sick avatars

i am shocked! i was looking for a strawberry shortcake avatar and you would not believe what i saw! avatars with nude men and women in very pornographic positions! rated X. maybe i'm a little naive to the world, but who and why would someone use these! there is obviosly a whole other world on the computer. my life is G rated. eeeewwww! sick!

p.s. if anybody ever runs across a strawberry shortcake avatar, please send me the link. i can't find one. thanks

For as many great things as there are on the internet, there are just as many bad things. Hubby gets illegal porn spam all the time, simply because he has an email address with one of the big providers, and some of the stuff they send is just disgusting. I understand kinky and all, but this stuff is gross (as well as illegal in most places!).

There's one commercial for a broadband provider where the computer tells the guy "You have reached the end of the internet. You have seen it all. Please go back. Now." The first thing I thought was that guy must have seen a LOT of porn sites and some really nasty stuff! If my hubby came out and said he had seen everything on the internet I would smack him!

One thing you could do is find a regular picture of strawberry shortcake on the web, save it to your computer and resize it to make an avatar. There are people here who could resize the picture for you if you are unable to do this yourself.

Here's some pics that I found:
http://groups.msn.com/StrawberryShor...ortcake21.msnw

Sorry, I'm not sure how to resize pictures.

~Jenn

Those are so cute, Jenn. I don't know how to do it either. Why not post in "Your computer questions answered?" Heidi will probably answer, or someone else knowledgable.

If you save a pic to your computer of Strawberry Shortcake and then open it with a picture viewing program like Irfanview, there is an option in the upper tool bar to resize/resample pictures. I believe the pic needs to be 50x50 pixels to be used as an avatar on TCS.

With Irfanview all you have to do once you click on resize/resample is type in the dimensions you want for width and height and then save it. Then you just have to use the browse function in the avatar changing section here to find it and download it.

Does any of that make sense? Thats how i got my avatar anyways Good luck!

thank you jenn! i will work on it later.

Originally posted by 7cozycats
thank you jenn! i will work on it later.

Click to expand...

No problem, good luck!

There certainly is alot of sick stuff out there on the web. And alot of it can be stumbled upon by accident. For example, I was looking for a particular fishing rod for my boyfriend for his birthday last year. I typed in ########## hoping to get the sporting goods store, and...Oh My God!

I would just reiterate, to those with children especially, there is so much garbage on the internet that you really need to be very aware and careful of where you browse. Sometimes these sites "spy" on who visits and then you will get a ton of spam for X rated sites and such in your email.

As they used to say on Hill Street Blues (I'm showing my age now) "Let's Be Careful Out There".

There is definitely a lot of nasty stuff on the web. Just think of all the lovely spam mails you get. It amazes me that this stuff comes up when you are looking for something completely non-related.

And watch out if you make a typo in your web address. This summer, I had a summer school position which was an on-line course aimed at 8th grade. It was designed to help prepare for the PSAT. It was at a technical trade school, one of their staff members compiled a list of technology related websites. One of them was misspelled on the list.

Luckily the other teacher discovered it was really a porn site, it was cybergyrrl.com or something like that. It was supposed to be a site for girls into computers, but it was a site for girls into other things. None of the students tried to access that site, thank goodness. They would have had an eyeful.

Jeff24girl.....I replaced the link you listed with ########'s, because I don't want any of our younger members to have access to that link. At least not by us.

Another thing to be aware of, these people keep track of any domain name that isn't renewed and buy it immediately to put their cr@p on it. At one point hubby was running a website about the goth scene in Denver, and it was pretty popular. Not even a week after he let the domain expire there was hard core porn on the site. I've heard of the same thing happening with cross stitching websites. Pretty sad the lengths these people will go to.

Also, if your kids have their own email addresses watch out! Especially if they are on one of those free ones like Hotmail. They send out their spam to computer generated lists (like a@hotmail, ab@hotmail, abc@hotmail) so they get it to everyone with a hotmail (or other provider) account. And of course, half of these include pictures in the email (disgusting ones, too. I won't gross anyone out with details if you haven't seen them for yourselves.) and the Remove links don't work (they do for the legitimate ones, but generally not for the really gross ones).

I have hotmail as a backup. It gives you IM also. I might have 1 or 2 pieces of mail from people who don't have my
ATT address and 20-35 pieces of junk mail. I have hotmail set to send anything not in my address book to the junkmail list on a different page. Then I thought I'd be really smart and take the time to unsubscribe from these mailing lists. Hotmail warned me NOT to do that, because then the site that's mailing them will know that my address really exists. They just guess at code names and mail willy nilly. If you try to unsubscribe, you are giving them info they didn't have! You can't win. Just delete the whole page. The titles alone are disgusting and graphic.

We never ever get pornographic links by email. I don't know why, we just get regular spam for advertisements but nothing ever raunchy. If I did though I think I'd just delete it like I do the other "junk" stuff I get and move on!

On ATT I don't even get Spam, only on Hotmail. I think the servers you pay for screen out the garbage.

I use a yahoo e-mail account (free) and never get any spam, naughty or otherwise. But then I only use my real e-mail address for sites I trust (like this one), any that I think are a little dodgy, where you have to register, I make an e-mail address up. I have, though, had a porn site hijack my home page, which was somewhat annoying, however they were nice enough to have a "get rid of this rubbish" link to their site, so not too hard to remove it.

There is a ".com" porn site that keeps on buying up certain UK place name sites - so, if you forget to use ".co.uk" you get the nasties instead of finding out about the tourist attractions. Why? If you want to find porn it really isn't too difficult, without it being shoved in our faces.

Be very thankful. I've heard some really bad things about Hotmail, especially.

One of the girls who was in my position before I got here spent her days surfing porn AT WORK of all places! The way our mail server is set up, if it isn't to a real email address, it gets sent to the general account, which is on my computer (because some people aren't smart enough to check the spelling of names, so that way all the email is eventually delivered to the right person). When I first started, I would get 10-20 of those nasty emails a day. I did take the time to try to unsubscribe to them, and the volume has gone down considerably. So, the legitimate businesses will really take your name off their lists. Most of the ones who don't care if you want them or not (and of course, are the most raunchy ), they will put a bogus email address/web address or not give you the option.

It was pretty sad, we set up my Dad's new DSL service through MSN. The first batch of email that was received when the account was FIRST OPENED included porn spam.