LinkedIn Update – Fake Profile Removed

I’m finally back online, and I’m glad to report that LinkedIn have removed the faked LinkedIn profile that I mentioned last month.  To their credit, they actually removed it within 10 days of me making the support request – I simply didn’t spot the email telling me they’d done so, as I haven’t been able to get online much until recently.

I’m pleased they removed the profile, and I’m relieved that the creator of the fake profile didn’t do anything to damage the reputation of Myth Games, however I’d still love to know who made it, and why.

Fake LinkedIn Profiles

As a freelancer, and the owner of a small company, I like to maintain a presence on as many different social networks as possible.  I don’t devote huge amounts of time to them all – there’s so many that I just don’t have the time!  However I do make an effort to create an account, link up with any contacts of mine that also have a presence on the site, and log in at least once a month to check for messages, and see what people are up to.

LinkedIn is one of the networks that I’m a little more active on.  The groups are useful, and answering questions is a great way to get your name out there.  Plus, it’s a little more spam-free and work focused than most of the other networks.

Every now and then, I get told that I have a new colleage at Myth Games.  Since Myth Games is a family-ran company with a full time staff of two people, and only a handful of occasional contributors (all of whom are close friends), I’m always curious to see who these supposed colleagues are.  Usually, LinkedIn has simply gotten confused, and the person they’re pointing me to works for a different company that happens to have “Myth” or “Mythical” in the name.

Today, however, I saw someone claiming to be a Journalist at Myth Games.   They had no connections, were a new profile, and had joined several gaming and journalism related groups.

I’m not entirely sure why anyone would do that.  If you’re going to fake working somewhere, why not pick somewhere big?  If they’re after some contacts, working for a comparatively small, independent site is not going to benefit them that much, and if they’re playing a practical joke, I’m not sure what they’re trying to achieve.

I’ve contacted LinkedIn to ask them to investigate the profile, hopefully they’ll close it down.

If you’re the owner of a company, have you ever encountered anyone falsely claiming to work for you on LinkedIn? If so, how did you deal with it?  Did those false claims do any damage?

Myth Games is getting a redesign

Myth Games has had the same design for almost two years, and I’ve finally found the incentive to update it.  We bought a VPS recently, and there’s a few differences between our old shared hosting and the VPS set up, which means that some features on the site don’t quite work as intended.

Rather than dig through the old site’s rather messy code, I’ve started work on a new design, which will include a more CMS-like back end, to make life easier for people when they’re updating the site.  If all goes as planned, the new design will be live (in beta form) later today.

I’ve thrown out the phpBB Portal part of the site – everything is custom coded now, except for the ads system, which is powered by OpenX.  I’m hopeful that the new design will be much faster, and much more stable – the phpBB Portal performed well most of the time, but needed regular database optimization, and was prone to falling over during times of high load – such as the first day of a games trade show.

The challenge now is finding an effective way of caching pages, without having the cache eat too much disk space.

I’ll be signing up to OpenX marketplace.  Since the death of HypeCouncil a couple of years ago, I haven’t found a good advertiser that offers decently paying, relevant ads for gaming and entertainment sites.  If anyone knows of one, I’d love to hear from you!