Jamie's Random Musings on Video IM
Having spent a good part of the last year struggling with a variety of video chat and IM programs, I have decided to write a few things down and see what other people have to say about them.
Monday 3 March 2008, 2:38 PM
Skype Pornography
Skype users are becoming increasingly irritated with the steadily rising flood of pop-up pornographic messages and pictures. As usual with user support requests, complaints and suggestions, Skype is totally ignoring their users. Here is the situation:
When someone wants to add you to their Skype contact list, they send you a contact request. This request contains their name, picture, and whatever text they write to ask you to add them. All of this pops up in the middle of your screen, and you can then either accept or deny the request. Unfortunately, spammers and pornographers have discovered this "feature", so now what you get unexpectedly appearing on your screen is often a lewd or outright pornographic picture, with some correspondingly suggestive text. If you are in the middle of a business meeting this can be embarrassing. But if it is on your home computer, where you have loaded Skype so your kids can talk to their grandparents or whatever, it suddenly becomes a much larger and much more personal problem!
There is nothing you can do to stop this pornography from popping up on your screen. Think about that, and read it again. IF YOU USE SKYPE, THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP THIS PORNOGRAPHY FROM POPPING UP ON YOUR SCREEN AT ANY TIME. Skype has made it perfectly clear that they are not interested in stopping this, or in making it possible for Skype users to block it.
The only suggestions from Skype "support" (for the very few who have gotten any response at all), and from the "experts" in the Skype User Forum, is to change your security settings to accept calls and chat requests only from people in your contact list. This has no effect whatsoever on contact requests, however. Then they say that you can block future contact requests from the same person - but of course, if that person is continually creating new Skype accounts, they can send the same garbage to you over and over again. (That makes me wonder how many of Skype's vaunted "250 million users" are actually multiple accounts set up and abandoned by spammers)
There are simple solutions to this problem. Just not showing the picture in a connection request would be a huge step forward. Treating the request as just another "event", which is flagged in the main Skype window, rather than suddenly, unexpectedly opening a window, would virtually eliminate the problem.
Unfortunately, as I said at the beginning, Skype has shown no interest in doing anything about this problem. In the long run, though, they are going to have to something. It would be nice, especially for our children, if it were sooner rather than later.
PreviousComments on this post
That famous slogan "Not safe for work" now applies to Skype!
it's a good example of bad customer service, they just have to simply do away with the picture, or atleast display it only when the user clicks on the link.
