Managing a social networking site introduces you to many new varieties of nefarious and scurrilous online activity. One of these is 'friend whoring'. This is the paractice of sending out friend requests to large numbers, or all, members of a network in order to establish a large friends list. The advantage of this to marketers ( viagara salesmen and the like ) is that they can then send out broadcast emails to their 'friends' without scrutiny by site administrators and moderators. Obviously this is a highly undesirable state of affairs and one which we constantly guard against. We carefully scrutinize each new application for membership in order to weed out these elements but we can never be 100% successful.

For these reasons we are always concerned when otherwise dormant and inactive members suddenly start to send out large numbers of 'Friend Requests'.

We are advising members not to accept these in circumstances where there seems to be no good reason for the request to be made.

We are taking the unusual step of issuing this security advisory because there are some indications from the log files that spammers have been taking an increasing interest in our network in recent weeks. Therefore we think its wise to proceed with caution.