Name change as a tool against stalkers on 7Cups (what happens when you overthink)

Hello everyone. I got tired of searching for spelling and/or stylistic errors in the text, same for trying to line out all the images so that it looks good, it's hard and time-consuming to do in the 7Cups text editor. So if you find a lot of mistakes, please forgive me. I suppose the actual content is more important anyway. This topic is mainly aimed towards listeners, but I thought some members mind find it interesting as well. Let's get into it.

Preface

A listener-friend of mine has had a lot of problems dealing with a stalker in the past. This stalker would bug her for months at a time and would keep returning with different accounts. Sometimes this stalker would only reveal who he/she was after a lot of conversations, which can be really frustrating. Eventually she tried to change her name, but the stalker kept coming back time and time again. I just noticed how frustrated my listener-friend got by this. So I started to investigate why this stalker could so easily find her account after the name-change.

Introduction

I want to start by saying I know that 7cups has limited time and/or recourses. So I dont expect them to remove every small vulnerability on the site, especially as it might sometimes require quite extensive work on the ‘back-end. Because of this exact reason, Ive tried to come up with multiple ways to deal with certain issues and I tried to think of ways that would be the easiest to implement. I dont expect that everything Ill bring up today will be changed in an instance, but I think the discussion about this subject might lead to a lot of opportunities for improvement.

This will be quite an extensive topic where I sometimes will touch on topics really brief, and other times I will explain some topics too extensively. But Ive tried to make the headers/content/lay-out as clear as I can, so you can skip certain parts that you deem to be irrelevant or less-interesting, and can skip to the parts that are relevant and/or interesting to you.

People might think that some things Ill point out are too ‘exaggerated or too small to be important. But I think its important to have a deep understanding of why certain things are the way they are, instead of just giving a list to solve them without any explanation as to why. In this topic I will try to extensively describe the vulnerabilities that I found. For every of these vulnerabilities I will give at least one solution with which it can be solved. Not just for 7cups and the back-end, but for almost all of the problems Ive also thought of ways listeners can deal with it themselves, without any help of things changing on the ‘back-end of 7cups.

At the end, I will actually give a step-by-step plan listeners can utilise when changing their name, to actually make the name-change much more effective. Surprisingly, you can actually give stalkers a much harder time if you spent about half an hour going through those simple steps. If its worth your time to request a name-change and meetings with a mentor, I think its at least worth a try to go through some simple steps to try and optimise your chances of getting rid of this stalker.

Ive roughly divided the vulnerabilities into three main parts: the forum, listener profile and browse listeners. These are basically the three easiest ways to re-find a profile after a name has been changed. To depict the vulnerabilities a bit better, Ive used examples from a few existing listeners on 7Cups. Ive asked them all for permission to actually use their profiles as examples. Disclaimer: the listeners that are used in this topic havent necessarily had stalkers; I dont know the exact reason of their name-change. The only thing thats important is that they changed their name at some point, that way I could utilise their profile to do some research on this particular subject. If at any point a listener named in this topic feels uncomfortable, Ill immediately delete this entire post to protect their privacy. So, lets discuss how and why the name-change itself happens first.

Why and how do I change my name?

There are actually multiple things you can (even pre-emptively) do to deal with members that get too attached, act in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable, or who are stalkers already. And I wont describe these all into detail. This topic is mainly about how to make the name change as effective as possible. If you want more info about how to handle specific situations/stalkers, I strongly recommend you to connect with a mentor (click here). In short, in the beginning it often involves maintaining appropriate boundaries and knowing when to block/ban a member. If you already have a stalker that keeps coming back, there are other solutions too. One way, for example, would be to stop taking personal requests for a while so that the stalker has no way of connecting with you. But as you can imagine, this is far from ideal. Many listeners would eventually like to be able to take personal requests again. But even if you don't take personal requests anymore, the stalkers could still spam you with messages from a variety of different member accounts. Thereby comes that some stalkers can be really persistent and can come back after not hearing from them for months. Another radical solution would be to delete your account and just make a new one.

