The online world is constantly throwing up new challenges. Here's my latest.
Somewhere in France, a young man - I assume- has just signed up to a Francophone Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan site. Yes, such places continue to exist. He has chosen 'Rupert Giles' as his identity, and - again, I assume - also created a Gmail account for his alter ego. My final assumption is that this email address is very similar to my own, as this best explains the sudden flood of notification emails from the site that have appeared, and continue to appear, in my inbox.
(For those who don't know, 'Buffy' was a popular TV entertainment at the end of the last century concerning the adventures of a young woman in an American school who finds herself caught up in a paranormal battle between good and evil. Rupert Giles was a teacher at that school who was her mentor and guide in matters magical; his character was of an upper-middle class Englishman of some sagacity - or at least, the American vision of same. Having ;no interest in the affairs of schoolgirls and/or vampires, I paid little attention to the show at the time, although certain of my peers were entranced.)
Hence my problem. I do not want my inbox filled with writing about the fascinations of people I don't know, let alone in a language I have to work to read, about a show I found jejune twenty years ago. I want these to stopl I believe this is a reasonable desire.
But. I do not know my electronic namesake's real name, let alone his real email, to ask him to stop.
Here are my options.
1. Ignore it all, and wait for it to die out.
2. Set up a filter and get Google to do the ignoring for me
3. Get my own account on the forum and attempt to make contact that way
1 and 2 are the obvious, sensible options. But these things go on for a long time, and I presume m'sieur Giles would rather not have his activities logged with a random stranger. Often, intense personal relationships spring up in public forums like this one, and he has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
(Last month, another Rupert G_______ , of Florida, gave my email address instead of his to Domino's Pizza, and for a couple of weeks I got all his delivery notifications. I learned where he lived, his girlfriend's name, something of his working life patterns, his favourite toppings and more besides: enough, in fact, to contact him at his office and get him to rectify matters. In the past, I have been electronically mistaken for Rupert Grint by Malaysian Harry Potter fangirls, and received the most astounding communications which I had to delete immediately for fear of falling foul of Operation Yewtree. These are deep and dangerous waters.)
3 is also sensible, but my French is execrable and Google Translate is not that good for interactive sites. Could I present a credible, or even comprehensible, case for my concerns?
There is a fourth option, or rather a range of options. The forum's security is poor - I have already received in plain text the user ID and password for the account. I could go in and change the notification email setting.
Or I could pose as some demonic possessor from the dark worlds depicted in the show, and mess with my counterpart's head.
I'm not much taken with that last one, to be honest. It's fun to contemplate, and from my doppelgänger's profile he's a rather self-important and supercilious young man (with terrible taste in music, given the evidence in his password) of the sort it is truly delightful to tease, but it would be - as they say - a dick move. The Internet has enough cruel trolling, and I have no wish to add to that sad calculus.
So, I'm most tempted by the email reset. He's not getting his notifications anyway, and assuming he notices this at some point he'll be able to fix the problem easily enough.
It;'s a shame that move would be illegal. You can't use other people's credentials to access their accounts, even if you acquired them blamelessly.I may even be breaking the law by reading the messages his chosen form sends me.
I don't want to break the law; I do want my heavy-metal-lite Buffy anglophile fanboy to enjoy his online choices without reference to me. This is a problem that's happened before and will happen again, I'm sure to many other people.
What to do?
