Small and Independent Press Books discussion

Earlier this year (as usual, without announcing it to anybody! :-( ), Goodreads apparently changed the default setting on our accounts, at the part where we specify who can send personal messages to us. Formerly, the default setting was that any Goodreader could message us, but we could limit that to our Goodreads friends. Now, all accounts are switched to the other way around; only our friends can message us, unless we go into our personal account settings and allow other members in general to do so. I only learned this through a post about it in another group.

You may not have a preference anyway, or may prefer to only allow your friends to message you; in that case, you don't need to do anything. In my case, though, there have been times when non-friends needed to ask me something, or when I needed to contact someone I'm not friends with; so in those instances, the more general setting can be an advantage. (If you change your setting, remember to click "Save" at the bottom of the page!)

Thanks.

No problem, Ron!

Which setting will make it impossible for the scammers who start out "Hello. How are you today dear?" to leave their irritating missives?

I'm tired of cleaning them out of the inbox.

Alicia wrote: "Which setting will make it impossible for the scammers who start out "Hello. How are you today dear?" to leave their irritating missives?"

That would be the one that allows just friends (and groups you're in, when the moderators broadcast a general message to everyone in the group) to message you. That actually should be the current default setting, but you should probably check it to make sure, especially if you're getting spam messages from non-friends. You can also flag spam and self-promotional messages to the attention of the Goodreads management, as well as block the senders.

I've been fortunate in that I haven't gotten many of those types of messages here on Goodreads. (Of course, my regular e-mail account is a different story.... Sigh!)

Thanks, Werner.

I have my profile set to:

Who Can Send Me Private Messages:
just my friends and groups I belong to

But the 'groups I belong to' must be the source of these messages, because I certainly haven't let any of these men onto my limited-bandwidth friends list.

I vet new friends carefully by Comparing books, checking out their posts and reviews, asking people they claim as friends if they know them personally... And I have a question new friend requestors are supposed to answer - and never do: Where do I know you from?

So they must be joining groups and then spamming the members.

If it becomes a major problem, I'll start doing more than Ignoring the requests. I haven't had much luck reporting them before.

And I love new actual Friends - you know me, I'm chatty.

Alicia wrote: "But the 'groups I belong to' must be the source of these messages, because I certainly haven't let any of these men onto my limited-bandwidth friends list."

Hmmm! That's interesting --I thought that "groups" provision was just for "broadcast" messages from the group's moderators, but evidently Goodreads interprets it more broadly. (And yes, there are BBAs --Badly-Behaving Authors-- who definitely would join groups just to spam the members. :-( If the Goodreads management won't deal with them, I'd report them to the group's moderators. Moderators have pretty broad power to expel people from their groups, and to block them from re-joining.)

By now, some of you have probably discovered Goodreads' "new look" (which I'm quite certain no Goodreads members asked for) for book descriptions. The most notable change is to make the description pages much more cluttered (and correspondingly more of a nuisance to scroll through and navigate in), with a much greater and more aggressive emphasis on displaying cover art and links to sponsored "recommendations" and books that "Readers also enjoyed." But there's also significant loss of functionality. :-(

While you can still scroll down to read reviews of the book by your friends and others in the Goodreads community, you can no longer go directly from there to any review itself. This makes it much more difficult to read all of the comments or to comment yourself. Also, while you can still "like" a review from the description page, the program no longer shows you whether you already have done so; it just blindly displays a "like" button, even for reviews you may have already "liked" months or years ago.

Since the Amazon/Goodreads management has effectively insulated itself from any feedback by members (and would ignore it anyway), I'm not commenting to encourage that, but rather to share a workaround that may be useful to some people. If you want to go from the description's list of reviews to someone's actual review, click on his/her name or profile picture, which will take you to that person's profile page. There, bring up the person's bookshelves, and use the search function for the book title. From the result page of that search, you can go to the review itself. So it's still possible; it just now takes four steps instead of one. (The wonders of technological progress.... :-( )

Grrr!!!

Goodreads apparently is rolling out the change gradually. Since this started, I've clicked on two book descriptions that have the "new look," and two in the old format. I'm guessing that they're not changing every description on the site at once, but instead doing it piecemeal. There are probably logistical reasons for that, but I don't know enough about computer science to speculate about them.

The description pages used to have one-step links that would take you directly to the individual reviews; but they no longer do. That's what my workaround was intended to address.

Actually, my Goodreads friend Katherine S. has made me aware of a simpler workaround that does the same thing. On the book description pages, below each review reproduction, she writes, "Right next to "like" and "comment" there are three small dots "..." click this and you get a drop down, click 'View all Reading Activity' and it will take you to the review." I've tried this, and it works. Of course, it's two steps instead of one --but that's much better than four!

Cool.
That assumes I can remember.
Thanks.

You're welcome, Ron! :-)