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An Idiot’s Guide to Parler
There seems to be a push by conservatives on Twitter to go a new social media app, Parler, so I decided to check it out. What unfolded was painful so I have a few tips for other senior citizens.
1. If you are a grandma, let your kids set up your account. If you intend to do it yourself, read on.
2. Have your cell phone handy so it can send a code and you don’t have to run to the other side of the house to find your phone and type in the code in 60 seconds, or be by your landline so a computer can call you with the code.
3. Type in your email carefully. You will need it when you forget your password and need a password reset link sent to your email. If you have a dot in your email, heaven help you (liz.herring).
3. Captcha should be called gotcha. I had some script letters and numbers that were so cutesy I couldn’t read them. It took four tries to get it right. If you do it on an IPad, type upper and lowercase letters like you see them. The IPad will try to trick you by presenting what you typed as all uppercase. Parler will then send you a number code that expires in a minute.
4. If you survive the captcha, you move on to the part where you pick a password. The IPad recommends a “strong” password that hackers can’t hack and you can’t remember. Don’t do it. Cheat. Enter something you can remember. IPad will then give you the option of adding it to your keychain. Be very careful and press the right little button or you will be in a big bag of hurt later when you want to add the app to your phone.
5. Once in, it is easy to use. I searched for one person I knew was on it, clicked on his profile, clicked on who he was following, and started clicking on the follow buttons on his list. I rather quickly filled up my list of follows with all the folks I like. Echo=retweet. I really liked it, played a while, and then logged off so I could add it to my phone and log in. Big mistake. I got stuck at the password part…wasn’t in the keychain.
6. So, what does one do? Naturally, click on “reset password” then wait for the email that it says will come in a minute. And wait. And wait. Then try again, and again. Then check the spam folder, then try again. Then I assumed I had typed my email in wrong so I clicked on “forgot email” and it asked for the phone number. Once given, it told me it was sending a message about my email….wait for it…..to my email…..but it never came. Next, we went to customer service to “help“ and typed in a message with our problem. Never heard back.
7. After 9 hours, I gave up and said the heck with this, I am creating a new account. I couldn’t use my email because Parler said it already had an account so my husband created a new email for me. Great. Now it needed a phone number but wouldn’t take mine because it was already in another account, and wouldn’t take the house number because my husband had used it, so we used my husband’s number. Finally got back on.
8. I do like the site. If you go there, I am lizherring, but can’t access that one, and elizabethherring, at least until I mess it up. Moral, don’t let grandmas do technology.
Published in General
No, no, a thousand times no! Although no techie, I work in the IT biz. Internet security is no joke. Here’s how to cope: Download a password manager. I use pwSafe, the Mac version of Password Safe. All your passwords are safely stored in there and you have to remember only one password, the one that opens the safe.
If you don’t have a PW manager, one alternative is to use a phrase, and interesting substitutions that make sense to you. Such as “OutWithA!” (out with a bang), or 4soothA#OfFlesh (forsooth, a pound of flesh). Sometimes, it depends on what the allowed characters are. But I’ve found that is an easier way to do it and remember than just picking numbers, letters, and special characters at random. “Seeing10*s” (Seeing 10 stars). Don’t use any of these, please.
Those are good ideas and I use them. But a check of my password safe tells me I’m storing 150 passwords. I never had the memory to hold that many passwords, no matter how clever. Now I have about five that I actually can remember, and I’m proud of that number!
You don’t have to search for many people. Once I find someone, I can click on his profile, just like on Twitter, and see who he is following. I can scroll down and see which ones I am already following and click on any I want to add to my list. It is easy.
See my comment #34
What do you think of Norton Vault?
I joined Parler yesterday in response to repeated reports of Twitter censoring and suspending conservative accounts. Now they’re fact checking the president. OK. I get it. Trump is a liar. Did Twitter just discover that politicians are dishonest? The bias is real and I expect it will get worse. So I’m transitioning to Parler.
My impressions so far:
I’m still a noob on Parler. I’ve noticed one advantage so far. You can post longer messages than on Twitter. Who knows. Maybe with some real competition, both Twitter and Parler will get better.
Like the barbarian leftist mobs, the geniuses at The Bulwank don’t know how to build anything. They only know how to tear down and destroy.
I don’t Twitter and I doubt I’ll Parler, but I agree with what you’ve said here. Competition almost always improves things for the consumer.
Worse still, a lot of what passes for security “best practices” is, like advice for COVID, apocryphal at best, or deeply flawed, or even flat out wrong.
Let’s take passwords:
Security will always have to be a balance between common sense protection and usability, and too often I fear we end up losing on both.
They were probably going for parlay.com, (a parlay being a civil negotiation between enemies with the intention of averting war) but that URL isn’t available.
Parlour.com is available, but that doesn’t really convey the same idea.
The company I work for is soon going to a “pick one really long password, and then you never have to change it again” policy. I forget what the special character requirements will be. Maybe just a number or somethying.
Yes, also the origin of the English term “parlay”, which is how it is pronounced in French.
After a month of being wary of their front page demand for a phone number, I finally relented yesterday and tried to enroll in Parler. Thanks for the reassurance that others are sharing this nightmare.