But if you want to retain your account, (also so that your current/old members can still easily contact you, so that you can partially retain your reputation, to not have to throw away the effort you put into building your account, etc) a name-change actually becomes one of the most valuable opportunities you have left. Realise that this is quite a radical step to take and often unnecessary. So I recommend you to first contact a mentor, or anyone in the 7Cups community to ask for help before that. As can also be inferred from the post that Laura made about stalkers (click here to go to that topic) a name change is one of the last resorts you have if you cant get rid of the stalker with any of the other methods but still want to retain your account and everything that comes with it. But changing your name to get rid of a stalker is a bit more complicated than it seems at first, which I will explain in the remainder of this topic.

Currently you can change your username yourself in the first 2 weeks after creating an account. After that, you can still change your name if you provide a ‘valid reason. (click here to read more about this, and to see how to actually change your name after 2 weeks) Its not specified what a ‘valid reason is or isnt, but if you have a stalker you can certainly have a name-change. Laura verified this in her topic where she gives information about stalkers too. If you change a name to get rid of a stalker, it might need to have different/more/stronger consequences compared to someone who changes their name for another reason. These stronger consequences might not all be desirable, but might be necessary to achieve your ultimate goal, namely getting rid of the stalker. The last lines might not make sense to you as of now but it will become clear later in the topic, so just bear with me.

Warning

Certainly not every stalker will utilise every vulnerability there is. So you dont necessarily have to get involved in every single thing Ill mention in the remainder of this topic. Just know that with every little loophole thats closed, it becomes a lot harder for the stalker. Along with every vulnerability I will also disclose how likely it is someone can use this, so you can decide for yourself if you want to spent time on it or not.

Again, most listeners will be able to solve their issues without a name change, so dont assume you need all of this. I strongly recommend you connect to a mentor first to see if there are other things that can be done (click here to go to the mentor page). Furthermore, it can be helpful to learn some listening techniques from the mentors that might (not in all case, but sometimes) prevent you from getting into this situation the next time around.

The forum

If youve never posted anything in the forum, you can skip this step. If you have posted things on the forum before, its probably for the best if you read on.

The one thing you can know for sure a stalker has if your account disappears, is your old name. Lets see what we can achieve by searching for the actual old name and if we can find a connection to the new name of this listener. If theres only 1 tag buried somewhere deep down in the forum, youll find it in 10 seconds using Google. Once you change your name most links and tags of your old name actually do change into your new name. But I found out this is not always the case. And the tags that can still be found of your old name, can make it really easy for stalkers to find your new name. Ill show you how.

As you can see in the first picture, a simple Google search of the old name of the listener (ravenousPhoenix changed her name into ThunderBird3726 in the past) immediately finds a post in a forum. If you click on the link you get to a situation like in picture 2, and there you can immediately see the issue. The actual name-tag (see A) changed to her new name, the ‘in reply to ThunderBird3726 (see C) changed to her new name too. The issue here is that the ‘@ravenousPhoenix (see B) stayed the same. So within 1 minute we just found the old username of someone who changed their name. And its not too far-fetched to expect a stalker to do a simple Google search with your old name. Especially if this stalker is so persistent that you need the name change in the first place.

Urgency of this problem

Its actually fairly important to deal with this issue in one way or another because the stalker will virtually always have your old name and with one simple Google search your new name can often be found.

Solutions for 7cups

- Tags can be changed into ‘unkown instead of into the new listeners name, like can be seen in the image to the right. If this is done in combination with not changing ‘in reply to xxx to the new name, that would solve this particular issue.

- Deleting all forum posts on request or always when there is a name-change, would also solve this issue. I never said all options are ideal or desirable; I just give as many options as I can think of that would deal with this issue.

- Automatically transform all tags would probably be a more desirable option. What I mean with this is that the ‘@ravenousPhoenix (B) in the earlier post would change to the new name too. This would make it impossible to Google the old name. But it still brings issues with it. For example, if the stalker remembers one forum post you made, he can re-find it. If he would find it, he would have your new name. He can do this either by going through the forum with brute-force, or by trying to Google parts of the text he remembers you ever writing in the forum. This can be easier than you might think, but it is for sure much more of a longshot/time-consuming. And the harder you make it, the more chance there is the stalker will give up.

