orkut

[waider]

So, ah. Orkut. Right. It's been pretty much as I expected; I've not mysteriously connected with any long-lost people, I've not acquired new and interesting friends; essentially I've pretty much established an identical network to my livejournal friends group which in turn is largely based on links that were forged when talk.bizarre was a slightly more viable venue for discourse (or abuse). And that's the positive stuff. I've had a variety of uninteresting and crappy FOAF messages, including one this morning from some idiot trying to drum up interest in his stupid vanity site. Orkut, where people you don't know can send you spam because someone you know knows them. Great selling point, that. I can't even find a button on the mailbox that says "block all messages from this person" nor one that says, "don't bother sending me FOAF messages"; there may well be one, but it's not in any obvious place and I'm not quite enthralled enough by Orkut to go digging for it. The forums I've looked at are nigh-on useless; most of them have topics that make MetaFilter's front page seem like a hotbed of opinionated discussion, and I discovered this morning that I can't delete a post I made. I can replace all the text, I guess, with the word "deleted" or better still, replace it with "deleted by Orkut staff" and set off a rumourmill of conspiracy theories, but see previous about lack of enthrallment.

Now, someone has said to me that you get out of this sort of thing as much as you put into it, and frankly that's pants. I've gotten less out of this than I've put into it. I don't count FOAF spam as a threefold return. Of course, I'll leave my account there. For now, anyway. Just in case, you know?

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

Of course, I'll leave my account there. For now, anyway.

It's not as if you have a choice: there's no mechanism for deleting it.

Re:

[waider.livejournal.com]

maybe if I violate their AUP or TOS or something, they'll delete it for me!

Re:

[jwgh]

Or you'll get lucky and they'll delete you randomly!

More usefully, at least one person has gotten their account removed by sending a note to one of the maintainers asking for it to be deleted.

[opadit.livejournal.com]

"block all messages from this person"

There's an "ignore user" option, but it didn't seem to work for me.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You can delete a post you've made, except if it started a topic.

You can turn off FOAF messages by going to Settings, and turning off both "messages sent to friends of friends" checkboxes.

Tom Limoncelli sent a FOAF spam once and seemed amused when i told him i expected better from him. Oh well.

Re:

[waider.livejournal.com]

Right, I fell foul of the Waider Started A Topic thing. That's a rather daft restriction. At the very least you should be able to have your post replaced with a [deleted] tag.

In terms of other items, YOU ARE TEH C00L AND I WORSHIP YOUR, uh, something or other. Go Ron!