It’s so easy to sign on to Twitter. One logon ID, one password. I’m a compulsive cookie eraser (CCleaner) so it’s no trouble to sign in with a logon ID and password. As a retired boomer, a landline guy, I do not appreciate the assumption that a smartphone accompanies me at all times. It does not.
During the pandemic house arrest my smartphone sits on a night table. That’s to check my historic fantasy baseball simulation scores in the morning. (For the baseball history-curious, that’s via Diamond Mind Online [http://www.imaginesports.com] a fabulous computer sim for baseball hobbyists which BTW could use about 150 Ricochetti to balance things out on their far left-leaning off-topic discussion boards.)
Count me out if Perler continues to require text message identification codes. I’d endure capcha, reluctantly. What’s with a multi-level ID screener for a Twitter clone, anyway? I could post a tidy little rant on Twitter in a tenth of the time it takes to log on to Parler.
Parler is also pretty far along on the OCD spectrum when it comes to approving your password. Okay, I get one number, one cap, one lower case, and alright, a special character even though few demand it at this point. So I composed a fresh one. Sorry, it says, “not complex enough.” Hello? Never heard that before. Alright, here’s another. And another. Same result, for five minutes. Finally I append a period to a friend’s old address and bada-bing, I’m in. It takes my simplest, most transparent plain English attempt, after rejecting all kinds of imaginative gobbledygook. Go figure.
Now, forgive me, time to generalize from the specific.
Conservatives needs to do a better job of competing with all mainstream media, down to not-so-tiny details like being as or more user friendly than everything the Left has.
I’ll spare you my rant on how profound this need is in television networks, SVOD streaming, news organizations, non-profits, tech, education, and minor pursuits like cinema, book publishing, music … and everything else except talk radio. You know that already.
It’s just the last few weeks have been really beyond the pale. Everything from Amazon Prime’s opening page to many heretofore neutral major corporations have their home pages graffiti-splattered with BLM garbage. Even Up With People now be woke.
I deleted half a dozen of the most politically loaded Black History TV shows from the Amazon Prime home page, but I’m still getting — I kid you not — an invitation to watch a Moms Mabley special whenever I try to find the next Poirot episode in my viewing sequence.
Why can’t our media just be as omni-present as the MyPillow guy? Citizen Free Press, OANN, Epoch Times and Parler have all got a long way to go. Especially Parler. They need to learn that when they get their 15 minutes of fame, they must be seamlessly user friendly and ready for the traffic.
LOL. Yep. This is what happened to me when I signed up last week after seeing Devin Nunez’s tweet about Parler — had to run to the other side of the house :-) And, yes, it took me a couple of attempts to finally create an account. Mostly because i wanted to set up an account without given them a telephone number.
@EHerring,I will look you up in Parler. Thanks for the post.
Just now…on Twitter…a message tweeted about Parler from Parler’s founder:
Be sure to pick the one with my full name. I feel like the display is cleaner. I don’t log out now. Is easy to open it since I don’t.
I’m not the one to ask (I do administrative work for the techies). I’d check the reviews.
I have played around on it and found something cool. Seems all the posts on the main feed have pictures, cute but space hogs so one must scroll a lot. If you go to notifications, you just get words so you don’t have to scroll a lot. I am happy with Parler so far. Seems cleaner with easy on eyes presentation. Bottom left button lets you alternate between a day and night mode presentation. Pictures show what I mean. Presentation is sharper than my screenshot.
If you swipe right, you get this menu. The bottom right button is the one that alternates between day and night mode.
Two questions:
Can you actually use it in a web browser?
And can you actually read it in a web browser if you don’t have an account?
Yes, and no. But accounts are free.
And by “use it in a web browser” I mean, can you post to it? For example, our church has an Instagram account, and I can read it/see it in a web browser, but I can’t post to it without a phone or tablet. So another guy is in charge of the Instagram account, and I do all the Facebook stuff.
Yes, you can do it all in browser. With a couple of caveats where things are still getting stabilized. Searches are interesting.
Parler’s TOS make me think that it’s already on the slippery slope.
As Vox Day notes,
As usual, it can unilaterally modify the end user agreement, and also as usual, this:
From Parler’s privacy policy:
One word: Fitbit.
The sole protection I can see is the hope that Parler’s investors will keep Robert Conquest’s second law in mind:
Glad you answered that techie question for me. I am the one who has two accounts because I goofed up one of them and locked myself out.
re privacy and what we post, never post anything you don’t want attributed back to you.
I would like to put in a big vote for 1Password. I have been using it for years. I have a families account, so that my wife & I share most passwords, but a few are in a vault that our children can access on their devices too. Having all passwords instantly available on everyone’s device is a major timesaver.
The solution to the security questions is to append a note to the password entry for a website indicating what fake answers you have used. I always use nonsense responses for each one.
A good program like that one helps you easily navigate the security theater.
I am enjoying Parler more each day. It is a good news aggregator, like Drudge used to be. Epoch Times, American Greatness, and National Review, to name a few, post article notices and links. When I am in a hurry, I skim through the Notifications list for articles and comments of interest then clear it. At other times, I go straight to the Feed.
I’ve been trying to join Parler … it says there are ‘invalid characters’ in my username, Doug1943. And all the usual problems others experience with it … could there be a Lefty infiltrator-saboteur among its coders? This is the second or third time I’ve tried to sign up with it, and have always ended the attempt in frustration.