A year after the feature was pulled, Twitter is bringing it back to the platform, having resolved the spam issues

Nov 18, 2014 11:12 GMT  ·  By

All is right in the world again, as Twitter has finally opened up the Direct Messages to URLs again.

Months after the company pulled the plug on the feature and stopped allowing users to send links to each other via the private messaging system, Twitter has turned around and opened up the door again.

The micro blogging site said at the time that it was all because of a particularly bad wave of spammy links sent to Twitter accounts. Last year, sources inside the company said that there had been a wave of hacked accounts that eventually led to a massive rise in Direct Message spam, where links were being sent to users in the hopes that they would click them and enter personal information which would later be collected by spammers.

Even one of the company’s execs got such a direct message, which led the company to put a ban on such messages until the issue could be properly dealt with. Sadly, this has taken more than a year to be solved, during which time users have been led to exasperation.

Replacing the dots within links with the word “dot” and breaking apart the link with spaces have become common practices among those who really didn’t want to send people messages via other tools or in public posts.

Twitter’s support page regarding Direct Messages has displayed a message saying that the company was updating its backend and infrastructure. Now that the work has been completed, you can once more send URLs to your friends on Twitter.

A long time coming

It’s surprising, however, that all this took so long to fix. Twitter is usually one to fix things in a timely manner, not one to take a year to deal with a major problem that people have been complaining about constantly ever since the first signs of trouble appeared.

Even so, this time around, let’s hope that the backend and restructuring work that needed to be completed is actually going to help Twitter capture spammy links before they end up flooding people via DMs as it happened last year.

There are also expectations that Twitter will be rolling out private sharing of public tweets via Direct Messages sometime this week. This has been a feature that’s been rumored for a while now, and that might finally see the light of day sooner rather than later. This would make the messaging experience on Twitter more complete, as this area of the platform has been seriously lacking.

Links in Direct Messages (3 Images)

Proof that you can send links in DMs again
Twitter has finally updated its platformDirect Messages are mostly back to normal
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