Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Instagram Facebook and other Social Media

Hi,

This feels like opening a can of worms.

MG Australia is running a competition. They want you to load up a picture of you with your MG onto Instagram using a hashtag. Then enter the competition on their website loading up the same photo and include the URL from Instagram.

I have Facebook and people have sent me Instagram links but as far as I know I have not setup an Instagram account. Now when I try create an account it says it already exists. When I try forgot password it says no account exists with that email address. I have sent Instagram support an email but I don't hold my breath they will reply.

I don't look at Facebook a lot and I prefer to use websites like Talk Morgan and MGEXP that are forum based. More interesting conversations and unlike Facebook where I feel anyone can and will put stupid comments TM and MGEXP are only rad by people into cars.

Anyway does anyone use Instagram? Is it less annoying than Facebook and is worth trying to get Instagram to work?

Thanks
Chris

It's all Meta, but I find Instagram more friendly in use, more about sharing pictures / short stories and than it stays with that.

In some cases these are used to get people to join the platform as much as share actual content.

Have a search through your SPAM and email as a whole (inbox/deleted etc) to see if anything with Instagram is in there. It might be you have had an invite in the past which you have ignored which is where your ID is locked against?

What might have happened is that some Insta program/process has harvested your email address from another persons contacts. If they have then sent a "i am on insta, you should join me" type request (or more likely insta has using their ID) it has created and held your email address in a pending state until you join. This would result in your name being in a pending state, it has been reserved by the process but not completed.

Ask any of your friends on Insta to do a search against your email ID/name from within Insta to see if you show on anything, also search for your name in general on there.

Whilst I agree with your aversion to having your details spread across many sites you should also consider it this way. If you do not have your ID now then it can be cloned by someone else. I do not use Insta however I did create an account on it when it started up using my "non-valid credentials" so others could not steal my ID. I have a set of wrong credentials (DoB, Address etc) linked to a gmail account I monitor which I use for all stuff that is likely to get abused. So if I want to protect myself I get in there first using these incorrect credentials. I also save them to a password protected note on my iPhone when I create them just for security. Doing this allows me to avoid risk as far as possible and also observe where my name seems to be getting leaked from possibly. I prefer to know rather than worry and so having the account up front avoids anyone else being able to take advantage.

I do keep a list of all of these "phantom" accounts. Please excuse me as this is a bit horrible but in truth saves a massive amount of pain. In the event that you were to pass away the workload involved in tidying up someone's on line footprint can be quit debilitating for the people left behind whilst they are trying to deal with the loss. Completing probate and then finding outstanding payments and all sorts of other stuff can bring more suffering as it drags it all up again. The Interweb leads to a fire and forget approach but in truth it can be very very messy for a number of reasons.

Personally I do not use any Meta products, they are reknowned for invasion of privacy and having security that is as leaky as a wire netting canoe.

I am on a few forums and use Google, which seems to know more about me than I know about myself, but I tolerate that and know that I can delete data that they hold.

As for as my mobile devices are concerned I do not give permissions for access to the microphone unless/until I want to use the microphone. I have the browser set to not allow tracking cookies and I often use a private browser that does not keep history or cookies.

I don't seem to suffer from targetted advertising and, in general terms, my private email address is spam free.

I do have a couple of email accounts and aliases that I use for certain purposes. If too much spam starts arriving on those addresses I can terminate the accounts.

If you have Apple computers etc, you can use “Hide My email”, which generates a random address, automatically forwarded to one of your normal addresses.

I'm a little late to the party, but did you try asking this on a MG forum instead of a Morgan forum? 😀

I tried to connect to Instagram on my phone and it said your account is disabled. I answered some questions and I now have an Instagram account and I have uploaded a photo of my MGB to enter the competition.

I like the MG competition because MG Australia are going to donate $30 for every entry to the Australian Red Cross hoping to raise $20,000 meaning they are expecting 667 entries, but I don't understand why they want the photo to be on social media rather than uploaded on their website like last time. Looking at the photos they have posted so far on their website most are MGTC, TD and TF's then MGB's. I am not sure how photos of old MG's going around on social media are going to make people want to go buy a new MG, especially when many people don't count them as real MG's.

Interesting comments from both Alistair and Peter, both different but both very interesting. Alistair, thanks for mention passing away, it is something we need to think about, after 40 years of me paying all our bills, doing both our tax returns etc. I do feel my wife will find me passing away not easy to cope with both emotionally and having to organise her own financials, she is no dumb but I have done it all and made her life easy, I probably need to write instructions how to do what I do and why.

Edwin, no I didn't ask this question on a MG forum. The MG forum has an off topic forum section for non car topics like this but 90% of the views are in the car specific forums so I felt I had more chance getting an answer on this forum. While I didn't end up buying a Morgan I still read this forum and find it more entertaining than the MG forum, more discussion on things like alternative fuels, EV's, solar panels and some of the thread drifts are great, plus the technical discussions are great like for example Montegue's post on the upgrades Monty has got are also very interesting. I have probably posted the same number of posts on both TM and MGEXP, Plus I feel my car with a Duratec engine with OMEX throttle bodies same as Gambalunga that a lot of the technical discussion on this site is more relevant to me than the discussion on the MG forum as a lot of the discussion is about parts my car doesn't have.

Apologies for the thread drift, but there seem to be an increasing number of online "win a car" competitions, here's a recent example https://competitions.vintageandclassiccarhire.com/product/1969-morgan-4-4/

No issues with thread drift.

I wonder if it just a car hire place based on the website name getting rid of some stock before retiring and getting much better prices than they would just selling the cars, assuming the Morgan is worth £25K that is also offered as the alternative price as Cash at 13999 tickets at £4.99 Per Ticket it is £69,885.01 total revenue, even with some costs it is an easy way to get over double what the car is worth. It looks like they have sold a very nice MGC and TR4 last month in September and a Stag this month.

There is a car hire place in Australia https://www.vintageandclassiccarhire.com.au/ that is based on renting his own cars but also other others cars. He built up the business over about 20 years, recently has been trying to sell it but don't think has had any luck and has more recently been advertising for staff to run it.

If you want to drift to a related thread, Richard posted this one earlier this year: 1972 4/4 for £9 in a draw but be quick.

I made the same point, from the maths it would appear to be a good way of disposing of cars at double their value. That company, Bridge Classic Cars, is still running regular competitions.