Just Faydra Deon – Page 8 – My thoughts. My ideas. My opinions. My life.

TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST!!!

About a year ago I received a request on my personal Facebook account to reconnect with a person from high school who I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. I was very happy to hear from her, so I of course accepted her friend request right away. I then sent her a message telling her it was great to be reconnected and asking her what she’d been up to.

I didn’t get any reply to my message, but I did start receiving emails from her about her Avon business.

At first, I didn’t know how I’d been added to anyone’s Avon mailing list, so I just deleted the first one without even looking to see what is was.

The second time it happened I actually opened the email and scrolled to the bottom to unsubscribe. It was then that I saw the name of this person from high school who I’d “friended” on Facebook. She, apparently, got my email address from my Facebook information and just added me to her mailing list. She didn’t ask or even tell me she wanted to add me. She just did it.

After I finished unsubscribing from her mailing list, and then reporting her as a spammer to Avon, I “unfriended” her on Facebook.

This may not be a big deal to many, but I simply do not like this.

This has also happened with my cell phone number. On four different occassions, I had to ask to be removed from “distro-texts.” One person was texting me weekly to remind me to listen to his radio show, which I never listened to in the first place. The other three people were sending “inspirational” texts.

Yes, these are all harmful, but the common denominator is that I didn’t ask to be sent this information. All four times, I thought it was just a one-time thing, so I didn’t immediately ask to be removed. I think that encouraged more texts. I finally texted them all and asked not to receive their information.

It’s not that I don’t want to be inspired and/or informed. It’s that I want to have a choice!

The worst email I ever received was from a chick who wrote, and I’m paraphrasing, “I know you might not know me, but because some idiot (her word, not mine) you know doesn’t know how to use blind CC, I got your email in an email that was sent to me, so I added you to my mailing list…” I wanted to be mad at her, but she was just taking advantage of the situation. When I emailed her and asked not to receive anything else from her, she 100% complied. I’ve never heard from her again.

It probably wouldn’t bother me so much if I hadn’t made a deliberate and conscious decision to never, never, never add people to any of my mailing lists without asking first. I generate tons of content all over the web, and it’s tempting to just send what I think is my amazing writing to every name in my address book, but it’s just not good manners.

Having said all that, let me repeat my recent tweet: “Y’all, please, if I give you my cell number or my email, please don’t put me on your distribution lists without asking me first, please. I know you mean well, but I get enough texts and emails as it is. I’d like to have a choice before I receive more.”

I said “please” three times. That has to count for something. 😉

My First Twitterview!

A few weeks ago, I was asked by the founder of Yellow Dogg Designs, Mark Bailey (@doggdaze), if he could interview me for his Women’s History Month series.

Of course, I was flattered that he’d think I was substantial enough to add value to his blog, so I resoundingly said, “YES!”

We exchanged email addresses, and he told me he’d send me the details.

When he finally did, he told me that he was planning a Twitterview; an interview on Twitter.

I was like, “Whoa.”

I was familiar with TweetChat, but I was kind of interested to see how an interview would go strictly on Twitter.

I have to say that I was thoroughly impressed with the concept once I was in the midst of the interview.

Instead of creating @mentions, we simply used the interview hashtag to allow people to follow the Twitterview. It allowed for maximum use of the 140-character limit on Twitter.

It took a little over an hour for Mark to pose 11 questions and for me to tweet my answers.

The whole experience was great!

You can see the entire Twitterview with me, Faydra Deon on Mark’s blog.

Why I terminated the Kindle Competition

I’m really frustrated right now, y’all.

Really.

This is the second time I’ve had a Kindle Competition, and the first one went off without a hitch. Folks voted and the winner was chosen by popular vote.

I used the same system this time, and the vote counters (yes, I meant to add an “S” to counters) were manipulated to give one participant an unfair advantage over all other participants.

How do I know this?

Each day I checked the counters to see how each story was fairing. The numbers stayed pretty much within the same range, even though some stories were getting more “yes” votes than others.

Then about five days ago, I checked the counters again, and one story had jumped from about 25 “yes” votes to 190 “yes” votes overnight.

The problem is that my site visitor stats didn’t match that much traffic, and the way I had the filters set up on the vote counters meant that there should have been at least as many visitors as there were new votes. Keep in mind that other participants were getting more votes, too. Their votes, however, had not spiked to such unbelievable numbers, though.

I removed that vote counter, but I didn’t deactivate it. I simply put another vote counter in its place, and kept the original counter active to see what would happen with it once it was removed from my site.

At first, the second vote counter on this particular story went up little by little, and two days ago it jumped up from about 15 “yes” votes to 118 “yes” votes overnight. Again, my site visitor stats did not support that much traffic to my site.

In addition to the “yes” votes jumping up on the new counter, the original counter, which I only removed from the site but did not deactivate was at 230 “yes” votes, not its 190 “yes” votes, which was the number when it was removed from my site.

Obviously, something wasn’t right, and this wasn’t happening on any other vote counters except these two; one of which hasn’t been on my site in the last five days.

This is why the Kindle Competition was terminated.

I have, however, decided to enlist the help of five judges to finish the competition. People worked hard on their entries, and I gave my word that I’d be giving away a Kindle, and I plan to keep my word.

I will have more Kindle Competitions in the future, but I will not ever use the previous method for choosing a winner. That process has been tainted.

Please save my life!

This was the subject of an email I received from an obvious scammer.

Of course I didn’t open it, but I thought to myself, “If you’re that desperate, why would you be depending on me to see and open your email to save your life?”

Since this person isn’t in my contacts, then it was a better-than-good chance that this email would end up in my junk mail folder, which it did, so how seriously could I take the request?

These email scams are outrageous and sad.

Outrageous because I have to wonder who would even buy into this nonsense.

Sad because they wouldn’t keep attempting to breach people’s trust if they hadn’t been successful with other people in the past.

Sigh.

I’m still a WordPress snob, but I’m giving Blogspot a go.

Anyone who has gotten to know me will tell you that a self-hosted WordPress blog is what I’d recommend to anyone and everyone who asks me which is better between Blogger and WordPress.

Being self-hosted just gives you more control, and I’ve been told I’m a control freak so… go figure. 😉

Anyway, I have a lot of associates who use Blogger, so I’ve decided to learn how to manipulate it and customize it, just in case any of those associates need help or want customization for their Blogspot blogs.

It’s almost never a bad thing to broaden your horizons.

Yes, I’m a WordPress snob, but follow my progress on learning all about Blogger.com at http://faydradeon.blogspot.com.

Ms. Chela has agreed to be my customization guinea pig once I get up to speed on how to customize blogspot blogs. Thanks, Che-Che! Now quit teasing me about losing that sandwich. 😆