Fun with Photos

Chess.com is a great site, not just for playing chess. There's articles, chess news, endless quizzes, forums and a lot of other features. Recently I discovered the photos section.

To my surprise, most photos were completely unrelated to chess; in fact, many pertained to the user's personal life (and recently Gaza). The majority of them contained feminine figures; the majority of commenters were male. When I sorted the albums in terms of most commented, it was no surprise that the women swept the top 5. 

The other day, I was browsing through the gallery while I noticed two different users each posting two albums full of selfies. In their album description/profile page, they had a Yahoo! ID as means to contact them. They received a lot of comments and compliments because they were pretty young. One of those people recently had their account closed. Sketchy.

Another person had posted spicy pictures of herself, but a simple Google search showed that it probably wasn't her. Yet she was getting more comments from admirers and she has a large friend count.

As I quickly realized, she wasn't the only one! Wow, the Internet is gullible.

So I decided to try this tactic.

Promptly, I changed my profile picture to something more safe. I removed my homepage, which was linked to YouTube. Then, I posted an album entitled: "me!" posting a few pictures of a cute model, and some random images. As for the poem, I added it later so that when people look at all the albums, the "not!" will not appear right in their face. Though it will still attract people as not everyone understands English.

So I waited a few hours and got my first few friend requests and match challenges. After I accepted the friend request, they would usually message me with their thanks. So polite :)

The views and comments also started racking up, being my most popular post in ages. With some of my posts barely reaching 100 views, this one was reaching 800 during the same time period (2-3 days)

By July 31, it almost reached #1 on my most commented posts!

But of course, not all comments were flattery. A lot of people are pros at spotting fakes, using the google image search tool second-naturedly. During this time, I had to censor heavily my posts, in case somebody gives me away, (in case people actually read comments ).

At one point, the compliments:troll ratio was almost even! But I deleted them to make way for new complimentors.

In the end the amount of attention I got was enormous. I had so much unanswered things it was unbearable. My note page was also "spammed." A friend also messaged me about my spammed note page, just adding to the messages I have to read from chess.com. Yes, I know my notepage was a mess, thanks for letting me know.

As you read this post, you may see that I have already removed such photos. I can tell you that it has been very quiet and I can focus on my chess again instead of my schemes.

Now, as all my blogs have a game in them, I'll show you two games I played with my new buddies. Pardon the quality on my part :)

Takeaways from this experience:

• A lot of profile pictures come from an online source. These tend to be fake unless the user is a titled player or something.
• A lot of people write the same things on different people's homepages. Ex: "finally , i found the mother of my children . thanks god ." " saw yr albums they are imaging i like them please accept my friendship" etc
• Being popular can attract unwanted attention :P