Keeping your Twitter account safe from hackers

Have you ever logged in to Twitter and seen that a friend has been sending strange tweets  and direct messages? Or worse still, have you logged in and found that YOU have been sending them and upset some of your friends - even though you weren't online at the time? Or maybe you suddenly find that you have followed people you have never heard of, or unfollowed some of your best friends?

One thing you can be sure of: as soon as somebody opens an account of any kind - an email account, a Twitter account or a Facebook account - somebody else will try to get control of it. Sometimes for criminal purposes such as identity theft, sometimes to try to get free advertising for their dodgy services, and sometimes to cause as much hassle as possible to as many people as possible. But as often as not, they do it simply to prove that they CAN. And while we  may wish the perpetrators would go and get themselves a life, we still need to deal with the trouble they have caused.

So how can you prevent it happening?

The number one rule is not to click on any links unless you are 100% certain where they are going to take you. Now if  you are a comper, you will be used to me saying "Click on the link in the tweet to make sure you have read the full instructions". No, I am not contradicting myself! If a tweet is clearly a competition tweet, then the link in it is safe. But if you get a tweet that has nothing BUT a link in it, even if it appears to be from your very best friend, STOP!!!! Don't click until you have checked with them whether they really sent it and what it is about.

Sometimes there won't be just a link, there will be a message saying "Is this you in the photo?" or "You have been mentioned in this blog" or "See who has been viewing your profile". All these are designed to lure you to sites where you will grant the application authority to access your Twitter profile before you can see the photo/blog/list in question. Then, of course, the photo, blog or list will be fake but the hacker has access to your account - authorised by you! - and can start sending messages from it.

So the next rule is: don't authorise any application unless you are 100% certain that it is a genuine application that will be useful to you. There are some wonderful applications out there that can really help you to manage your Twitter account, but make sure any you use has  been recommended to you by a reputable source. And  GENUINELY  recommended by them - not tweeted from their account by a hacker pretending to be them.

What should you do if you are hacked?

First of all, let all your followers know and warn them not to click in the links in any unusual messages you may have sent them.

Next change your password. To do this, go to your twitter home page and click on the arrow beside your name at the very top right, then choose "Settings" then "Password". The harder your password is for you to remember, the harder it is for a hacker to guess! So make it more complicated than your old one by mixing letters and numbers and not using a name or a recognisable word.  Don't forget that if you access Twitter through another application, such as Tweet Deck, or on your phone, you will need to change the password there as well.

Now revoke authority to all applications but the ones you know you use regularly. To do this, still on the Settings page, choose the "Applications" tab and click on "Revoke access" next to all the ones you want to remove or don't instantly recognise. It's OK to be quite ruthless about this as you can easily re-allow ones you revoke accidentally - they will simply ask you for authority next time you try to use them.

Finally, make your computer forget! Log out of Twitter (and remember your new password for when you log back in) then clear your cookies and history (in Internet Explorer you do this from the Internet Options menu under "Tools" or the little cog wheel) and, if you have time, restart your computer so that when it starts up again, it will have forgotten that your account was ever compromised!

I hope you never have to do any of this - but remember this page just in case you should ever need it.

CLOSED Win a Justin Bieber double DVD

At the moment, there is a limited edition double DVD of Justin Bieber's  "Never Say Never" available only at Asda. One DVD is  the same one available singly elsewhere, the other is the Extended Director's Edition with 40 minutes of extra footage and lots of other extras.

Demand for this DVD set has been so high that Paramount has had difficulty supplying everyone and some orders  placed  online at Asda have been delayed. So you may well have a sulky teenage girl in the house, claiming that her summer holiday has been completely ruined by the lack of DVD. Or you may know a teenage girl (or boy!) who would love it. Or you may secretly hanker after a copy for yourself...... I promise not to tell if you do!

I have a pair of DVDs to give away. And better news still for any Belibers or parents of Belibers,  the main DVD contains a leaflet that gives details of a competition to win one of two trips to the USA to meet the man (or should that be boy?) himself!

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED.

To enter this competition, all you need to do is to fill in this simple form - if you need any help with the answer, try looking here . The form will only allow me to collect 100 responses so HURRY as the competition will  close once all 100 have been received. I will announce here and on Twitter when the limit has been reached. If I have not reached 100 entries by midnight on Sunday 31 July I will close  the competition anyway in order to be able to post the prize out as soon as possible.

