a query for those who pay attention to these things

[the_siobhan]

OK, so what are serial adders, and what's the deal with them?

('Cause I appear to have one, and I'm trying to figure out what the purpose of this is supposed to be.)

Comments

[mrph.livejournal.com]

It's bargain basement trolling. With an agenda. As I understand it, the history goes like this...

For a while now people - well, some people - have been moaning to the powers of LJ that they had no control over who friended them, and that this Just Wasn't Fair. Whole host of reasons why people feel that way, of course - some valid, many just highschool drama or misunderstandings as to how the 'friends' system works.

Then someone started a petition, which you might have seen, complaining that they could be friended by "child molesters, rapists, murderers, thieves, spammers and hackers", that this wasn't against the Livejournal TOS, and that something had to be done. There was some discussion in lj_biz, but the verdict seems to be that it's not worth major changes right now.

...and that's when we really started getting the serial adders. Usually with things like bestiality and pedophilia listed among their interests. Some of them are just gleeful trolls, but some of them are probably people creating a problem so they can justify a cure (everyone I know who posted on lj_biz to say that there wasn't a real problem immediately got friended by two newly created serial adders, for example...).

Then again, I'm a cynical git so I would suspect something like that, wouldn't I?