People who forward chain letters/internet petitions

[tabbyblack13]

I will send the snops link to people all the time when I get the petitions to stop a bill or something else. The chain letters I delete. I hate them so much. It got bad when my sorority sisters kept sending them to my email box. I had to announced that I do not want or need them. The ones that claim you will get bad luck are the worst. They are also coming out for the phones too.

[fireheart17]

I don't mind LOLcats, mostly because I have a thing for cats. But chain emails and the like...they go straight into my spam folder. My mum gets a few of those jokes from time to time, but with the chain stuff deleted.

[TehShush]

Funny stuff is allowed; 'serious' stuff, which is actually spam dressed up as a sob story, gets deleted.

The only petition I allow is the one to ban DHMO.

[Lace Neil Singer]

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/children/children.asp

http://www.snopes.com/glurge/glurge.asp

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/petition.asp

Here are the snopes pages I've worn out in my mission to singlehandedly ruin people's fun/stop people sending me crap. XD I don't mind funny stuff being sent to me; but I draw the line at internet crap about so called sick children and petitions. -.-

[HYHYBT]

The ones I hate the worst are the heavily-loaded political ones with insistent "forward or delete" notices attached. Never mind the actual content; demanding that those who disagree with you must remain silent, rather than contradict (either to you or to others) not just your opinions, but often your grossly inaccurate facts, is... what's the word I'm looking for?

[Andara Bledin]

I particularly like the heavily political ones that masquerade as being "sensible ideas" hiding massive bigotry that are also full of lies. I take great delight in responding to those with corrections and notes about how bigoted they really are.

^-.-^

[Kaylyn]

I think I mentioned this before on here. Back when Obama was running for president, my nephew's girlfriend (or were they married by then, I can't remember) forwarded one going around that said something about Obama being a black supremacist and planned on sending all our money to Africa or something. A bunch of other crap as well. And it said, "This has been VERIFIED on Snopes!" Curious, I looked up the Snopes article, and as expected, there was a giant red FALSE on the article. I forwarded the bulletin and added the Snopes info and a lengthy chastising at the top, saying if you're gonna hate the man, hate him for what he actually is, and not based on lies being spread around Myspace.

Later that week, I got MY message forwarded back to me by my nephew...with the header deleted and the lies just being spread again. I forget why I could tell it was my message, something in the messy delete was left over that signaled it was my message. I replied to my nephew and unfriended his girlfriend (I never liked her anyway). And then later the girlfriend BEGGED me to friend her back...guess her entire existence is threatened by her loss of a Myspace friend.

She said, "if you don't like it, don't read it." Yeah, I get that, my point was to educate people, and my explanation was deleted in order to continue circulating the lie. It was about then I discovered Firefox's Greasemonkey scripts, one of which was to blacklist annoying people from your Myspace bulletins.

Also, back when I was in the family email circle, I used to get forwards ALL the time. I sent a Snopes reply back ONCE (I think in reply to the gang initiation/headlight flashing one, or perhaps the woman who almost got raped at a gas station because a guy snuck into her car while she was inside prepaying) and got a private email from my mother, saying it was rude of me to do that and don't do it again, because WHAT IF such a thing were true, or people started doing it because this got spread around?

[Tanasi]

I have several friends that are retired and at times have so little to do they just forward everything they get. If I only receieved the email once it wouldn't be so bad but they're all also friends and I'll get the same blamed email a dozen time or more. They also have no concept of deleting all addys from the email or what bcc means. Then there's the new users that don't understand why their computers stay messed up from spyware, viruses, etc. but will forward everything they received especially if it has an attachment.
I also have a customer that's very religious and fowards lots of chain mail especially those that say if you don't foward this then you hate Jesus. I don't want to loose her business so I just suck it up and go on. Also have another customer that's kinda stuck with me and she's also a friend that forwarded the same stuff, I started hammering her with that stuff and she got the message and stopped.
Just think how much bandwidth would be saved if spam and chainmail disappeared??? It would be almost like email had disappeared.

[LexiaFira]

first few times i politely send them the link to snopes or similar sight
by the third or fourth time I start being less polite and start copying and pasting the info about hey this forward/chain mail what have you is a lie stop it.
anything else ignored gets a block and family members get sent to junk mail.
my MIL has not taken the hint so alot of hers go there mostly because she doesn't put a title half the time
yes i am mean but, have grown tired of it and my tolerance level on email has dropped

[MadMike]

What bugs me is that the perps tend to be people I otherwise have a certain amount of respect for, are otherwise intelligent, or whatever.

My brother was guilty of that for awhile. He graduated second in his class, and yet I had to tell him several times that there's no such thing as an "email tracking device", and we weren't going to get free beer / Disney tickets / Microsoft products / etc. just for forwarding emails.

At least he was nice about it and admitted that he made a mistake. One of my other friends blew up at me when I tried to tell her.

[Greenday]

I get a lot of pissed messages when I tell people their chain letter they post on facebook is a hoax. I'm trying to tell you that it's fake and you don't have to worry about it happening so why get all pissed?

[Andara Bledin]

I take a rather perverse pleasure in pointing out to people that they shouldn't be such gullible rubes. Not sure why. Maybe it feeds into some sense of superiority.

Regardless, I tend to be removed from lists rather quickly.

^-.-^

[bainsidhe]

My sister forwards chain mail and political rants/jokes/petitions. Don't think she takes any of them seriously, she's just entertained by them and sometimes agrees with them. I got her to stop sending most of the dirty jokes/racist/child abuse ones though. I left her a scathing message when I opened a text showing an image of a toddler beaten to hell and also when I received a text with a rather racist & offensive political rant. I've also expressed my anger about the penises. I've never considered myself a prude, but can I open a text message without an image of a penis please. Now I get very little spam from her (yay!) and we have actual conversations by text. Finally!

[Teysa]

Someone had to do it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSA7kKNu2Y

And yeah I agree, those chain letters are really annoying.

[HYHYBT]

I get a lot of pissed messages when I tell people their chain letter they post on facebook is a hoax. I'm trying to tell you that it's fake and you don't have to worry about it happening so why get all pissed?

People hate being wrong, they hate feeling stupid, and they particularly hate what they perceive as being *called* stupid. Plus many don't understand the difference between pointing out a factual error and disagreeing over an opinion, or at least don't see that one might point out a factual error for reasons other than emotion, ideological differences, or whatever, but simply out of wanting to have the record straight.