One entry per person - I think in any case the form will only let you visit once from one computer so you don't really get any choice in the matter! As you can tell, I've not used this service to run a competition before so it's a learning experience for me as well as a chance of a prize for you.

How to choose fresh fish

Now this may seem like a rather odd topic for a blog that is primarily about competitions,  so let me explain why I'm writing it.

Last year, a good friend, Sharon Buchalter, was lucky enough to win a fish cookery day for two, at a restaurant not far from my home. Unfortunately she had to drop out at short notice, so she  very generously arranged to have the day transferred to me and my daughter.

We had a fascinating day, cooking and eating numerous dishes, all accompanied by indecent amounts of excellent wine. The most useful information of all though, was gleaned not from the cooking and eating, but from the visit to the in-house fishmonger's shop where we were given some invaluable tips on choosing and buying fresh fish. Tips that apply just as much if you are shopping at a supermarket fish stall as if you are fortunate enough to be able to shop at an old-fashioned fishmonger.

I think we’ve all heard that when shopping for fish, you should look for bright eyes. The eyes should be shiny and slightly raised from the face.  If they are sunken inwards and/or slightly opaque, the fish is past its peak of freshness.

The gills should be bright red when you look inside  them, not  a  grey brown colour. Fresh blood is OK- slime isn’t.

A whole fish is also pretty stiff when it is very fresh. Something the size of a mackerel can be held up straight like a truncheon and not flop over (no sniggering at the back).

Flat fish should have a thin covering of rather horrible feeling slime –  the nastier they feel, the fresher they are.

Other  fish should feel quite scaly when you run  your finger up the body the wrong way. As the fish ages, the outer scales  fall off and the skin becomes smoother.  

It should  smell  of fresh sea air, not “fishy”

If it is filleted so that you can see the flesh, the whiter it is, the fresher it is. The flakes of fish should be densely packed and the meat feel firm.

Obviously most fishmongers and especially  supermarket fish stalls don’t want you to handle or sniff their fish, so look  out for these ways of  disguising less-than-fresh fish (Note – if it’s on sale it MUST be fit to eat, by law, but it’s not going to keep when you get it home).

It’s quite easy for them to display their fish in such a way that you can’t see whether it is stiff or not, but there are some other things to look out for.

The first thing they do is cut the head off, so you can’t see the gills or eyes. In a display of really fresh fish, the only fish without a head will  be the monkfish, which most fishmongers feel is so ugly it puts people off buying.

Next they “clean” the fish, washing off the slime from flat fish or scraping off scales from other fish. This of course saves them time as they can  do it when  the shop/stall  is quiet rather than doing it for each customer who comes along,  but it’s also a very handy way of disguising fish that has already started to lose its slime or scales.

The fish that has been cut up and put in packs is  likely to be the oldest of the lot, still edible but carefully arranged so that if you are looking out for any of the pointers above you can’t see them.

I hope you find these tips useful - they have certainly helped me in my shopping.

Photo courtesy of

Image: pixbox77 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How many times should I enter?

How often do YOU enter each competition? Do you concentrate all your efforts on just a few competitions at a time, perhaps sending in entries on behalf of all your family and friends, or do you frantically try to enter every competition you see, eventually having to admit that there just isn't enough time to make just ONE entry to all the ones you want to enter? I must admit, I belong to the latter camp. I would love to have the time to work through every competition out there, putting an entry in to every single one whose prize I fancy, but sadly I haven't yet found any competitions where the prize is 24 hours of uninterrupted free time, so I  just can't keep up.

I imagine the price of postage has put most of  us off doing multiple entries to postal competitions these days - the rules almost always say "One entry per envelope" so you can't save on stamps that way. But I have noticed recently that quite a few entry forms are giving Freepost addresses, so as long as the rules permit, it wouldn't cost too much to send in more than one entry. Some people go to extreme lengths though - a representative from a handling house once told me that in a competition they ran a few years ago, one student was so determined to win the car prize that he got all his friends to spend many hours writing out thousands and thousands of entries - so many that in the end he had to hire a van and deliver them all to the handling house in person. And did he win? Well, yes, he did, but it made them think hard about how many entries it is reasonable to accept from one person and have introduced a rule that says "entries must be in individual, stamped envelopes" so hand delivered entries are no longer acceptable. (And do remember that when it says "stamped" it means stamped and not franked, so no trying to slip your entries through the office franking system - they won't be accepted).