- Its possible for 7Cups to change text in a forum so that Google isnt able to index it. Meaning, you cant find it by using a search engine. The negative side is that it would also make the forum less accessible, as in it would be harder for good members and listeners to actually find what they want with similar methods. Thereby comes it might make 7Cups less visible on search engines in general, which is obviously very undesirable. Instead of using this method on all the text in the forum, it could be done on small parts, for example on the tags only. That would solve the issue by making it impossible to find the tags through search engines, while the rest of the forum is still indexed. Although this will probably not happen, it would solve most of the issue.

Solution for listeners

The previous solutions can only be achieved by 7Cups changing things. Although its far from perfect, there is something listeners can do to prevent stalkers from easily finding their new name in this manner. If you only posted once or twice, you could ask 7Cups to delete this/these posts, if you give this reasoning theyd happily do that for you. But most people who are active in the forum will have a lot of posts, which makes that solution impossible. There is another solution though.

It might seem silly at first, but you can inundate the forum with tags, your old listener name-tag to be specific. Google doesnt show all results for hundreds/thousands of the same tags on the same website. It shows those that it deems most recent/relevant/etc. and it leaves out results that are too similar/repetitive. The only search results that are actually a threat to us is the ones that can be linked to our new name. By simple adding the tag to a lot of random posts, it will become a lot harder for stalkers to find you using this method. Although it might still not be completely impossible, if you inundate the forum with enough tags it might get close to impossible. The more you post the tags the stalker can find you with (in this case your old listener name) the harder it will get to find your new listener name through Google. Even posting the tag only several times can make the world of difference.

Dont do this from your listener account that will go through with the name change though. Because you run the risk people might react to your post. And if they react to your post using your tag, youll get into the same trouble as before. So what you can do is ask other listeners and members on the site to give you a little bit of a helping hand with this. A lot of people in the community would be glad to help, also considering it wouldnt take long at all.

Listener profile page

Profile page 1 – The feed

You can skip this step if youve never made any feed post(s). If you have, Id, again, recommend you to continue reading.

There are several ways in which your feed posts make you vulnerable to stalkers finding you again. ExpressoPizza has a changed name, and is now called ExpressoRite.

As you can see in the image to the right I put the old name of ExpressoRite in Google, and immediately found the new name. This is because old feed posts dont change after someone changes their name. That also means the name doesnt change, like it actually does do in the forum. You might say: but how does the stalker know its your profile, and that this isnt another listener who just reposted ExpressoPizzas posts? Thats actually an easy one to answer. In the second image you can actually see who reposted the post. So because theres no ‘reposted by ExpressoRite in there you know it must have been his post and youve found the new name you were looking for.

If someone reposts on of your posts, you dont have to worry. On the page of the person that reposted your post it will only show your old name, so your profile cant be found. Be aware, if you have reposted the post of someone else this is also not completely safe. The ‘reposted by @expressoPizza for example, can be Googled too and therefore runs into the same issues. I also added a picture to the right to show this.

Urgency of this problem

Its just as urgent as the previous issue about the forum. Because, again, a simple Google search of the old name would give the stalker the new name and profile page right away.

Solution for 7cups:

Have the links of the old name in the feed-posts actually change to the new name. The advantage of this would be that you could keep your feed posts, but it has a similar disadvantage as before. If a stalker remembers a sentence of a feed posts that you ever made, he can Google that too. But it would make it much harder again.

Solution for listeners:

The best solution is just to delete literally all feed-posts and make new ones after your name has been changed.

Profile page 2 – Profile description, written reviews and badges.

Just like the forum and your feed, Google indexes the reviews you got from members, your profile description and badges. So whatever you do, dont put your old name in the profile description after the name change. For a stalker to find you this way (assuming you don't have your old name in your profile feed), he would have to remember a specific sentence/combination of words that is used in your profile description or in a review. The more unique the words are he remembers, the less he has to know for him to find you quite easily on Google. Here is a picture of how I find my own profile. You can actually also find profiles by searching on badges, but this is exceedingly hard to do and would only reasonably work if you have a super uncommon badge and the stalker knows you have that badge. But thats very unlikely.

Urgency of this problem

Its not as urgent as the previously outlined ways to find your new name. But its still good to be vigilant of this too.

