Seriously? Linkedin, facebook, & other annoying invites

[zerospace]

*Rant warning*

I just got a rather annoying email from Linkedin... IN FRENCH from a member here whom I have openly disliked (and so have many others) in the past. I had to do a quick email search to confirm that the person is who I thought initially.

iceman57 why on earth would I EVER want to connect with you on Linkedin, even IF I were a member there? Even if I did speak/read French and could actually understand the e-mail that was sent to me.

I really wish people (especially people who barely know me but only want more "connections" or "followers" or "friends") would quit inviting me to join various social networking sites. I get enough emails to all of my email addresses that I don't need those, too. *sigh* I would have joined by now if I wanted to, and I certainly wouldn't do it for a person who has always been about himself and his own "elite" knowledge of animation art around here. The worst of it is that Linked in spams me for weeks after someone enters my email address to "invite" me to the service. It keeps pestering me to join. My very estranged uncle has nagged me several times to sign up, and so have other folks I barely know. Grrr...

Is there anyone else here like me? Or am I the last serious social networking holdout? I actually did set up a facebook page recently: for my dog (so I could use it to back up some mobile games). It's classic. If anyone wants to connect with me outside of these forums, I have a Google+ account (mostly hidden) and I use Hangouts. I like privacy. Beyond that... please for the love of Pete, stop inviting me to these things and just e-mail me or request to chat with me on Hangouts if you really want to communicate with me. Otherwise, I'm not going to be your Faceplant buddy, Twitter follower or Linkedin professional "contact". It's all a bunch of fake-friends-garbage anyways!

// end rant

[JWR]

There is always a chance that his computer was hacked and the complete email history (I have no idea if you both ever exchanged emails during one of the Beta Awards) and your one of many to be spammed in French.
A few years back I had something like that happen to me when I was on Hughes.net and friends were getting spam that looked like it was sent from my email account to the point my legit emails were getting blocked by spam filters at the ISP level.

[Drac of the Sharp Smiles]

One thing to remember about that stupid Linkedin is that it will invite ANYONE AT ALL with which you've had pretty much any contact. Also, it does it on it's own, without telling you it's doing it. I've gotten Linkedin invites from people who didn't even have an account with Linkedin anymore....

So that, at least you need to just discard, or tell your e-mail to drop anything from it immediately into your spam file.

[sensei]

Sensei has been certified by Linkedin for having a New Skill!



The New Skill is Being Able to P188 Off Anyone Without Even Trying!!

]

Access your Linkedin account now to congratulate Sensei and to post Your New Skills!

You too can P188 Off People in France Without Even Trying!!

[iceman57]

Sounds to be an automatic stuff from the Linkedin platform, had an update last days by connecting Gmail to it, apologies for inconvenience.

I unfortunaly, as many, did not read the 132 text pages in Calibri size 10 font of legal terms and notices wrote by amazingly skilled Californian IP lawyers that certainly included an unlimited access to my mailbox and an ability to reuse a decade of e-mail adresses.

Apologies again, maybe other persons received or may receive similar generic e-mails. Does not definitively deserve a public debate.

[sensei]

Well, I think the direction of the debate is "Shame on Linked In" and "Be careful if you have an account with them" (as I and many other Betarians do). That I think made it worthwhile.

[zerospace]

One thing to remember about that stupid Linkedin is that it will invite ANYONE AT ALL with which you've had pretty much any contact. Also, it does it on it's own, without telling you it's doing it. I've gotten Linkedin invites from people who didn't even have an account with Linkedin anymore....

So that, at least you need to just discard, or tell your e-mail to drop anything from it immediately into your spam file.

AH, this I did not know, thanks!

JWR -- *Sigh* You're looking at possibly the biggest computer/Internet tech geek on this board. I used to work for an ISP dealing with spam abuse issues for a living. This email came from Linkedin directly in french. I verified the source via the message headers before opening it (I'm not that stupid as to open messages in foreign languages from a source I don't recognize -- that's a surefire way to get a virus).

This email also came to an unfiltered email address that if I want to filter spam, I must do so at the point the messages are downloaded from the server to my PC. So yeah, this address gets a crapton of spam already, and thus it's doubly annoying to get this voluntary spam from services like Linkedin. It's good to know that I shouldn't direct my anger at the PEOPLE necessarily (except that they, perhaps stupidly, blindly gave permission to allow a service to spam their entire address book -- don't even get me started on how disgustingly rude THAT is). More reason for me to hate Faceplant and Linkedin . Just what I needed!

iceman -- apology accepted. Read what you're agreeing to next time, please? Much appreciated, thanks.

Thanks guys, for the heads up & sorry for the rant. This kinda crap just drives me nuts!

[lunacels]

Sensei, your post is seriously cracking me up!!

I once registered on ResearchGate to request an author's thesis, which was unavailable elsewhere. I thought I had read through the terms, but it still spammed all of my research coauthors with whom I had published, requesting them to join. I don't even know how it identified all my papers and figured all that out… It's completely crazy. It continues to spam emails to me about how many researchers have reviewed my citations, which drives me bananas (ha! See what I did there? ) and yet I can't shut the darn thing off! At least every once in a while I'm able to get a free paper out of it, and so I suppose there's a silver lining...

But I love Facebook. Having moved as many times as I have, it's the only way I can keep up with pictures of everyone's kids, pets, and dinners out.