PMs stifled

[igenlode]

The trouble with fanfiction.net having disabled email alerts on all PMs ('as an anti-spam measure') is that it makes it basically impossible to contact anyone who isn't actively updating their work. The only time I ever see that I have a new message now is when I check the page view statistics on my existing stories, since this part of the account isn't visible when all you do is interact with the site forums or other people's fiction. Someone who has no reason to log in at all because they have no reason to suppose that anyone is reading their work is basically out of contact for good.

Which sounds reasonable enough when you phrase it that way -- people who have abandoned the site obviously aren't interested in being contacted, right? -- except that it also includes people you were beta-reading for six months ago, people you previously had lengthy PM conversations with, people who read and review but don't themselves write stories, and people who have have left a given fandom but are happy to talk about their old stories.

Which ironically takes the site back to the old days of people leaving random reviews on stories as a means of communication, since review alerts haven't been disabled...

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

Well, that sounds both obnoxious and useless. People aren't going to stop getting spam PMs, they just won't know they're getting spam PMs, and people who didn't want a bunch of email notifications in their inboxes would have turned them off anyway. I swear sites like this just enjoy making their users' lives more difficult.

[igenlode]

There has been a spambot going round sending people messages along the lines of

"Hi there!! I m young sexy nice lonely girl looking for a guy to have some fun with

Frankly, whoever pointed the bot at a site with at least 80% female membership (possibly much more) ought to have realised that they are wasting their time -- possibly they reckoned that the high prevalence of sex-obsessed fan-fiction indicated a large market but didn't realise that the teenage girls who like writing bad porn react with shocked outrage when they receive this sort of thing: https://me.me/i/fanfiction-pm-sneakylady80-you-have-received-a-message-from-sneakylady80-ec4656253f7848a3a65a562479b18842

Incidentally, I actually tried Googling the term supplied in order to see what the intended effect was (since I can't run video or any kind of embedded script, I reckoned I was pretty safe) and didn't get any results other than people complaining about the messages...

The other, not implausible, possibility is that this is an attack aimed specifically at fanfiction.net by whatever bored hacker was amusing himself by posting hundreds of thousands of spam reviews earlier this year, e.g. https://www.fanfiction.net/r/12117521/
If so, they have achieved their aim by successfully taking down a feature of the site: fanfiction.net claim that this is only until a more secure anti-spam feature is installed, but it's probably permanent.

[betweensunandmoon]

*rolls eyes* You'd think people like these would have better things to do with their time. At least this one's funnier than Tumblr's particular brand of porn bots.

Will disabling PM alerts actually get rid of the spambot, though?

[igenlode]

Will disabling PM alerts actually get rid of the spambot, though?

It won't have the slightest effect on it.

And since I haven't heard of anybody who has received more than three of these random messages in the course of a year, while all notifications for all PMs have been removed in case (presumably) someone who wasn't intending to log in to the site in the near future might see one -- since anyone else would be subjected to the original message, even if not the alert -- it seems a massive sledgehammer with which to fail to crack a nut.