Disappointed!

I totally agree. That is very sad and really unfair. I think people should just talk about future baby names and all sorts. There is plenty of room for that. I toally agree with @casilda. they should post fake babies in the name games forum. There is just no point of that.

This is the reason I don’t comment on birth announcements for twins, triplets etc. because I think 90% of them are fake. It’s sad the people feel the need to invent fake children.

Personally, I have been surprised that Nameberry hasn’t initialized a process for confirming births before now. I think the one-sock feet picture with the baby’s name written on paper is a pretty ingenious idea. It preserves privacy, doesn’t exclude home births, and makes photoshopping inconvenient.

It might also be worth considering leaving the Birth Announcements forum as it is, and adding a dedicated link on Nameberry allowing parents to submit their child’s name directly to [name_f]Pam[/name_f]/[name_f]Linda[/name_f]/site administrators. This could require the foot/name photograph, or something else. If a picture were only going to the administrators and had guaranteed privacy from them – you know, that the pictures are only for confirmation purposes and get deleted after X months or whatever, and I’m not going to load up Nameberry someday and find myself in one of the blog slide-show features or something like that – I wouldn’t object to more stringent requirements, like sending a picture of myself with the baby and the name written out. Or even a full family picture with the baby’s name written out, since I have one of those large families which, while rare, are actually legit. I think it would be worthwhile to go through a screening process, because I’m afraid many people do think my large family is fake. I don’t blame them; it would put up red flags for me, too – but if the administrators approved my family’s legitimacy, other Berries could know I’m not a fake while I would maintain my family’s privacy. A screening process for the official blog seems both prudent and fair in my estimation.

@saracita00 - I think that’s an ingenious idea, but it seems like so much work! I think it would cause a lot of new mothers quite a hassle to go through all of these guidelines just to prove their birth is legit.

What’s going to stop people to take a photo of their niece/nephew/little siblings foot and submit it?

It’s sad that there are fakers, but this is the internet, it’s going to happen.

I don’t think most people that are fakers would care enough to find a random baby and take a picture. There are some that would go to that extreme though… but it would greatly reduce the overall number of fakers.

@teatime - I think you’re probably right that those babies aren’t real, but they weren’t deliberately posted twice. Somebody commented on the original thread from last year, which is why it was bumped to the beginning of the announcements page and was accidentally included in the most recent quarterly report. This happened for about a dozen babies who were accidentally reported twice.

I think trolling is impossible to stop. Sad that it’s so common, especially for genuine mothers of multiples whose stories are sometimes doubted, but that’s the internet.

This is all very true. Unfortunately, there is no way to stop it completely. Oh well, I guess.

I do wish trolling would stop there’s no pressure on this site to be a mother which is something I love about the site. Hopefully the trolls wilk see this and change there mind but most trolls seem to get caught.

A photo of the birth certificate but covering the surnames for privacy reasons? Pretty extreme though and some certificates take ages to issue.

To me It’s kind of the equivalent of people going into chatrooms pretending to be someone they are not. I don’t like it but I guess I will just not reply to posts that don’t interest me or seem authentic.

Or a photo of the baby’s hospital cot card with the name on it but covering up the sirname.

Again, not everyone gives birth in a hospital. I had a hospital birth with my first but there was no cot anyway - they encouraged co-sleeping. Things like that also mean that if you forget about it while at hospital (I can’t imagine nameberry is top of everyone’s minds when they’ve just given birth) you can never contribute.

I don’t think there is any way to authenticate posters, you just have to accept that trolling happens. As frustrating as that is.

So annoying - when I was looking on here for name advice ten months ago I really used the announcement lists precisely because I wanted to see what was currently on the rise that wouldn’t show on the official lists for another 12 months. It didn’t influence the final decision but it could have. Tiresome people, you have the whole internet for your fantasies - go annoy someone else, pregnant ladies are tired and too hormonal to be trying to figure out fakery.

this literally made me LOL. ;D

[name_m]Ah[/name_m] yes, I see now. I should have been more diligent in looking back for the original post. [name_f]Mea[/name_f] culpa! I’m sorry if I offended anyone. Sadly, I don’t have much time to go digging through the archives anymore, as my one year old is well…a one year old. He’s incredibly tall and dexterous and can escape any clothing no matter how securely you think it is fastened. I prayed for him and wanted him desperately and am thankful every single minute to have him, but I surely do not wish he was twins. Perhaps if he were, he’d only be half so mischievous? Sadly, I can blame no one but myself for his mischief…I was a horrible child.

I don’t think it makes sense to go to any great lengths to try to “authenticate” birth announcements in the forum. For one thing, it would just take more time and energy than it’s worth to screen them. Plus, I think it would mostly just discourage people from sharing their real birth announcements, because who has time to do all that when you have a newborn? I wasn’t yet a member of Nameberry when my daughter was born, but if I had I would have been posting about her birth one-handed at 2am while breastfeeding. Trolls will troll. All forums have to deal with some amount of trolling. The best thing we can do to maybe reduce the incidents of birth announcement trolling is to ignore the post and don’t comment if we think it’s a troll. They’re only doing it for attention.

@sarahmezz–I’m afraid I’m guilty of inadvertently repeating those announcements from last quarter–I’ll be more careful in the future. It’s gotten really difficult to manage the sheer numbers–real and maybe not–so we’re considering doing it monthly instead of quarterly.

I totally agree with this. The fakery is annoying, but there’s no way as a mom of a newborn and three other kids that I would bother with photographing hospital bracelets or birth certificates or even submitting my baby’s photo to prove he is “real.” I think that we would lose a very large number of legitimate announcements by requiring such extreme measures to prove people’s babies are real.

There are so many announcements that are obviously real because the parents in question have been on the forums debating names for months before the birth (I’m just dying to know whether joyfulmomto8 will choose [name_f]Grace[/name_f] or [name_f]Caroline[/name_f], for example). But trolls will be trolls, and as others have said it is the internet. Not much we can do about it.

I agree with the above poster. This is a online forum there is going to be trolling unfortunately. It’s just how it is and really not a big deal because you can tell usually what’s real or what isn’t. It’s a forum

Honestly, I think a large problem is that members are allowed to continue faking after extremely persuasive evidence is posted against them. I know Nameberry has a reputation for being ‘nice’ - but sometimes the lengths mods will go to to prevent conflict is a bit ridiculous. I’ve seen threads locked by mods because someone was accused of faking (WITH evidence of contradictions in earlier posts), and people were discussing it. No action has been taken, in the threads I’ve observed, to remove/correct these members. In fact, I’ve seen several go on to stay on the board for quite some time afterwards, keeping their stories going!

Maybe faking is inevitable - but that doesn’t mean Nameberry mods/members should just turn a blind eye when it’s incredibly obvious that something’s up. I think Nameberry’s a really interesting site in terms of the names and lists it has available, as well as the interesting tastes of members - but I can tell you right now that a LOT of other name sites out there roll their eyes at the mention of its forums/birth announcements/popularity statistics, due to the vast number of fakers. Most sites have a pretty strong zero-tolerance policy for faking, and I think that’s a good thing. If not full-out banning a member (which I know may seem a bit harsh compared to the current rules), I don’t see the harm in suspensions. Give them a bit of time to consider what they’ve done, observe how the board works, and come back as themselves.

You really can’t have a healthy community when members seeking parenting advice are getting suggestions from 14-year-olds claiming to be the mothers of seven children. If the board makes it clear in their rules that faking isn’t allowed, and that teen members are more than welcome, I think people who genuinely want to talk about names, rather than playing an online game of The Sims and getting attention/praise via birth announcements, will get the idea.