Obviously, we don’t want to name any names, I’m just curious how often it happens here. And to what degree of creepiness does happen?
I wonder if anytime one our female Dopers says anything remotely sexual on this board, does that pretty much guarantee she is going to get a couple of creepy PMs?
I remember back in the AOL days, one time I had mistakenly logged on with my wife’s username. I went into a chat room (which had nothing to do with sex) and was immediately bombarded with IMs from creepy dudes wanting to “talk”. Talk about an awakening experience! [[shudder]]
Anyway, I’m kind of partial to this place, and like to think most of us are above that sort of thing. But then again, maybe I’m just being naive.
I know for a fact that someone was banned from the SDMB (and not all that long ago, either) for sending ‘skeevy’ PMs and/or emails to other Dopers. :eek:
I’ve gotten two PMs referencing sexual/romantic themes of a personal nature in the time I’ve been posting here, and neither one was predatory creepy to me, but might have felt that way to another woman. They were both from very recently single men (one divorced, one widowed) who were sending out tentative feelers to see if I might be interested. I wasn’t at ALL offended (so please, don’t PM me to apologize or anything, we cool…) but after a couple of gentle parries, I did simply stop responding to the PMs, and they stopped.
I actually don’t even recall their usernames, and don’t particularly want to. Whatever residual awkwardness I felt at the time is gone with the memory; I prefer to keep it that way as I’m sure we still interact just fine in threads, and I’d like to keep it that way.
I post a LOT of TMI, including sexual stuff, and no, it’s not been a problem for me on this board. YMMV, of course. If it does, report it to a mod.
This brings up a fuzzy memory of mine. I was casually involved in some AIM debate or something for about 30 minutes. Afterwards my wife asked what I was doing. I told her and she made a quip along the lines of ‘are you sure you weren’t hitting on girls’ or something like that. She was just having a giggle (she knows my propensity for droning on and on about boring chit with likewise people). I was puzzled, since I was under the impression that I would have to find a chat room specifically for that sort of thing (ie, to randomly hit on strangers). So we talked about it and apparently if you have a female name - or a name remotely female - you will have dudes sending you IMs, kind of like fishing.
Boggled my mind.
I’ve never gotten sexually creepy PMs, but I’ve gotten death threat PMs (and PMs of another sort of creepy nature) on another forum that I used to moderate for (actually the two forums I moderated now that I think about it, although the Darwintalk one the creepy emails were sent to my email address…Not sure if that counts…I still have them somewhere I think, wonderfully crazy stuff…).
No creepy PMs or threatening PMs on the dope though.
I am not female, but I recently got a rather strange “friend” request (the only one I have ever had on this board) from an apparently female doper. This person appeared to have just joined the board, and to have made no posts whatsoever, but had filled out a fairly detailed profile (whereas I have virtually nothing in my profile) describing herself as a 19 year old redhead of short stature. There were more details - some stuff about her job and general location, I think - but after I turned down the request it disappeared from my console, and I cannot exactly recall the other details or the username.
Although it was in some respects rather gratifying to have a cute sounding 19 year old chick apparently wanting to befriend an old geezer like me, it also made me feel a little uncomfortable to be so approached by a person of whom I knew absolutely nothing, and could know very little about me. Not wanting to be rude or unwelcoming to the board, I left the request open for a while, and then, after seeing she still had made no posts, I turned it down. I hope, if she was for real, that she wasn’t offended, but I am still quite puzzled and mildly disturbed about the whole incident.
I’m not aware of this being a problem on the SD, but on other boards there are spam bots where PMs will go out to all members (or a lot) from fake women trying to lure people into, well, I don’t know exactly since I never respond, but I think of them similar to the Nigerian Prince emails of yester-yore.
I love the ones you get on Facebook. Some top heavy woman will send me a friend request. I always turn them down, but before I do, I’ll click on her friends list to see how many of my dumnass friends actually accepted her request.