Solution for 7cups:

- Same as before, you can prevent Google from indexing certain text. It would be incredibly helpful if at least the badges and member reviews would be treated like that. Because as you will read down below, it gets slightly annoying if you have a written review with your old name in it.

- Delete member reviews on request and/or after all name-changes. Not desirable, but it would help.

Solution for listeners:

The best thing to do is to just delete your entire profile text, and make a new one after your name is changed. If someone mentioned your old username in one of your reviews, thats a slight issue. As explained earlier in this topic, anyone could then find your profile again with a simple Google search. Theres actually nothing you can do about it, its impossible to delete reviews yourself. You could try and ask 7Cups support if they can delete a specific written review, but I dont know if theyd actually do that, Ive never heard of it at least. Its sadly not uncommon to have your profile name mentioned in a review either; I think my name is actually mentioned in about 5 of my written reviews.

Profile page 3 – followers/following

There are several things going on with the list on someones profile feed, about who someone follows, and who follows him/her. You can stop following people you follow but you cant delete people from the list that follow you.

Once you change your name, the name in the list of people that follow you will stay unchanged. So people that follow you, can see your old name in their list, and if they click on it theyll simply get redirect to the ‘browse listener page', as if the account doesnt excist anymore, which it technically doesnt. So if the stalker is following you, he won't be able to find you there.

There is one really big issue that has to be solved, which could make it easier for a stalker to find you back, even unknowingly. Imagine a stalker follows you, you change your name, he won't be able to get to you account through the 'follow' list anymore. But there is a way that this 'follow' list can cause him to find you again. New feed posts that you make from your listener profile with a changed name, will stilll show up in his feed if he follows you. So at some day he might be looking at his feed, see a post from someone he doesn't know, click on it, and find your profile again. Even if it was never his intention to get back to you in the first place.

It gets somewhat worse. In your feed you could get posts from people who you don't literally follow, but the stalker can actually find out in an instant if this is the person he is searching for that changed his/her name. How? Even though in the stalkers 'follow' list only your old name is shown, he never un-followed from you. This is very relevant. For one, this is probably why you still get to see the feed posts. But secondly, if the stalkers comes on the profile of the person that changed his/her name, he actually gets the option to unfollow when hovering over the 'follow' button, meaning that's the person he was looking for. There's only one reason you can still follow someone and have the unfollow option even though the exact username isn't in your own 'follow' list, which is that that person changed his/her name.

Urgency of this problem/solution

This is quite an important thing to solve too, but at the same time it's not the most easy thing to solve in the world, mainly because you don't know if the stalker follows you with one account, or with more accounts. If you know the exact account of the stalker, you can have him kicked off the site completely by contacting 7Cups support. He can make a new account, but that new account doesn't follow you yet. So he can't find you with this method anymore. Especially because in the meantime you can make your feed private (closed), after which members will need your permission to be able to follow you. If you aren't sure if he has multiple accounts following you, or as long as his account is still active (and following your feed), you simply can't post anything in your feed when you've got your new name. Everything you post in your feed would be sent straight to his feed, sadly.

Browse listener

Another way of finding a listener is through simply browsing listeners. You might think there are too many listeners to find this one listener back of which you dont know the name, but there are things stalkers can utilise to make it easier. They can filter by country, gender, topic, language, etc. Especially if there are very few listeners in one of those categories you belong too, there might suddenly not be so many listeners to choose from anymore. And if there is only a small amount of listeners left, he would likely be able to find you again by checking out all of these profiles one by one.

Urgency of this problem/solution

Its one of the less urgent things to deal with when changing your name, but especially if you know from yourself that theres a category you belong to that not a lot of listeners on 7Cups do, you could think about it.

First of all, change your profile picture, most rather make it blank before your name change and after your name is changed immediately switch it to another picture. Do you speak multiple languages, you might consider getting the most unique ones for 7Cups of the list, especially if they arent the languages you primarily speak on 7Cups. You could temporarily change your gender to ‘prefer not to tell, you could switch around some of the issues you talk about that are shown in your profile, etc. You could do this and switch it back after a while, you could also not do this at all, its not a super big deal. The most important is that you change your profile picture, because that would make it quite easy for someone to find your profile again, especially if you have a unique profile picture.

