I'm trying to build some advanced twitter searches to monitor certain items. At present, they get thrown off by people using one of the keywords in the username.
I can't just mute / block all those users, as some of them are ones I follow.
At the moment, the only way I can see to completely exclude an account from results is:
-(@username) -from:username
This works, but the approach rapidly gets lengthy if there are quite a few names to exclude. It also doesn't allow me to exclude all accounts containing username - i.e. @username1 @username2
One thought would be to create a list of accounts to exclude and then filter the list. That doesn't seem to work though as it won't help in excluding replies to these people.
I was confronting a similar problem and the way I ended up solving it is exactly as you suggested with a tiny addition:
Like you, I created a list for accounts with usernames similar to my keywords, then used the list: operator with my list's ID, in minus - to exclude tweets from the list members.
I also ended up getting lots of replies to accounts on my list, so i used the exclude:replies operator and it worked quite good.
[keyword(s)] -list:[list_id] exclude:replies
The only false positives I kept on getting were tweets which quoted members of my list but adding exclude:quote did more damage than help as it filtered also legitimate tweets with benign quotes.