The pros and cons of SoberCircle February 25, 2008

Starting SoberCircle has been the most rewarding experience of my professional career.  Few are the times where we can positively affect the lives of others while doing the work that we love.  I get thank you letters all the time, so I am very aware of the impact this website can have.  On the other side though, you have people who seem to have a death wish with the idea of SoberCircle and an online community that serves the greater good people that join it.

Its difficult to deal with all the turmoil that these people seem so driven to create.  It also baffles me that people would want to cause harm in a place meant to do good.  So, I learned the hard way that people will be people.  Some people are really good people.  Some people are not such good people.  Some people are perfectly fine unless you mix them with other fine people that grate on one another and they drag each other into the mud.  Some people will miss their meds and really fly off the handle and give you every reason to banish them, but you dont and they come back and redeem themselves.

This is not the SoberCircle I envisioned, but it is what SoberCircle is.  It is a social community, just like the real world.  It is an online community with real world issues.  And for every bad thing that happens in this real community, there are a half dozen good things happening.  That’s the trade-off.  There’s an expression that goes around 12 step settings that says “Take what you want and leave the rest”.   This is especially true of SoberCircle because we could sanitize the community to the point that only good things were being said, but would the community be better because of this?  I seriously doubt it.

The cons could very well become the pros.  Yes, there is often a lack of judgment when members slander other members and there is no excuse that makes it acceptable.  I have seen cases where people slam others and come to terms that it was wrong to act or react in that manner and they grow from it.  One side learns from their mistakes while the other side learns to forgive.  What was the con, is now a pro.  Its amazing how that works.  And its all up to us to take the good out of every situation and leave the bad, to look the other way and not give into the temptation to stoop down to the levels of others.  Leaving a positive footprint on the community is a responsibility that we all must share, even if we have done harm to others in the community – its never too late to give something good back.

Spam: The Cancer of Any Online Community February 12, 2008

At 11:37 CT today, a community conscious member of SoberCircle brought it to my attention that there was some spam making the rounds through member’s inboxes. Thank God for a loyal member base. This goes back to the principals discussed in Laying Down the Law on Your Social Networking Website. I would have caught this within an hour or so by looking through my spam auditing application. Fortunately, this member gave me a heads up before I ran that report.

Here’s the message:

Hello My Dear!

Hello My Dear!
i am miss Favour i saw your profile and become intrested i will like to know more about you please contact me at , (wfavour99@yahoo.com) please do not reply to me in the website because i will not have the time to answer you there, just send your mail to my yahoo id then i will send my picture for you to know whom i am. remeber age, coloure and distance dose\’nt matter but what matters is true love.
Your\’s Lovely New Friend
wfavour99@yahoo.com

Does it get any more blatant than this? It never ceases to atmaze me. Every spam message we have had on the website in recent months has followed this general pattern. And this is not a bot doing this. The process and send times are way too slow for a bot. So where is this coming from you might ask??? :

person: Mody Ndiaye
address: SOCIETE NATIONALES DES TELECOMMUNICATIONS
address: Sonatel
address: Dakar
address: Senegal

They mostly come from the wonderful West African nation of Senegal. Its insane.

Why do these people want to connect via you email address?

Most likely these individuals are low on the food chain of an organized crime scheme that plots to engage in an email correspondence where they promise to send you a picture of themselves, only to be a file laced with a trojan that can then steal data from your computer. The most common trojan for this is a keystroke recorder that tracks when you login to sensitive sites like bank accounts and credit cards. Once these people have your login info they can then setup transfers from these accounts.

The second scheme is much more rudimentary in nature but also lethal if done effectively. Scammers are constantly looking for susceptible users to run phising schemes against. Chances are, if you are naive enough to fall for the first email, you will fall for further phishing schemes later (i.e. your bank has recently updated its systems and needs you to reenter your login information).

Don’t Fall For The Bait!!!
If any member approaches you at random and asks you to start a correspondence outside of the website, don’t go for it.  If you are remotely intrigued about the offer, try to continue the dialog on that website for at least a couple of days.  If its bogus, the perpetrators aren’t going to waste their time trying to scam a single person.  These people are only interested in mass numbers.  Always look at websites you visit and pay close attention to the base part of the URL.  If it is your bank, your bank’s website is yourbank.com, make sure the part of the URL before the / is yourbank.com.  Often, scammers like to use urls like login.yourbank.com.oiacis.ru/.  If you were clicking on this link, all your information entered will not go to yourbank.com, but to oiacis.ru.  This is how the game works and its time to wise up to it. Please remember that financial institutions will NEVER approach you through email to ask for sensitive information.