The same person told me that when a rule says "one entry per person" and they get multiple entries from people living at the same address, they start to get suspicious if there are more than half a dozen entries from the same address and are likely  to check it out. If it turns out to be an ordinary house and not something like a hall of residence or nurse's home they will  consider disqualifying the entries - so if you tend to enter on behalf of your cats, hamsters and goldfish you may be reducing your chances rather than improving them.

How many mobile phones do you have? I know of compers with batteries  of them lined up on the desk, so they can enter every text competition dozens of times. As with postal competitions, I would be put off by the time and cost involved. I did have two phones  for text comps for a while, but I was very half-hearted about using my second phone and only ever won one small prize with it. I lost it about 6 months ago - I think it's down the back of the book case somewhere - and I can't honestly say I have missed it. I'm just not organised enough to keep up multiple personalities, and in any case my one trusty phone has won me some wonderful prizes including two fantastic holidays so I think I will stay loyal to it.

How about online competitions? Many websites only allow you one entry - and they can very easily tell if you have entered on behalf of other people by tracking your IP address. But the good  news is that almost all of them will still allow  your first entry, disqualifying further ones made from your computer, so you still get one entry into the draw even if you enter for several people (or enter for yourself more than once, whether by accident or design). What about competitions that allow you to enter more than once? Personally I still only enter once, as there are more competitions out there than I could  possible cope with, but I do make exceptions. The competitions linked to ITV programmes, for instance, have such lovely prizes that they spur me on to make a bit more effort. Each one allows either 3 or 5 entries, and it very helpfully tells you if you try to enter too often, so I'm happy to spend a few minutes pressing the "back" key and entering again.  And if there is a new prize to be won every day, I will enter every day. Otherwise I just move on to the next competition.

On  Twitter, the original tweet for a competition may well include a link to the terms and conditions. It's ALWAYS a good idea to follow the link and read it. I often see people tweeting a competition several times, maybe even every day, when the rules have said "one entry per person". Twitter has arranged things so that you can't retweet the same message multiple times, and finding ways around this such as altering the message slightly can mean that your entry isn't actually seen by the promoter. And also retweeting the same thing over and over again can result in you  being sent to "Twitter Jail", or even having your account suspended, as can having multiple accounts and tweeting the same things  from them.



But for me, the ideal number  of entries to make is the number I enjoy doing! That might be one-a-day, it might be none at all, it all depends on the competition, the prize, and, if it is a website competition, the speed and user friendliness of the site.

So how many entries do YOU like to make for competitions of various kinds? And how successful is your strategy? Come on, own  up! And feel free to do it anonymously if you think some people might find your statistics excessive - I promise not to criticise.

It's almost Friday again.....

And, as I've mentioned before. Friday is a FANTASTIC day to be a comper! My husband has a day off tomorrow and thinks we  are going shopping..... I'm going to have to put him right about that. But even if I'm not around, do feel free to watch, or follow, my current Friday list on Twitter - the people on my list run competitions most Fridays, and if you watch my list rather then watching me, you don't need to rely on me  being around to tweet competitions.

But now things have started to hot up on Facebook on Fridays too. Soon compers are going to have to declare a four day week,so we can devote our Fridays entirely to comping! This Friday, July 22nd,  a one off competition is going to be run by Voucher Hub - but you  will have to be quick off the mark, as the winners will be the first 10 correct entries, who will each win £15 worth of iTunes vouchers.

The competition will take the form of a "pin the tail on the pig" game, with entrants needing to choose a grid reference from a picture. Voucher Hub will be giving clues once the game is under way.

Good luck - and I hope by tomorrow  evening that some of you will be "squealing" with delight!

From my Comping Library: 4. The Books

When I feel as if I've lost my comping "mojo", when the wins aren't appearing and my enthusiasm for comping starts to flag, there's nothing gives me more of a boost than reading a book about comping. It can fire me with enthusiam and ideas, and give me a real lift, especially when reading about other compers' wins and experiences.

Books about comping are few  and far between. I believe a couple of new ones have been published recently, so I will look out for them and tell you more about them when I have read them, but all the ones in my collection are a good few years  old now.

At the times these books were written, the authors were probably among the best known names in comping. Robert Kendal, who was a regular columnist in Competitors Journal, wrote "Prize Winning Ways" in 1988, and although in his day the only way to enter a competition was by post, a great deal of his advice still applies to all our more modern ways of comping.

