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Recently many of you on our mailing lists will have got invitations seemingly from RCEF personnel inviting you to join social networking site Goodreads. Whilst the site does offer a legitimate service, their methods of finding new users can only be classified as spam. Allow me to explain.

One of our core members within RCEF signed up for a Goodreads account, and as is often the case with social networking sites they were asked for access to their email contact list in order to find which or their contacts are already on their network. Goodreads then unscrupulously sent invites to every single one of her contacts, including people she hadn’t emailed in years. As these contacts included all core RCEF members and some of our mailing lists virtually everyone on RCEF’s contacts database was sent an invitation.

RCEF wishes to apologise for this mess, but would like to stress that it was an honest error by a member who was tricked into sending an invite to all her contacts. Goodread’s creator, Otis Chandler, has himself claimed that it was a mistake on their part, but this is a lie. It is inconceivable in this day and age that someone with the knowledge to launch a social networking site (and let it be known Mr. Chandler is a software engineer, not some clueless IT-phobe) that something like this could happen without premeditation.

The fault really lies with Goodreads and here are some steps you can take to avoid their emails/spam:

1. Mark any emails from goodreads.com as spam. Hopefully in time your email client’s spam filter will blacklist this company.
2. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, sign up for the service they offer. If I cheated you once, would you sign another contract with me? No, didn’t think so.
3. Spread the word – this company and the people behind it are dishonest and their service is not to be trusted.

I realise these are strong words and not the type of language you’re accustomed to from RCEF, but I’m writing this in a personal capacity as Director of IT. Social networking sites are popping up every day, most of which offer legitimate and very useful services. But the danger that they abuse access to our data is very real, and companies like Goodreads lower the level of trust we have in legitimate sites.

Therefore it is important that we punish those who act unscrupulously by taking the measures outlined above. If our actions are effective then hopefully the bad PR will cause the next social networking startup to think twice before adopting such shady practices.

Steven Liu

Director of Information Technology

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