April 10, 2006
I once again have left LDSLinkup, and I think this time it is for good. Jed (the owner) has a good website, but his rules and management are a bit medieval, so he won’t get any good advertisement from me. It’s a blessing in disguise though as I’ve been wanting to leave the site for a long time, but couldn’t on my own. It was too fun talking politics there. And even though I got banned from the political board, on my friends board, I created a thread called “Thoughts on Politics” that went over 1000 posts!
I’ve been on that site for a year and a half, started posting in September, 2004, on the 13th with an awesome thread called “Why Is Osama Bin Laden Still Alive?” In its entirety, that thread got over 1300 posts and was quite polemic. That question needed to be asked, and still needs to be asked of the Bush Administration. Why is the person who attacked us (Osama Bin Laden) roaming free and the person who did not attack us (Saddam Hussein) sitting in a court room?
On Linkup, I posted the most out of anybody on the entire website, posting a total of almost 40,000 posts (just on the regular message boards) and probably another 1500 or so on the friends boards. Only one other individual came close to being as frequent of a poster as I was, and that was Douglas (aka Mavs, Go Mavs, etc). He probably posted a total of 35,000 posts, and he recently was kicked out of the website.
This is where my beef with Jed comes in. He’s kicking people off his entire site for posts on the message boards, when he could easily just ban people from posting, so that they could still use the other more valuable functions on his site, such as collecting a list of all your friends in one place so it makes it easier to communicate with them. It’s funny, because Jed is a pretty smart guy, graduating from Stanford and Harvard among other places, and is a millionaire entrepreneur, but yet he can’t see something this easy….
In any case, I am very appreciative of the site, because that is where I met my wife. Yes, I found my love on the internet. We weren’t attracted to each other as we were chatting online though; we were just friends. But one day, as I was living in Rhode Island and she in New York City, I decided to go down and visit the city. She showed me around, and I found that I was attracted to her. The rest is history. 
That is perhaps why it has been difficult to leave the site, because of its importance in my life. I had waited for so long to find a good woman, and this site was the means to that end.
But now begin my post-linkup days.
In these post linkup days, I will keep up my political thoughts here on RHMD’s Thoughts on Politics. This blog will be more for day to day things that I may feel like writing. I’ll spend more time on creative things, such as stories or music….at least I hope to be getting back into that. Creative blocks are a pain sometimes!
So that is that
April 11, 2006 at 1:54 am
Dan, Linkup is going to be wierd without you and Doug. I usually don’t post on the politics board because I don’t want to get into fights with people, but I enjoy reading what people have to say and see different points of view. But, I guess that if you had all that time to post 40,000 posts, you can redirect it and now you will be spending it changing diapers and staying up all night feeding a new baby instead! I’m happy for you and Jamie
April 11, 2006 at 1:24 pm
thanks Bonfire.
yes, it is good to be away from linkup now. I actually had the inkling of being creative last night, of wanting to get in front of the computer and try composing some music again.
i best get to it before the baby is born!
Dan–>
June 13, 2008 at 1:36 pm
You know, Dan, I completely agree with you about the rules and management of LDS LinkUp being completely medieval…and getting worse as time goes on and they get paranoid about people using the site to stalk people (or whatever it is they are so freakish about). I joined LinkUp in, I think, 2003, and I am finally tired of all the crap. I am totally glad that you sort of met your wife through LinkUp. I am sure there are many successful “hookups” made through the site’s existence. However, when I was first on LinkUp I would talk to members of the opposite sex, even going so far as to allow a few of them to meet me, and unfortunately, being over age 25, I often had men over the age of 26 or 27 talking to me. They would seem really nice, really intelligent, really charming, and then, upon meeting, the flaw was discovered. Many older men in the church seem to have the notion that just because they are older, the same rules of chastity don’t apply to them. So long as they aren’t having sexual relations, they think it’s okay to have passionate make-out sessions on first dates, try to allow their hands to wander a little more freely than they should, and then they are actually upset when you don’t want any part of it…as if they have been falsely misled on LinkUp, thinking older girls should be willing to let their boundaries with chastity slide “just a little” too. The first time it happened, I thought, “Yeah, bad experience this time. Most LDS men won’t be this way,” and I continued socializing. Horrofically, the pattern repeated itself 2 or 3 more times before I knew LDS LinkUp was not where I wanted to meet my potential partners. So, I could overlook the fact that there are guys on the site with obviously declining morals, and I contnued using the site to stay in touch with old friends from the mission who are in another country as well as old high school and college friends. Unfortunately, in spite of knowing better, I finally gave in to meeting one last guy on LinkUp…he was a friend of some of my favorite families from my mission, so he had to come highly qualified, right? EGHHHH!! Wrong. This experience was the most costly and the most emotionally taxing! Upon my first trip to Europe, I suspected that he wasn’t being completely honest with me. Nonetheless, he seemed charming and witty, and he knew how to sweet talk a woman! (I completely disregarded the fact that he was the first man I ever heard say “Oh Shut Up, Woman!” to his mother…and ignored the nagging in my head that said, “If he’ll treat his mother that way, you won’t be any different.”
