Recipients of the Otago Regional Council's new Twitter alert flood warning system have been ''baffled'' by spam-like tweets.
The new system sends alerts of increasing flood risk around the region through Twitter to those who have signed up for the service.
Recipients had contacted the council about their concerns and investigations by Twitter had discovered the problem was not spam.
Council environmental information and science director John Threlfall said while the people ''fast following'' the system thought they were getting spam, it was in fact Twitter's ''top tweets of the day'' notification.
A simple solution to the problem and stay subscribed was to use the reply function on the cellphone and send the words ''set discover off'' following receipt of an unwanted tweet.
