that this user had blocked @LastChancePets. I asked her why & got a snippy response about stealing her tweets & changing them. I tried to explain to her that I give her credit at the end of the tweets & that due to the constraints of 140 chars I had to reword some parts but she never responded to me.

Through my other account I was able to see that she had been complaining that someone had stolen her tweets & was passing them off as their own for personal gain, not for the animals. Shocked & hurt, I tweeted about it without saying who it was and people told me not to worry so I tried to let it go. Still, worried about Annie (CA dog) Nikki tried to ask her about it & so did another twitter user completely unrelated to us. To this day, we still have no idea if that beautiful boxer baby made it or not. After that I heard absolutely nothing from this person. I could not retweet her very easily anymore since I was blocked but there is another great twitter user, @TheArtofKaren, who RTs her quite often so I began RTing her. Now I’m going to be completely honest: because this person had been so rude to me, I didn’t want to give her any more exposure. But just because I had a problem with HER, it didn’t meant that I wanted the ANIMALS to suffer. I figured the more people that followed her, the more animals that could be saved. That’s how I see wanting to get more followers on both my accounts too. It’s not about me, I want to help more animals. So I continued to stick her name at the end of those tweets (via @TheArtofKaren @user). Now, since @LastChancePets still has relatively few followers, I’ve been RTing everything from there on @RescueAnimals too. Because there’s not enough room in the 140 characters, I remove that user’s name because I figure people can trace the tweet backwards to find where it comes from if they want to. I figure, as do many other animal lovers I’ve seen, that the most important part of the message is the animals, not the person. Everything was going so well with @LastChancePets that I decided to ask others if they wanted to run their own accounts for their states. We now have @LastChanceCT for Connecticut and @LastChanceCA for California! I was so happy because there are so many people out there that care about animals and now more people can get targeted tweets. Anyway, I figured everything was fine until I woke up this morning and saw that @LastChanceCT had sent me a message asking what that message from this particular user meant. I told her that I couldn’t see anything from them because we were blocked so she sent it to me, as well as her response.

Now I’m not sure if I should be flattered or not, but there is NO way that I could run 6 twitter accounts (really, it should be 7 since she doesn’t know my personal account). @RescueAnimals & @LastChancePets are both mine. I’ve never hidden this. @Snailbird & @DesignCoyote are Nikki’s. We’ve never hid that either. The other two are run by two completely separate people who are amazing & volunteered their time to do what they can to save animals. Now I had taken the insults directed at me & Nikki but I got upset when she decided to go attack those two wonderful women. So I got on my twitter and pleaded for someone to reason with this person. We also tried to go see if this user had said more things about us and after finding a way through her twitwall, we found that she had actually been saying angry things to me at other times since the first time. Now I have no way to prove it to you, but I swear that those @replies to me never showed up in my TweetDeck or the Seesmic on Nikki’s computer. I assume it’s because we were blocked. What she was saying was just so completely false and insulting that I can’t imagine where she came up with any of it.

I must say, though, that I was so relieved to see that two people had come to my defense. That to me proves that most people can see that what we are doing is for the animals, not ourselves.

Still, I’d like to address some of the most serious accusations. First off, I don’t steal tweets. Go through all of my accounts. You can see that I RT often and that whether the credit is at the beginning or end, it’s there! Now I know that there have been a few times that I’ve forgotten to give credit & if I catch it, I post another tweet to the effect of “Last tweet was from @username, sorry”. I know there’s probably times where I’ve forgotten to do that, or didn’t notice that I didn’t put their name but out of the thousands of tweets I’ve done, obviously that’s just a mistake that’s bound to happen. That is not at all the stealing that I’ve been accused of. We have also NEVER claimed to be a non-profit. Ever! And we’re not using our tweets to raise money to buy an iPhone!

