misskitty_79

In one of the recent news announcements, LJ informed us that they've made it easier to get rid of them: the pop-up menu that's visible when you hover your mouse over the userhead icon () now includes, both an option to report that user as a bot, & a "ban user" option. Every time someone adds me, I check their journal. If it's all in Cyrillic, if it's friended hundreds of other accounts, but only a few people have friended it, or even if it just looks fake, I ban it & then I report the account. It's actually really easy.

For starters, make sure that both the hover & the new friend notification features are on. You can activate the 'Hover Menu' checkbox over here & the 'notify me when someone adds me as a friend' checkbox is located over here. Just make sure they've both got checkmarks in the boxes & you should be good to go. :)

Then, when you receive a notification telling you that exampleusername has friended you, you can go visit the account's profile page. Again, if you don't like the looks of it, for whatever reason, feel free to both ban & report the account as a bot.

If you're curious to see who you've currently got banned, visit the Ban & Unban Users page (visit this FAQ to learn just exactly what banning a user does.

Out of curiousity, I checked me recent befriendings (this will bring you to yours, not mine!) &, out of the last 30 friendings (over a span of 20weeks), only four were actual human beings. Of the 26 bots, there are still eleven accounts that have yet to be shut down & all that because not enough people are taking the time to actually report the bots that are out there.

Of course, if, for some reason, you hate the hover feature & don't want to have it activated, you can always do it the "long" way: go to the bot report page & type in the bot's username yourself!

Any questions, feel free to ask me!
Good luck!!!

knotty_mark, lubaya, xnuala & blacksquiggles all seem to have a higher than usual number of weird/bot friendings...