Help! Since we left Brooklyn for Long Island about 60 years ago I have not had contact when any of my neighborhood or school friends. I joined classmates many years ago with the hope of finding a name I recognized, to connect with and chat about old times. I had about eight High School friends that I was close to, all guys, no girls, I was extremely shy. It was the same for neighborhood friends. All these years on classmates I have not found one name of my close friends, some names sounded familiar they may have been in my classes. Recently "Joyce" popped up on my profile visit a number of times. A few days ago I got a Classmates email from her, she claims I gave her my crew neck sweater because she was chilly back in school. First off she graduated a year after me so it definitely wasn't me, I didn't dated a girl till I met my wife 3 or 4 years after graduation. Plus I don't even remember talking to a girl while I was in high school. I responded by saying I didn't remember that incident, however I would be nice to chat with with a classmate. In the meantime the Classmate sight has pre-selected words that you can leave as compliments to your fellow classmates, she put on my profile that I was "Charming" and "Attractive". When I told her in my email we should chat I meant through the classmates sight. She responded to my email by sending me her phone number and that we don't live too far apart, she lives on Long Island. I want to respond back I think it's the polite thing to do but I'm not interested in phone conversations or getting together if that's in her thoughts. How do I respond politely?
Tony--this is just me and I'm naturally suspicious... but I wouldn't respond at all if I didn't remember her. Sadly there are so many scammers out there nowadays. I'd say use caution if you want to keep in touch with her, and don't give out too much personal information.
That's exactly what my wife said. I sign up for classmates maybe three months out of the year to see if there's anybody there I know, I have found some who had the same teachers and we maybe exchanged 2 emails and that was it. This one makes me nervous she visited my profile again tonight, I think I'm just going to ignore her.
I agree with Beth. If she persists, it might not be a bad idea to contact the Classmates site administrators, tell them you suspect the authenticity of this, and ask for their advice. They may wish to look at "Joyce's" activity to see if she has sent a similar email to others.
I'd be careful as well, although a safer online place to scout the situation out might have less potential for harm. Despite numerous problems that I have had with Facebook, leading to my rarely even logging into the site anymore, that has been where I have been able to connect with relatives whom I hadn't thought of in a while, classmates, former neighbors, co-workers, and students of mine. The high school that I attended has an active Facebook page, and my graduating class has another, although there aren't a whole lot of us left anymore, given that it was a small class, to begin with. I have accounts on Classmates and one or two other similar sites and, although I recognize the other people whose names are there for my class, and some of the lower grades, I haven't made any connections through these sites.
I thought my account on classmates would the ending soon, I checked they had me on automatic renewal I corrected that I'm not planning on renewing. I have to think about Facebook as an option, I did try it for one day that's all I could last so much information poured into my site, photos of people I didn't know, I was overwhelmed. I lasted a few hours, then opt out. Thanks for your help I appreciate it, I think I'll just stick to SOC for for now.
Facebook can be overwhelming unless you set up boundaries, @Tony Page . You can make your account so that only Facebook friends can see your page and anything that you post on Facebook. You can also limit the people that you “follow”, and that will stop their posts from showing up on your facebook page. If you have a friend or family member that uses facebook, ask them to help you set up the restrictions for your account for you, and once you add more of your friends, I who know that you will find it is a great way to keep in touch.
Is there a way to shut out out the random stuff you don't want cluttering the experience, but still leave it open for that long-lost friend to be able to contact you?
You can go to your settings and shut out people and stuff you do not want to see. You will always get some ads, but you can stop all of the little posts about recipes and cute puppies and stuff like that. If you follow a person (or company, etc) then whatever they post will show up on your facebook page. The only people that I follow are my 3 kids, because I want to see what they post, and they do not post junk posts. To see other friends pages, I go to my friends list and just open their page whenever I feel like doing that. Every few days , I just run down through the list and open most of the pages to see what is happening with my friends. You can set your page so that friends only can see it, or only you can see it, and the same with your list of friends. If you join some of the wonderful facebook groups, you can either follow those or not, too. I always unfollow as soon as I join a group, and stop notifications, that way, I only see stuff from the groups when I look at them. On my ipad, when I open facebook, at the top right corner is my name, and then a little down arrow, and that is how you go to settings. I don’t know how it works on a regular computer.
So is there a sweet spot where you filter out the junk, yet that random person you went to high school with 50 years ago and who you completely forgot about can still find you and contact you through it? Or is it not possible to leave it that open and not get flooded with garbage? Sorry to sorta derail Tony's thread, but this has to do with those lost friends being able to find us while we concurrently try to enforce some degree of privacy.
Yes, I think you might have to have the settings where anyone can see that you have a Facebook page. Then you can search for long lost friends, and they can search for you. I posted a story on here about tracking down a long-lost dear friend that I had not seen or heard from in almost 50 years. She doesn’t have facebook, but her daughters do, and I finally found one of them by doing internet searches for my friend’s name, and the girls names. Once i did that , I messaged both of her daughters. It actually is not derailing @Tony Page ’s thread , because he was also wanting to find a way to reconnect with long lost friends, and Classmates is probably one of the poorest ways to do that. Facebook would work much better for him as well, once he adjusted his settings properly.
It's almost as though we can imagine the arguments when phone service came to each area. It's all a blessing and a curse.