In amongst all the web activities and other new features in the April Windows Live update there was one small but significant update that has gone unheralded but which has fixed a problem that has plagued many Windows Live users since wave 3 went live in November 2008; the scourge of network invite spam.
I’m sure many of you will have experienced the same problem that I have, that of recurring network invites from people that you have never met and who don’t even bother to introduce themselves. I used to routinely decline the invites but the problem became so prevalent that instead I chose to simply ignore the requests which has resulted in my having a pretty big backlog of 704 invites at the time of writing:
We do of course have the option in our communication preferences to specify who can send you network invitations and one of the options is “No one”:
Unfortunately a bug existed that meant for some people (including myself) specifying “No one” had absolutely no effect and the river of network invites just kept on coming. Happily this has been fixed in the latest batch of updates and you can now set this setting to “People in your extended network” or “No one” and it will behave as advertised.
You will need to visit http://profile.live.com/Communication/ to set your preference accordingly even if you have done so in the past. I set mine to “People in your extended network” this morning and the seemingly endless flow of network invites has now, happily, ceased. Now all I need is a means to ignore my existing 704 invites in one fell swoop so to anyone reading from the Windows Live team, consider that a feature request!
-Jamie
