Earlier today I announced the creation of a twitter hashtag, #trdev so people wanting to create a training and development community of practice on twitter could find each other, and interact. We have additional plans to make this work. However it will NOT work if the tag is used for NON-RELATED tweets.

Within 3 hrs. of announcing the tag, providing instructions for use, etc, Doug Constant @onpointcoaching started spamming the tag with messages of various types NONE of which pertain at all to the topic. You can see for yourself what he is doing by doing a search within twitter for #trdev, and you can see what appears to be a deliberate attempt to prevent you and I from creating this community.

I do not know Doug Constant in any way except what people have told me. I know he did the exact same thing a few days ago, when some of us tried to use #CTI for the same purpose. He simply posts junk, destroying the functionality of the tag. And, that his previous twitter account, @onpointcoach was suspended a week or two ago for misconduct.

If you want to make your voice heard about this attempt to derail a legitimate attempt at creating a training and development community of practice on twitter, you might want to consider filing a support request to the good people at Twitter.

Go to http://twitter.zendesk.com/home which is the support page, while you are logged in to your twitter account, and click on submit a request. I don’t know if you can use the spam request or need to use the other, so try both if you have the time. Simply send the basics included in this post and be SURE you include @onpointcoaching as the offending party.

If you don’t want to do this, I certainly understand, but then we simply won’t even be able to try to make this work. And if you do take the time, thank you.

Twitter is a neat service that is very flexible, and we have other things planned if we can get him to stop anyone from creating a way for us all to get together virtually online.

Pat Stark, @trdev, http://twitter.com/trdev and patstark@busylearners.com