While I was in Europe for that first trip, we attended a church dance together, and the whole time there was another American girl throwing dagger looks my way. He reassured me that she was just heartbroken because she had moved to Europe with hopes of dating him but he had crushed any hope of that. Well, a few days later she shows up at church on Sunday and we have a repeat of her behavior at the dance. Also on that visit, he trash-talked three other American girls he met through LinkUp, and it didn’t sit right with me, but he was still so charming. I returned to Europe at least twice more before he showed up in America with a RING! I knew in my heart it was the wrong thing, but I also knew he had a week left in America that I had to be entertaining him, so I hesitantly accepted the ring, knowing I would send it back to England with him. We took a road trip through Utah in that week he was here, and the last straw for me was when he invited another girl (a “family friend” 
to a homecoming dinner with him and told me I couldn’t come…this was after he had stayed up until 3 in the morning talking to her while I was in bed! Was I not the fiancee? The woman he supposedly loved? I am NOT the jealous type, but I would think any woman would have felt quite justified in being treated the way I was. This incident sure made it easy to give back that diamond! It was only after we broke up that I was contacted by 2 of the girls on LinkUp he had trash-talked when I met him on that first trip to Europe. They had seen the young man and I listed as “In a relationship” for about a year only to return to single again, and they just had to know “my story” and share their own. It turns out that when I was in Europe that first time, Mr. Charming was actually leading on FIVE American women, every single one having gone to Europe to see him (at his invitation) and two of them just happened to be there at the same time I was there…boy howdy was he struggling to juggle 3 women in addition to all of the others he was also wooing on LinkUp! No wonder the one girl gave me dagger looks…she probably thought his sweet talking meant she was THE ONE, and then he shows up at a dance out of nowhere with me! I would’ve probably been upset too if I were her and had traveled all that way to see this guy and he was so sweet and spent lots of time with her and sweet talked her only to find out later that it was all a lie! So anyhow, I really would caution people against being too trusting about meeting “returned missionaries, amazingly sweet charming individuls, recommend holders” on LinkUp. Just because someone went on a mission and holds a temple recommend doesn’t make them exempt from deceptive schemes and, in many cases, a lack of moral boundaries. One of the girls on LinkUp decided to post some comments about this young man to warn other girls about his schemes, but of course it seemed unkind and was taken down. That is one of the hugest flaws of LDS LinkUp. Everyone can have 300 friends saying all kinds of sweet things about them, even if they have never really met in person, and it makes all sorts of people seem really attractive to other people. However, when one of those people happens to be abusive, mean, breaks the law of chastity, uses a man or woman inappropriately and then leaves them, nothing can be said about it, leaving 300 potentially false “amazing” things to be said about the person but nothing TRUTHFUL being said to protect others from experiencing inappropriate things at the hands of a supposed active church member who would never do anything inappropriate
to other people.
But, I went off on that tangent and didn’t even get to what I first got on here to write. With regards to the rules and management of LinkUp being medieval…that’s the most recent. Ever since getting married to the man of my dreams (who I met at college instead of online…my much preferred method of dating!), I haven’t spent much time on LinkUp. I hadn’t been on LinkUp for a year until I recently learned I was pregnant and attempted to post my ultrasound pictures. For a week I kept checking and checking and checking to see if my pictures had been posted, and finally I emailed them to ask what the hold-up was. They refused to post my ultrasound pictures because it had my full name listed in small print on the corner of the picture, and it hadn’t even occured to me to look and see if the picture was rejected…it was a picture of a fetus, not a porn star! I guess I can try to be empathetic and say that at least they are trying to protect people, but that is seriously archaic! I had posted the same pictures on Facebook and MySpace and hadn’t even realized my name was on them…I don’t think anyone looking at the pictures would have even known my name was on thre…it was THAT small! My question is, if it’s MY NAME and MY PICTURE and I don’t have any concerns about safety and it isn’t something inappropriate or nude or offensve, why shouldn’t I be allowed to post it on LinkUp? So I erased all the names off the ultrasound with a picture editing tool and reposted. The picture finally got approved (I can’t believe it wasn’t denied since the baby wasn’t wearing any clothing or because someone might THINK of sex when looking at an ultrasound picture…but that’s my sarcasm coming in…I’ll try to stay focused!). I wanted to see how it looked from a profile other than my own, so I used a family member’s profile to check out my own profile. The next day, I got to work only to find an email saying my account had been shut down due to creating a fake profile. A fake profile? I was seriously confused as all get out. It didn’t take long for the family member to ask me what was wrong with their account since they knew I had logged onto it the day before and it was working. It was then that I realized that the LDS LinkUp admin thought my family member had a fake profile simply because I had accessed it ONE TIME from an IP address in a different state. I was appalled and wrote back to LinkUp Admin telling them they needed to turn the account back on, and they sent a threatening email in return saying “If your family member wants to write to us, we will respond to them, but not to you. And when your family member does write to us, they better be truthful because we know more than you think.