In the spirit of my “let me google that for you” post recently, let me share with you another little piece of online etiquette that is bound to make you less annoying to friends, family, and coworkers.
It’s called Snopes.com. And it’s the place to go before sending on any forwarded warning/sob story/wealth generating chain letter.
If you send me a stupid forward about a missing child who needs prayer, or a sick kitten, and I find it on snopes, I am going to mercilessly call you out on your stupidity in the hope that you’ll learn your lesson. These letters are designed to clog up the Internet.
You don’t even have to go to snopes – a quick google will normally kill any stupid internet rumour.
Comments
just wait till you’re on the pcq mailing list…
You haven’t even mentioned 6mb powerpoint presentations of sickly messages and happy snaps…
YES! I HATE getting those emails.
Amy – the emails Nathan blogged about are worse. People forward on the “powerpoint presentations of sickly messages and happy snaps” because they enjoyed it and think you might too. They forward these hoax emails because they’re gullible.
I am finding recently that the two items are getting combined in one – sickly sweet messages and then the killer sad child story at the end…
Also, those 6mb powerpoint presentations usually get you into trouble with your IT people for clogging up the servers…
hehehehe – welcome to my world.
After 9 years I finally had trained most users to at least check with me before sending broadcast email. Then I changed jobs.