Most people equate spam to unsolicited email, but spam on the Internet comes in all forms. Whenever you see an off-topic comment in a forum, on a blog, or just about anywhere else, it's also a form of spam.

Social networks generate another kind of spam that makes social networking undesirable for a lot of people (including me).

Read the rest of this entry »

(This is a guest author article.)

I've been on the internet for nearly 6-7 years, participated in a dozen online forums/communities and left several of them and my advice to people who don't like a particular community: leave. Stop visiting that website, delete your bookmark for that site, remove the RSS feed from your feedreader and resist the temptation to return to that community website. If you do, chances are you'll be active there again on a regular basis and become frustrated with whatever provoked you in the first place. It's not worth fighting for something that really is outside your control. Avoid emotional attachment as much as possible.

So here are my tips:

• Completely remove all traces of that website from your computer – bookmarks, RSS/Atom feeds, history and so on. Turn off e-mail notifications from that particular website or if that's not possible, remove your e-mail ID from that website (or turn it into something nonsensical).
• Don't post farewell messages. It attracts flaming and sarcasm and you'll be tempted to respond again to those messages thus creating a chain reaction. Also by leaving quietly, you keep yourself in the good books of that community.
• Try to find another online community which interests you or just stop using the Internet so much. There is a life outside.
• Don't get addicted to social networking websites. It's fun once in a while, but they offer nothing more than a glorified contact list. Your real friends will always contact you by e-mail.

The internet is a useful place to get information, but there are also addictive websites out there. Avoid the temptation to waste hours (or days) of your life on online communities that don't serve any useful purpose for you.

There's a time when I was an active member of more than half a dozen internet communities. Of the four or five years since I've had non-dial-up based internet connections (I cannot, in honesty, call it broad-band) my internet usage has sky-rocketed. There were times when I literally counted the seconds as I logged in to my e-mail account and logged out. I was so aware of my internet usage that I hardly got online for more than five or ten minutes at a stretch. That kind of thing really didn't promote what we take for granted today – blogging, social networking, file sharing (especially video sharing) and discussion groups/forums. As far as I was concerned, the internet was a medium for information exchange. If I had a particularly big document to browse online, I saved it for off-line reading and disconnected as soon as I could. Ah… the days :wink:

Read the rest of this entry »