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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
Are you using the app of a browser. I was on it today. My big beef is I have to enter my user name send password each time then do the gotcha. Sometimes they have terrible whenmany are signing up. Try again. Let me know.
You might try Gab. No need to even offer up a phone number. The downside is there is so little censorship that occasionally an individual might post that every problem in the modern world is the fault of The Jews.
But following dependable people keeps that insanity at bay.
“Happy warriors” is up on Gab as a private site, as it is here.
Several months ago, due to getting evacuees from both Twitter and parler during the same ten day period, the site was rather unreliable. But now that the extra 600,000 members have been aboard for a while, the additional servers that were purchased have kept it humming along nicely.