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The Shady Business Practices of Classmates.com
eldavojohn writes ""Some of your classmates are trying to contact you!" reads one e-mail. Attempts to remove yourself from the mailing list may only result in more mailings from the site of ill repute. Well, Ars Techica brings us news of a suit against Classmates.com. You don't need to look far for anti-classmates.com sentiment spreading like wild fire across the tubes." Good next target: ads that say "you've already won" some expensive toy.
I signed up a long time ago, before myspace or facebook existed. It's a totally worthless site.
I've done my part to screw with their business model... they let you post a picture, and my "picture" is a gif of my email address. :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Mostly negative stuff about classmates here; and I don't disagree with the lawsuit, which is about tactics, not content. But let me tell you a couple of stories about how classmates contributed positively to a couple of situations.
I had a colleague who told me an intriguing and sorrowful story. She got pregnant during her very first sexual experience. Her mother was in denial until the baby started kicking. Her mother then proceeded to put her daughter in an apartment in a nearby city, cut her red hair and dye it black, and wait for the baby to come to term. It was born and whisked away for adoption before my colleague laid eyes on it. (What a mother, eh?) The father was never informed and told my colleague was spending the semester overseas. Mother arranged letters to be sent from France until they dwindled to nothing. I was told this story maybe 20 years ago, and the thing is, I knew the father slightly because I knew I had see a picture of him on the swim team in my annual, who had gone to my high school (along with Ted Bundy). About 5 years ago my colleague, through her own research, found her long-lost son. We decided to try to contact the father. I went through classmates.com and found him. My colleague paid for my gold membership for a year. I contacted the father via email, set up a meeting, and he and my colleague were re-united. He was, of course, very surprised to know he had a grown son. Father and son got into contact, and, for better or worse, both natural parents are in contact with their son. Naturally, they do not replace the 'real' family who raised the kid, but it certainly expanded all their lives. I didn't re-up with Classmates. I get an email once in awhile, but it's certainly nothing overwhelming or particularly bothersome.
The second thing classmates has allowed me to do is researh in genealogy. A few of us were into DNA analysis of the family (for our own reasons) going back to the late 1700's when our ancestor in question lived. His name was Jeremiah Pack and we wanted to know his ethnic background along with that of his wife. We found direct descendents of Jeremiah pretty readily, but finding direct descendents of his wife was a daunting task because surnames of females change every generation. After several years of research we finally found a 4th cousin or so who had a complete chart with names. I was able to go onto classmates.com and find the names, and write to the likely suspects. I found a couple of women who were direct descendents of Jeremaih's wife through the female lines, therefore their MtDNA was a match. We were able to do the testing and come to a suitable conclusion. This is not as 'heart-rending' a story as the first one, but I have to tell you it settled a generations-old mystery and legend for our families.
In both cases, the positive conclusions would not have been possible without classmates.com. That doesn't forgive their questionable marketing tactics, but let's not claim the service has no value. It depends on what you are looking for.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Many of us who are 30+ associate those sites with the "OMG PONIES!" crowd.
I'm one of those. Ehm, the old guys, not the pony crowd. I took the opportunity to try to find out what Facebook is like because someone recently asked me if I had a page there, but it seems that you can't do anything unless you have an account and are logged in. The help section of the site doesn't seem to feature screenshots. Is there a way to get a feeling of what the site's about without creating a fake account? My old age keeps me from just entering all my personal data and worry later. Maybe there are some pages set to "public for everyone", so some URLs would be nice.
... I am the one who took the bait and signed up for the gold membership. Classmate.com emails were already going to my spam folder, but I look that over before I empty it, and their's claimed that I had "2 New Guestbook Entries!" or something like that. At that point I decided to see if anyone I knew had recently added themselves to the list, and sure enough, and old friend had not very long ago.
Suspecting that this person may have left me a guestbook entry, I bought the gold membership, instead of just tracking down his phone number. Upon logging in with my new gold status, I was rewarded by finding two guestbook entries from names I had never heard of and not from my school.
In my defense, I am usually smarter than this. However, the good news was that when I emailed support asking to have any and all of my information removed, they complied without complaint in a timely manner, and even refunded my payment. I was shocked.
The moral here is, if you get caught in a moment of weakness and stupidity like I did, send them an email demanding to have your info removed immediately, and maybe you will get a refund too.
I kept getting messages from Classmates.com telling me that former classmates of mine sent me messages. Of course, you can only view those messages if you pay Classmates.com. I knew this was a scam, but decided on a test. I altered my profile (first time I did that since setting it up years back) to include my e-mail address and a short message: "I don't read messages posted here. If you want to contact me, e-mail me at USERNAME at DOMAIN dot COM." (That e-mail address gets enough spam that I didn't mind exposing it like that.)
I keep getting "people" leaving me messages on Classmates.com and no real classmates have sent messages to my e-mail address. My theory is that these "messages" are:
1. Nonexistent with the e-mails serving only to goad people to pay for their "premium" service.
2. From Classmates.com itself or some third party company trying to get me to buy stuff from them.
3. From an actual classmate who is such a huge idiot that he/she doesn't know how to read in which case why would I want to pay money to contact them back?
Classmates.com is nothing but one huge scam.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Yes, I fell for eHarmony. They are much worse. You know, us technical guys get so wrapped up in our work, we don't have time to meet any decent women.
Well, eHarmony will bug the heck out of you and "convince" you to sign up for a 7 day trail. During that 7 days you will get all kinds of "Matches" with interesting, and attractive women. Some will start communication with you.
You're thinking to yourself - this is great! I'm meeting more women then I've ever met in bars or anywhere else! Multiple matches keep showing up and your communicating with more of them. And you are thinking: "Wow - I'm going to be dating 3 or 4 woman!".
Then the 7 days passes. All the sudden, the matches slow down. A lot of the ones you were talking to suddenly stop communication with you. ( were they even real women in the first place? Or just employees of eHarmony.com masquerading as potential dates? ) Down to 3 or 4 matches a week. None very interesting. Not nearly as attractive as the matches in the first 7 days.
You email eHarmony and you call them ( finding the phone number takes a little work - they didn't have it on their website when I was trying to contact them ). A refund is not available after 7 days. You are out 165 dollars, if you paid for the 6 months.
They say you need to tweak your match "settings" to get more matches. Well, heck, I have every race and religion checked, plus I have from 23 to 38 in the age range, and I have 100 miles from my zip code checked. I live in a city with over 5 million people in the metro area as well.
After a few weeks, the matches are 1 or 2 a week. One a few ever respond. Most don't even communicate. After 3 months, the "trickle" of women is a steady 1 to 2 a week.
If you call eHarmony at this point, they either give you the "you have to be patient, it takes time to find the perfect match" line of BS. If you keep asking for a refund, they start getting annoyed with you.
Emails aren't responded to. I even wrote a snail mail certified letter to the CEO of eHarmony asking for a refund. Nothing. Not even a phone call or a letter. No response. It's like your emails and snail mails go to /dev/null.
Classmates.com? Just a minor annoyance. Someone needs to sue the heck out of eHarmony.com. They are the real scammers. I wish they would get sued big time. I would do it myself, but I didn't keep good records and this happened over a year ago.
Somebody please sue eHarmony??? Please!!!