Kathy Kantypowicz is another name which will be familiar to those who have been comping for some years. She produced a comping magazine of her own and contributed to several others, and the lessons learned from her experiences form the basis for her book "Winning Consumer Competitions" published in 1996. It includes an interesting look at comping from a promoter's  point of view, and brings  us a little closer to modern times with a look at how to get on to TV game shows.

Also published in 1996. "How to Win Any Consumer Competition" was written  by Martin Dove, who still writes  for Simply Prizes magazine. It is a more light hearted book than the first two, with lots of lively anecdotes and potted biographies of successful compers.

I don't turn to "How to win Consumer Competitions" by Graham Stevenson, published in 1992,  as often as the other books in my collection because most of the information in it hasn't stood the test of time as well as the rest, although there is some very useful advice on how to get letters published in magazines.

"How to Win Any Slogan Competition" , written in 1994 by Angelina Kaye, is simply a huge and useful collection  of previous winning tiebreakers, grouped according to theme. Although tiebreaker competitions are quite rare nowadays, a collection like this gives you great ideas  for puns, rhymes and word-play when you DO find one to enter.

And even more tiebreaker inspiration comes from Lynne Suzanne and Dee Tracy in  "Pun-ch Lines" (1999) which gives you the basic building blocks you need to create your own witty, pun-filled tiebreakers on almost any subject. Many older compers will be familiar with the postal comping club that Lynne ran for many years, and the numerous and very useful booklets and tiebreaker collectionsshe published.

My final look this time is at a real piece of comping history - "American Slogans 1952-53" by William Sunners.

William Sunners was a prominent comper in the USA in the 1950s and wrote many books for compers. This one  - aimed at advertising students  and copywriters rather than compers - is the only work of his that I have been lucky enough to get hold of. It is  simply a list of thousands and thousands of advertising slogans of all kinds from all over the USA. While probably not a lot of use to a modern comper, it is still a fascinating book to leaf through. Who these days, for instance, would advertise a hardware store as "The house of a million nuts"?

While all these books are long out of print,   you can occasionally find some of them, and similar titles, listed on eBay or on Amazon Marketplace.  And if you know the names and/or authoers of the recently published books, please let me know - I would love to bring my collection up to date!





What is Grape Vine?

The Grape Vine blog was originally set up to help me to keep in touch with subscribers in between issues, but it has developed into a much bigger  comping resource than I ever imagined it would, and is regularly read by hundreds of you who may not even know what Grape Vine is – so here is a little introduction to the magazine I produce as my “day job”.

Set up by John Lock, about 18 years ago, and passed on to me when he retired 6 years ago, The Competition Grape Vine is a monthly magazine for compers of all ages and amounts of experience. Originally devoted to postal comping only, it now covers competitions of all kinds, online, postal, text, phone – the only provisos being that information about them was originally sourced offline in some way, and that the competitions in them do not come from paid-for news-stand magazines, although where a store charges  for its own in-store magazine I do include it. There are some wonderful websites and forums that cover online only competitions, and some excellent magazines that list hundreds  of competitions from news-stand magazines, but Grape Vine works hard to bring readers something a bit different.

In every issue, you will read a list of big wins that readers have had in  the previous month – and if that wasn’t testament enough to our success, lists of winners  of less-big prizes are frequently made up almost exclusively of Grape Vine readers. And no wonder – I go out of my way to source hard-to-find and potentially low entry competitions, and with only a few hundred subscribers, many of the competitions I feature give you an outstanding chance of winning.

 

Why not give Grape Vine a try? Subscribers get a printed monthly magazine, an email update part way through the month crammed with last-minute competitions,  the chance to swap entry forms, advice on answers and entry codes (when it is possible to enter without proof of purchase), and even a winners-list checking service for if you see a tiebreaker that you think is yours but haven’t received a prize. And if you have any queries about a prize that goes missing or isn’t as described, I keep the details of every competition until a year after the closing date so I can help you to refer back to what you SHOULD have won. Any sneaky rules that might catch you out are highlighted, and I can help subscribers out with direct links to online competitions that appear to have vanished into thin air. In fact Grape Vine is more than just a magazine – it is a complete comping service and many readers tell me it is more like belonging to a club than simply reading a magazine.

 A 3 month subscription costs just £13.50, 6 months £25 and 12 months £45. Just one small win can cover the cost! And if you have never had a copy before, you can request a free sample simply by emailing your name and address to janesgrapevine@yahoo.co.uk  - go on! You’ve got nothing to lose – and  possibly a lot to win!!!