Sunday, May 09, 2010

Troubles with the Second Life Blogger group. [Update]

If you are one of the people who gets innudated with emails after the Second Life bloggers group moved from Ning to Grouply,  Eddi Haskell has written a explanation on how to get yourself removed.

Ning is changing to a paid service only and the Second Life bloggers group moved to Grouply consequently. At first we where invited to create a new account at Grouply, but I and I assume many others choose not to do that. I never really used the Ning group anyway in the several years I was a member. Apparently all of the almost 1500 members got transferred over anyway, causing quite a stir because group messages work differently and seem to be emailed to every one. What caused some people with auto responders on their email to broadcast their phone numbers and emails to all the other member. 

I'm assuming good intentions of the group owners, and not having known the difference in behaviour of the services. I hope if you are affected you can get yourself removed, or with the help of the group owners.

End Public Safety Message.

update: Zoe Connolly posted the following
To all Second Life Bloggers.My deepest and sincerest apologies on the whole Grouply matter. I had no idea it would turn into a spam machine. My blackberry was loaded with spam as well as messages pleading for help and not a few angry ones. 
 Obviously Grouply is NOT the solution.For a temporary fix I've disabled ALL messages on all my Grouply groups until such time as I can delete all of them, any help with how to delete a grouply group would be appreciated. 
 Again I'm so very sorry for the disruptions and it WAS very unprofessional. 
 ~ Zoe Connolly

4 comments:

  1. I followed the link at the bottom of the emails, which sent an email that was supposed to unsubscribe me, but I don't think it did anything.

    Then I went and signed in (I figured grouply already had my email address, so I just asked it for a "new" password), left the group, and deleted my grouply account. That worked just fine, even if the grouply site is a bit badly designed, navigation-wise.

    I got real, honest-to-god spam from grouply in a different account the other day, so I will not be using grouply under any circumstances.

    More troubling on the slbloggers front is that I left the slbloggers ning not long after the initial ning announcement. Getting signed up to the grouply group was not only a failure of judgment on Zoe's part, but a security failure of ning.com as well.

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  2. Glad you did manage to unsubscribe, many seem to be having trouble.

    What might have happened is that your contact info was already send to grouply before you removed yourself, or maybe Zoe had collected those manually first.

    All speculation ofcourse.

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  3. This was also due to the Ning-to-Grouply migration tool. Just have a read:
    http://blog.grouply.com/ning

    It's designed to subscribe all Ning members AND send them notification emails. BAD.

    I unsubscribed and apparently I'm still receiving emails.

    Just please don't use Grouply.

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  4. Fogwoman Grey also reports that deactivating a ning account (and so, I assume, leaving a specific ning) may take up to two weeks. (!) So I suspect I was just still in the system when grouply scraped the ning for the members.

    ReplyDelete