Orkutlery

“WHAT is the point of Orkut?” I cried in frustration after signing up for an account to become part of an online community that is fast becoming a very popular online hangout.

“Joining and being active in communities,” said my sister rather casually.

From that day (which was about two months ago) onwards, I’ve been literally addicted to Orkut. Come rain, hail or storm, I never take a break from signing into my account at least twice a day. Back when I started signing up for communities, I joined about two dozen of them. So one can only imagine the amount of internet time required to keep up with those two dozen communities on a daily basis.

I discovered many long-lost friends, made new ones and congratulated myself on finally finding something constructive to do with my time. But all that changed when the true meaning of “beta” began to dawn on me.

One fine day I logged on to my Orkut account, and started checking out the latest topics on the different communities. Soon, I was typing a reply to one of them. However, after about five minutes when I finished writing a “mini-thesis” (a common word on Orkut for long replies), and clicked on “send,” I was in for a surprise. The screen in front me said “User account blocked.” It went on to inform me that I had been abusing my account (?) and as a penalty my account had been blocked.

Before I could fall out of my chair the last paragraph somewhat pacified me — their alarm could be triggered by mistake and in that case I could write to them. Rest assured, I wasted no time in doing just that. However, three days passed and still I did not hear from them. Imagine having to read interesting threads knowing I couldn’t reply.

I came across loads of friends whom I couldn’t add to my list. Worst of all were the times when I forgot my account was blocked and I wrote a few nice long posts only to realize later that they had to sit patiently on my desktop till I was out of the “Orkut jail.” Suffice it to say that after a painfully long wait, my imprisonment ended.

If you’re thinking that this was a one-time issue, guess again. To date, I’ve lost count of the number of times my account has been blocked. The only intelligent thing I have discovered about this whole fiasco is what actually triggers their alarm. Imagine this scenario — your cable net server refuses to budge after you have typed a scrapbook entry. You click on “send” once, twice, thrice and finally on the tenth attempt, the server decides to have mercy on you. Upon refreshing the scrapbook, you realize that one entry has been posted ten times. You painstakingly delete the nine extra entries, but by that time the Orkut alarm has been triggered.

Apparently the webmasters is oblivious to the phenomenon of my-cable-net-doesn’t-feel-like-working, so clicking on”send” 10 times is counted as spam. Now you can bang your head against your PC when I write this, but any time your ISP or cable refuses to work while you’re on Orkut, don’t even try pressing any buttons more than twice or you risk being blocked for what seems like an eternity.

Another problem with Orkut is session expiry every thirty minutes. Now I don’t mind re-entering my username and password after every thirty minutes, but the problem with this screen is that it pops up after every five minutes and sometimes proceeds to tell you that the page you wanted to access has expired. If this isn’t annoying, I don’t know what is, and if you’re like me and have a dozen windows open, this screen will pop up in all of them.

The trick here is to enter your username and password in just one window and for the rest, click the back button and then re-click to go to wherever you wanted. Remember, if you re-enter your username and password a dozen times, the Orkut alarm will be triggered once again for some inexplicable reason that I have yet to learn about.

Another bug I’ve discovered is that whenever I try to send anyone a message, and my thirty minutes happen to expire then and there, I re-enter my username and password. Now, instead of the “sent box” page, it gives me a blank “compose” page. The sent box however does show the message written in it. Of course don’t let yourself be fooled by that for your message has not been sent. Maybe it will go through, maybe it won’t — you just have to keep trying your luck.

Then there are the usual problems of communities not being sub-divided. Searching for a community can only be done effectively if you know of some good techniques. Type “KU” in the search box and you’ll get all sorts of weird communities in various languages. Even typing in “Orkut” can turn up some pretty confusing results.

Of course, many of us are also familiar with Orkut’s trademark feature; the “bad, bad server” window. I literally know the whole error message by heart because it has popped up so many times. To date, I don’t understand why Orkut allows an infinite number of invites when its server cannot handle extra traffic.

However, one thing is for sure; it’s very irritating when you’re trying to open different communities in different windows, and this message shows up in nine out of 10 windows, and you can’t even refresh the page.

All this is not meant to scare you off Orkut. It is certainly an excellent place to get in touch with long-lost friends and maintain contact with present ones. The communities are a very interesting past time and the fact that it is a closed network is also a feather in its cap. Having said that, you can honestly tell that it is a beta service for the innumerable bugs are sure to drive you up the wall on more than one occasion.