Shortlist of what to do when changing your name

Ill give a short list of things to do to make a name change most effective. You dont have to do all of these, if you think one or more things on the list are unnecessary, just leave them out.

Note: it can take a little while for Google to ‘index changed sites. So if you change your profile text for example, someone might still be able to find your profile using your old profile text in Google. This is important to know for understanding the list.

You can pretty much do step 1-4 in any order you want. Its important to request the name change after you did those things though, not before.

1. Have you been active on the forum? If yes, inundate the forum with your listener tag (for example @DarkWolf) without using your own listener account you want the name change for.

2. Delete your profile description entirely, or even better, change it to something short and super generic many listener would have in their profile.

3. Make your feed private (closed), in the settings tab.

4. Delete all your feed posts.

5. Contact 7Cups support to have the Stalker kicked off the site in all of his known aliases/accounts. Important: make your feed private/closed first!

6. Preferable wait 1 or 2 days after this, so Google can latch on to your new profile description/forum tags/etc. (Although you often have to wait a while too after requesting the name change before your name is actually changed)

7. Choose a new name thats not too similar to your old name. Then go to the support desk https://www.7cups.com/supportDesk.php to find out who to ask to change your name.

8. Immediately after the name change, consider if you want to change some things around to make it harder for the stalker to find you in ‘browse listener, like removing an exotic language you dont really use.

9. After your name change immediately change your profile picture (to something you didnt have before), make new feed posts (unless he still follows you, then make no feed posts at all), a new profile description, etc.

10. In the beginning, try to not take any personal requests for a little while, just to be safe. Other than that, you should be all set. Now hope well have a little luck and the stalker is gone forever ^^.

11. I highly recommend to contact a mentor after this, who can help you gain some nice new listener skills and can answer any questions you might have about anything 7Cups related. This might also help you prevent getting into similar situations again in the future.

(Extra) Uneccesary thing I found while overthinking

I told you all before that once you change your name, the names in your old feed posts stay unchanged. As you can see in the image the user is not found when moving over the name. So I thought, what would happen if Id make a new listener account with that exact same name? Turns out that its possible, and suddenly something ‘funny happens. All the old posts in the feed of this person now link to the account of the new person who took the name that's identical to old name of the person who changed his/her name. Basically, I made a new listener account with the name ExpressoPizza. I know it's not technically allowed, but it's just for research purposes which might end up to benefit 7Cups in the end. Thereby comes that I won't use this account to contact anyone, and in due time I'll delete it again. in the lower image you can see that the feed posts with his old listener name suddenly link to my new account with the identical name. (P.S. ExpressoRite, if you disagree with any of this, just sent me a message and Ill delete the ‘ExpressoPizza profile I made so everything will revert back to how it was before. I can delete this entire topic too if you would prefer that.)

It doesnt end there. People who followed you when you had your old name, will still have the old name in their ‘following list after the name has changed. So in the ‘follow list of all the people who used to follow this other person in the past, will now be re-directed to my new ‘identical-name-profile (realise that some accounts have more than 1000 followers). So its like they follow someone they never chose to follow, although they technically dont follow me. They wont get my feed posts in their feed, but the links in their 'follow' section will link to my newly made profile.

This happens with all old links that dont change to the new name, theyll now be links to this person who made a profile with an identical name. Ironically it would make some sense to make a listener account with your old name to throw off the stalker even more, but this is technically against the rules, therefore I couldnt recommend it.

I don't think this is a very big deal, since most people would never think about doing this. Its just somewhat unprofessional I suppose. I just thought this was too interesting to not include in this topic. Id be surprised if a lot (or any) of you will make it this far and will read everything. But, I hope some people might find some benefit and/or entertainment in this topic. And I truly hope the steps I laid out might actually help someone in the future get rid of a stalker.

It might very well be so that I forgot things or mistakenly put things wrong, because this post turned out to be a lot longer than I initially expected and I kinda lost oversight at some point. If you have any questions or remarks about anything (criticism is welcome too), feel free to leave it in the comments.

DarkWolf

Random tags: @blackSnowflake25 @bookworm4 @ThunderDragon9919 @ExpressoRite @Laura @10 @AnAmpersand @ThunderBird3726 @EVIDENCE @ExpressoPizza