The never-ending bane

Published in Sci-Tech World

Feast your eyes on the following, copied verbatim from a few scrapbooks around the popular social networking website, Orkut http://www.orkut.com.

“Once upon a time there lived a guy his name was syed tayyab, he writes poetry and work for “nestle” the kit kat company. he was graduate and love to sit alone in park and chat with frnds on net... do u know who he is????? “meeee” lol will u be my frnd?

a:-yes
b:-no
ur answer?”
Another example:
“where you? M at Orkut. I likes ur profile. Don’t mind u have much friends, have me too”
And another one...
“heello how are you buddy? was viewing urs friend’s profile and saw urs pic there. achi lage thought chalo baat kertay hain. so am from islamabad do let me know if u wana talk”
Here is yet another one:
“Hi:) where in london do u live i’m eager 2 know just cuz i wanna make some friends of mine as well. Well now that I’m here, i think i should wid a lil help from u, take care karo larki:)”

You may be laughing your head off. We all have laughed silly over these. But we have also ranted about it, shaken a fist at our computers and come close to banging our heads against the wall. But nothing, absolutely nothing, seems to dissuade all those “desperados” who seem to have an infinite amount of time on their hands to write and copy/paste “frandship” scraps on just about every girl’s Orkut profile that they come across, hoping against hope that one of the many will reply.

Enough has been written about these “frandshippers” and their annoying habits on these very pages. There are girls who have proceeded to write in capital letters on their profiles that they do not want strangers adding them.

So why don’t people listen? It seems that everything goes right over the head of these people, who either think girls are as weird as they are to fall head over heels over a scrap written in atrocious English, or they have this drive to add as many girls as they possibly can to their profile to impress their equally weird friends.

Ever received profile invitations from guys you don’t know? Join the club.

When it comes to finding out a logical reason for this mania, there are many people who argue that some girls invite such messages given that most of them have extremely photogenic photo- graphs on display and seem to have gone through a dictionary to make their personal profiles sound (sickly) romantic. But if you closely look at the profiles in general, almost every girl seems to be a victim of these scraps.

It does not matter that she keeps a minimum amount of information on her profile or that she does not put photographs of herself either in the display picture or her album. Frandshippers abound everywhere, with no end.

Another impetus to these people is that annoying feature of Orkut which has recently been introduced. If you visit someone’s profile, it will log your visit and the person whose profile you visited will know you were there. It is all well if you visit the profile of your friend. But what if you read someone’s post on the community and decide to visit their profiles? There are instances where the profile you visit turns out to be that of a would-be friendship scrapper who is delighted that you visited his profile and decides he wants to know who you are.

But regardless of the reason, let us face the heat. Basically it all comes down to this: how to deal with these people so that they keep away from your profile for good.

First, my advice is to keep a “low” profile in every sense of the word, especially the personal details. Also, remove all your personal photographs from the album as well as display picture. Even though this will not prevent friendship messages, at least you will not have people telling you that you are the cause of these scraps.

Secondly, the key is to unite. Get together and make a “Death to Frandship” group blog or a community on Orkut. Invite all those girls to join who have either been a victim or want to put a stop to this friendship drama. Whenever any of you get an annoying, desperate scrap, spring into action. Not only should you post it on the blog/community verbatim, but also post the name and link of the person who sent you the message.

All the members of the community can then add that person to their ignore list simultaneously. It also will not hurt to report the profile as bogus and notify the authorities that the person is harassing you. If you do it in a large number there is no way the powers-that-be on Orkut will ignore you.

Another thing which I have noticed most people doing, and which you must never do, is to scrap the person back asking them things like “who are you” or “do I know you” or “why did you add me?” You may not realise it, but even this innocent sounding scrap is a world of encouragement to those desperados and chances are you will never be able to get rid of them. If you have an invitation from a person whose profile you do not recognise, simply hit the “deny” button and add that person to your ignore list immediately. In the rare case that the person turns out to be someone you know, simply explain you were taking precautionary measures. There is no need to feel embarrassed.

And this brings us to the most important thing. Never feel guilty about doing any of the above. There are people who feel that the friendship mania is just a hyped-up situation and that the best thing to do is to ignore it. But the situation at present is a glaring proof of the fact that ignoring the problem is not the solution. You can ignore one scrap and hit delete and never think about it again. But what if there are people out there sending tons of friendship invitations and scraps and you are just sitting and taking it instead of doing something about it?

So think outside the box, take the initiative and tell yourself that you will do everything you can to dissuade people from scrapping you for friendship.