But...
Lately, it seems the spammers have taken over. At first, I noticed that if I searched for something, like a "pillow", some of the pins that would come up would lead to spam. OK, I can handle that. I would try to click through but there would be no tutorial or shop. Just spam. Boo. In the last few weeks, I've noticed a huge shift towards spam. Now if I search for "pillow", I get this -
OK. Nice pillow but not exactly what I was looking for. The spammers have learned to write a caption that will get noticed (In this example, the caption is "Pillow pillow pillow pillow") Btw, every one of these pins is spam (not a shocker). And, every one of these pins has already been reported as spam. So, why are they still showing up?
I wasn't ready to lose hope just yet. I decided that the best way to find new things was to skip the search bar and just repin things from users that I follow only. Which has helped a lot. (This is where I need your help - I'd like to follow you! Please leave a link to your Pinterest boards in the comments and I'll follow you. If you are interested, you can find my boards here) I also pin things that I find all over the web. Problem solved, right?
Nope.
Last night, we attended my son's high school graduation. Super fun! So proud of him! Anyway, when I returned home, I hopped onto my computer and did some surfing. Of course that meant checking out Pinterest. And something caught my eye. I happened to notice that someone had left a comment on one of my pins. Which doesn't happen too often. I clicked on the notification, and found this -
This is one of my boards. Except it isn't. Somehow, a spammer created a whole new board in my account. And pinned a really crazy image -
This is all fake. I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I didn't create that board and I didn't pin that image. And most likely, if I hadn't seen that notification, I wouldn't have caught this on my account for a long time. (Actually, I have no idea how long it's been there. It wasn't even the last board on my 'wall' - it was somewhat camouflaged in the middle.) I marked the pin as spam and deleted the board (there was no way of marking the whole board as spam). This was completely out of my control. And that makes me nervous. I have over 1300 pins. I plan on going through each and every one of them over the next couple of days to make sure they are legit. I also changed my password. I'm hopeful but I don't know if it will stop this fake board and pin spam from happening again.
Has this happened to any of you? Have you seen this before? Are you a little nervous about the security (or lack there of) of Pinterest? I'm really hoping that they will be able to add more layers of control so this doesn't happen again. My fingers are crossed - I don't want to go back to a pre-Pinterest world!