Being safe on Alive Not Dead

As you guys have noticed in my Admin Bear postings, we’ve been building alot of tools to help you find your friends on Alive Not Dead including the contact importer, the members tab, the 2nd-degree friends page, and advanced user search.

We’ve been lucky here at Alive Not Dead in the fact that we have a very tight, active online community, probably because most of you were acquainted with one another through the old Alive web site or the official Jet Li web site. As a consequence, I’m glad that everyone is becoming friendly to each other and even becoming friends around the world.

One thing I want to discourage, though: Please don’t post your email address or any other personally contact information like your mobile number to the public. I know that alot of you want to make it easier for people to be able to automatically add you as a friend. We purposefully separated out Friends from Fans and the general public so that people can safely post personal content using the “Viewable by Friends only” feature available in the Advanced Options area of the Blogs and Photos. In general, unlike some other online communities, we’re trying to discourage “Friend Collectors” – people who go out there and spam everyone on the site with friend requests when they don’t even know the person they’re requesting. That’s why we stuck in the extra step of requesting personal contact information to verify that you actually know the person.

I REALLY discourage you openly asking people to add you as a friend when you don’t know them. However, if you INSIST on wanting to tell everyone to add you, posting your Invitation URL in the “Find Friends” page rather than your email address or mobile number. They won’t need personal contact info if they use the URL.

REALLY: Posting your email address or mobile number is UNSAFE online. Not only will your email address/phone number get picked up by web spiders and be added to spam/telemarketing lists, but you also might become the target of unwanted online predators. We’ve been really lucky so far on the site in the fact that we have a relatively tight, community - According to our new member search, 59% of our users are female which is astoundingly high for a general online community. I think it makes us more “civil” than other communities out there. Let’s make sure that we continue to keep it safe – don’t become the target of undesirable predators by leaving your personal information out there for everyone to see.