We’ve only ever asked for donations twice – first for the puppy & kittens we found in the road a couple weeks ago & now to help pay vet bills for Denver, the dog rescued from euthanasia in WI. I didn’t ask people to pay MY vet bills, I asked for help with the strays we saved. We raised $80 for our 3 rescues (only half the vet bill) and none so far for Denver. Again, we never told anyone that we were a charity! In fact, if you go to our donations page, you can see that the place where was ask for donations to help us run this site (which we do in our spare time & have not been paid a cent for) is off to the side. Why? Because that’s not the purpose of this site! We want to save animals, pure and simple. Next, I’m glad that this person is so self-centered that they think the only thing I RT is her but actually I’ve been RTing both the new Last Chance accounts, find my own stuff from Coweta Co. GA, and post things that people have asked me to – such as Denver (who would be DEAD if we only stole her tweets), a golden retriever that someone asked us to spread the word about by contacting us on our site and from emails sent to me by people like Tammara from @CanineHopeResQ. She’s right, I don’t go through 600 emails a day. I don’t have the time. That’s why I RT what I can and am trying to get more people involved by creating accounts for their own states. She seems to think that’s she’s a martyr and the only person out there trying to save animals and that is just absolutely untrue. The ONE place where I can agree with this person is where she asks people who may think she was being unfair to us to “know the facts before you judge”. That is ALL I’ve wanted her to do this entire time! She’s been judging me unfairly & coming to false conclusions about us and our intentions and I just want it to stop.

I don’t think I’ll ever get through to her but I wanted to write this to be able to “clear our name”, so to speak. While at times I’ve been angry, frustrated and hurt (I was on the verge of tears when I found out she’d been badmouthing us so long) but mostly I feel sorry for her. She claims to be so compassionate and yet she’s wasting all this time and energy on trying to discredit us. I wonder what horrible thing in her life has made her so bitter and jaded to want to attack us when all we’re trying to do is save animals – just like her! I wish this wasn’t happening but it has. I just don’t want people to get the wrong impression about Nikki and I because if we lose followers, that’s less people that will get word about animals in desperate need of rescue. Unfortunately, since I now see that’s she’s threatening to try and get us suspended (read the excerpts Nikki found below to find out why she’s wrong about it anyway), I’ve had to make the hard decision to stop RTing her altogether. This means that there are animals she knows about that will no longer get the exposure from us passing the information along. Hopefully people will see them through people who RT her like @TheArtofKaren and @ersle. It’s still very sad that I have to give up on some animals because of one severely misguided person but we will continue to RT any urgent lists that we come upon and we will continue doing our best to save pets from death row. Thank you for taking the time to see our side of the story! You’re all great!

Now have some research Nikki dug up from Twitter support to prove we are not abusing their policies.

“The Art of ReTweeting”, an article linked FROM Twitter.com in their support. Here is their helpful tips to Re-formatting RTs.

Re-formatting RT or Re-Tweets

The confusion of looking at RT topics can be minimized and presented in a much more easier and readable manner. Here are some ideas:

- Take extra 20-30 seconds of your time to analyse the post before you want to re-tweet it.

- Set your re-tweeted or tweeted post limit to 120 characters, in that way you will have free space if someone wants to re-tweet your post.

- Never modify the link or shortlink posted by the original poster of the tweet.

- Move the RT @username part to the end of the post.

- Remove duplicate words from your post and if possible make it shorter.

- Format RT possibly in this manner at the end of the post “This is a post that is re-tweeted (RT @username1 @username2 via @username3)”. Lets explain the RT, it was RT by username1 and username2 but was originally posted by username3.

- Use the word via if you want to identify the original poster.

- Make use #hashtags to identify important keywords

- Appreciate and Thanks other users who’ve re-tweeted your posts

- Whether it’s a link, quote or interesting information, add value to what’s been said before by contributing in your own words something relevant to the content. Give your opinion, be critical, be complimentary – this presents that you’ve actually looked at it rather than just simply forwarding it on.

More support for our case. From the Official Twitter Support FAQ:

What does RT, or retweet, mean?

RT is short for retweet, and indicates a re-posting of someone else’s tweet. This isn’t an official Twitter command or feature, but people add RT somewhere in a tweet to indicate that part of their tweet includes something they’re re-posting from another person’s tweet, sometimes with a comment of their own.Check out this great article on re-tweeting, written by a fellow Twitter user, @ruhanirabin.

Yet again from Twitter Support About ReTweeting:

Reposting others’ content without attribution is against the Twitter rules

Re-posting another person’s updates without giving them credit and without their permission is a violation of Twitter’s rules. Accounts re-posting others’ updates (with or without crediting the author) may be immediately suspended because:

1. Re-posting others’ updates, regardless of stating authorship, is a potential form of spam

2. Re-posting others’ updates as one’s own without giving credit to the original author is tantamount to plagiarism

If an account is aggregating or re-posting others’ updates for a legitimate reason, such as collecting and re-posting all updates with the word “dream” into @dreamtweets profile, it’s ok as long as the original author is credited for their update.

All of these rules and regulations are ones that we follow. If we have RTed a tweet without the original author, it is only because we are RTing the person who had tweeted it last and is NOT because we are being disrespectful to anyone.