If I was into women and really, really desperate this might have been a good thing
Several years back my internetting mainly centered around fansites for a certain band I won't name. I left due to a combination of loss of interest and a massive fallout which is another story entirely, but the main point is I had absolutely shit all to do with them following that.

There was one girl who I'd never met in person and it was clear I had absolutely nothing in common with except an interest in the band, and now there wasn't even that. She was determined to stay in touch with me and still wanted to meet up at some point. I kept fobbing her off with maybe at some unspecified point in the future. She was clearly somewhat mentally ill and it seemed best to be polite. My life would have been a lot easier if I hadn't bothered. She contacted me slightly more often than I would like and I tried to cunningly throw her off a bit by not telling her my number when I got a new phone but she just called my parents until my doormat of a mum gave her my real number.

Anyway, the one slight link to the band I still had was I was moderator on a Yahoo fangroup. The group had about 5 posts a year of which about 3 were spam and 1 was an automated birthday reminder so handing over mod powers seemed more effort than it was worth. The one post a year actually related to the group was generally her. For reasons I can't remember she managed to start a flame war on barely animated zombie of a Yahoo group so I stuck her on moderation to stop her being such a douchebag.

Then she tried to post while on moderation and I was afk for a few hours and all hell broke loose.

When her post didn't come through immediatley she send me a torrent of abuse about how I had no right to ban her from the group (I did have that right and she wasn't even banned). This started with emails but escalated to phonecalls several times a minute for several hours. I was out of the house and this was before I had a smartphone so that meant no internet access, so no amount of abuse could make me release her precious message. She started phoning my parents telling them how evil I am, and doormat mum was once again being far too sympathetic and thought calling the police would be "heavy handed", but luckily it was out of her control this time. This continued for several days and I called the police after threats that if she called me one more time I would call the police only lead to her constantly calling me begging me not to. The trouble was she was completely batshit insane and her messages made no sense at all, a lot of her torrent of abuse was her demanding me to stop harassing her, because apparently putting them phone down on her and not replying to her emails is harrassing her. The first police I spoke to were stupid enough to think that just meant she didn't want to talk to me and I didn't want to talk to her and there was no problem, so the torrent of abuse continued.

Eventually I called them a second time and they said something to her that finally caused her to stop contacting me. However, she hadn't quite learnt her lesson and I'm told the story repeated on another fan of the band and even a member of it. The sad thing is that since none of us were related to her there was nothing we could do to make her get the mental health care and close supervision she so desperately needed, and she may still be out there doing the same thing to other people.

However, this has been the exception rather than the rule and on balance meeting people on the internet has improved my life vastly more than it has made it worse. I don't like telling that story without this caveat because otherwise it looks like proof that you should never give out contact information to people you meet on the internet or meet them in person and I don't agree with that at all.
(GothicTechie, Tue 27 Nov 2012, 19:09, 1 reply)

Once I'd read that your mother was a doormat it all made sense.
That was as far as I got though.
( Infidel , shit and wrong, Wed 28 Nov 2012, 2:35, closed)