How do you manage friend request?

I've noticed an occasional surge of friend requests from people whose interest in my writing is problematic. For instance, I've gotten an inordinate number of requests from young, shapely females wearing next to nothing, whose profile picture, uh, deemphasizes their face in favor of the other end.

Those go straight to the bit-bucket.

I also get a lot of requests from people who seem to be in the business of collecting friends. If their profile doesn't say anything about their love of computers or reading or some such, and they have upwards of 700 friends and counting...

bit-bucket.

In my case, that takes care of about 3/4 of my requests, and I can take the time to look more closely at the rest.

And even when I accept friend requests, I mostly unfollow them immediately. Honestly, I don't really care what some fan from Oklahoma did on his Friday night. If they address me directly, I'll read that.

I only have friends as my friends on FB.

Not necessarily people I've met in real life, but people I have known online long enough to chat and laugh with.

I closed my Facebook account . Facebook informed me , in doing so I was banned for life . I idea of total strangers wanting to be my friend, I found so creepy . I'm sure It's all harmless , but you can't help how you feel .

For personal safety and security, it is always best to only add people you know.

I've set up a Facebook page for my author-self, and I have security for my normal account dialled up so only friends-of-friends can add me. Strangers and spambots go to the author-page (which accepts everyone, and requires no maintenance) and real friends go to the personal page.

It's very common for authors to have a page (usually called 'name Author' eg 'Emma Maree Author') for fans and strangers and a personal page, so writer friends won't find this confusing.

stephenf said:

I closed my Facebook account . Facebook informed me , in doing so I was band for life . I idea of total strangers wanting to be my friend, I found so creepy . I'm sure It's all harmless , but you can't help how you feel .

Click to expand...

This is worrying -- closing your Facebook account does not create a message that you were 'banned for life', so I'm a little bit concerned you may have been targeted by a fake Facebook look-a-like site. I would encourage you to ensure you removed your Facebook account properly. AccountKiller has a guide, and is a solid source for removing accounts from almost any website.

Ignore them. They're either bots, or you don't want to know them. (was that harsh?)

EMaree said:

This is worrying --

Click to expand...

It takes two weeks to remove your account from Facebook . During that two weeks Facebook will send a regular , it's not too late , e-mail . Eventually, Facebook point out , once an account has been closed, it can't be reopened . In reality you could open a different account , using a new email address and maybe a different computer . I have not tried to reopen my account , so I'm just guessing you can't .

unless i've posted a comment in someone's thread and they comment on my comment in a nice way and then send a friend-quest....i'll approve them
otherwise, i'll PM them "reason for request?" and if they give a legit reply, i'll friend them. might be a good way to weed out bots and spam friends
i also check out their page for content. if there's no personal feel to the page and just a bunch of crap, i'm not gonna friend you.

I often get requests from people I don't know. Usually fellow cartoonists who came across my profile while setting up their peer networks. I'll approve them if enough of my other peers have, especially if that includes at least a few I actually know, not just folks who have contacted me the same way and whom I haven't heard of since. I'd rather actually know who the person is, but my account has long been lost for private use. It's now my inofficial official profile.

I'm sometimes tempted to get in touch with the ones who don't even have those contacts in common with me and ask how they know me, but I don't because for all I know they might be spammers or scammers trying to phish for my phone number. Almost happened once - I got an apparent friend request from an actual friend whom I was already FB friends with but the person claimed that account got lost or something. First thing they did was ask for my phone number which I was positive my friend had. (Actually, she didn't, as I learned later.) Between that and the fact that the posts were very poorly written, very unlike my friend's who's a fellow writer, gave the attempt away. Also, very out-of-character emojis. Turned out some scammer had copy-pasted her profile.

I get request from young women, too, like what Dennis described above, but that's mostly on Twitter. They also keep Liking whichever Tweet I've set up on top of my profile page. I guess that's why they're called sticky posts.

EMaree said:

For personal safety and security, it is always best to only add people you know.

I've set up a Facebook page for my author-self, and I have security for my normal account dialled up so only friends-of-friends can add me. Strangers and spambots go to the author-page (which accepts everyone, and requires no maintenance) and real friends go to the personal page.

It's very common for authors to have a page (usually called 'name Author' eg 'Emma Maree Author') for fans and strangers and a personal page, so writer friends won't find this confusing.



This is worrying -- closing your Facebook account does not create a message that you were 'banned for life', so I'm a little bit concerned you may have been targeted by a fake Facebook look-a-like site. I would encourage you to ensure you removed your Facebook account properly. AccountKiller has a guide, and is a solid source for removing accounts from almost any website.

Click to expand...

They told me that too actually -- well, not me exactly. I'm not on FB, never have been, but I have a personal email addy with my actual name, which apparently someone who likely has the same name and some add-on or underscore or period with or whatever, mistyped into fb. I got a 'welcome to FB, click here to finish registration of your acct...' or what have you, and at the bottom was 'if you did not attempt to open a fb acct with this email/this is not you click...' it was directing to fb, I checked the addy with a search so...

That page just had a 'clicking this will disable this address/acct from use on fb forever and ever; you won't be able to use it to create an acct again... ' which I clicked because I don't care. I think there was some alternate option to like, send in a ticket or whatever if there was an error.