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. They were talking to me like I had been stalking and molesting little boys or something. I hadn’t even used my account in A YEAR and then all of a sudden they are acting like there’ve been all sorts of inappropriate emails/threats/stalking taking place from my account. Because I had accessed my family members account to look at my ultrasound pics and it was in another state, they accused us of having one account for multiple users. COME ON! You can see anyone’s profile on LinkUp…you don’t have to be their friend, you don’t have to be in their region, you don’t have to be anything but a member. So why on God’s green earth would a person need to have some FAKE account? I mean, of course I would if I were stalking little boys or threatening people, but there hadn’t been emails sent from my account or any of my family members’ accounts in over a year…none of us had even logged onto our accounts in the last year! So, they made false accusations against me half the day (the first time in my life I’ve been treated like a criminal, and it was by a supposed kind, welcoming, LDS site) telling me I was authoring fake accounts and lying by not keeping their User Terms of Agreement. As it turns out, my family member had indeed created more than one account over the last 5 years, not intentionally but because we live in a world of so many passwords and websites and it’s hard to remember sometimes if we really did register at Amazon.com or WalMart.com only to find out when we try to register again that we already have an account and just need to relocate our password somehow. As it turns out, my family member woke up this morning to an email teling her not to contact LDS LinkUp anymore via phone or email, AND they listed her email addresses AND passwords that were used on the couple of accounts she had created, out there for all of cyberspace and hackers and whoever else to see her passwords that she also uses on bank accounts, utility bills, and other websites which contain her credit card information. So, my family member has since contacted the Better Business Bureau, the creator of LinkUp (Jed), and has deleted her profiles with LinkUp. I can’t say I blame her…a whole day’s worth of accusatory, inflmmatory emails sent to both of us and all because I had the nerve to “be dishonest” and use her account to view my ultrasound pictures. How could I have done such a thing? After they spent a day emailing us both extensively, I had to ask myself if the admin don’t have better things to do with their time than to watch for a profile being used one time outside of it’s IP address. Heck, I would have to caution anyone who lives at home with their parents and other siblings who may also have LinkUp accounts to be careful…they may accuse you of creating fake profiles. And if you go on vacation, think twice before you will check your LinkUp profile at the CyberBar because they may cancel your account and accuse you of having multiple people use one account. And, if you ever share your password with your spouse, best friend, roommate, or family member, THAT is breaking their terms of agreement, so be careful to make sure they can’t read your mind or find out that you’ve shared it because sharing passwords is also grounds for shutting down your account. I will tell you, there isn’t a password of mine my husband doesn’t know…not to mention the fact that there are multiple utility bills or house payments that say it is against their terms of agreement for anyone other than the primary person on the account to access the information of or make any changes to the account. You better believe, though, that when my husband says “Babe, will you get online and make that payment” or “Will you call and change our phone number on that account?” and they ask me for his social security number, password, and ask if I am authorized to be accessing the account, of course I say YES! What wife doesn’t have to pay bills even when they aren’t in her husband’s name, even if it means logging on to his computer account. You don’t see those companies freaking out and saying they don’t want your money because you are creating fake accounts or breaking their Terms of Aggreement!
LDS LinkUp is not hassle-free, the admin have too much time on their hands, they treat law abiding, good people like criminals, and make false accusations based on faulty logic and unproved accusations. They don’t spend their time coming up with ways to kick the immoral and rude people off of the website, or trying to find people who may be using the services to stalk or take advantage of people, but they sure will deny innocent pictures and freak out over someone knowing someone else’s password, as if it doesn’t happen every day! I would highly recommend Facebook…it’s my favorite and it is totally hassle-free. If you won’t go for Facebook, there’s always MySpace. You may get the inappropriate content, but at least you have the freedom to post what you want to post and log in with your spouses account and not get treated like a piece of dirt. I am all for saying Beware of LDS LinkUp for more reasons than one, and if you have any similar experiences, don’t hesitate to share!
June 16, 2008 at 8:42 am
wow Krista, you sure had a lot on your mind there.
June 22, 2008 at 10:40 am
Ha! I often do have a lot to say! Thanks for allowing me to say it! I love your website and love that you also have a lot to say! It’s a sign of a great writer, maybe!?