How to block contacts in Live Messenger 2011

We all remember how easy it was in the old days to get rid of an annoying person or a spambot in MSN Messenger. You could just right-click on the contact and select “block” or “delete and block” and the problem was gone. Now, with Live Messenger, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Lately I’ve been messaged by compromised contacts (spambots), who aren’t even in my visible contact list (at least I thought they weren’t), so I started searching for a way to get rid of them permanently. Long story short, here’s what you must do:

So you want more privacy on Geni.com?

Me and my family discovered that Geni will give out information about your immediate family relations. The problem: go to www.geni.com and type some name into “Search People” form (you can try your family name or some friend’s, if it’s not too common). For example result for “Lady Gaga” will tell me that she’s “Daughter of Joseph Germanotta and Cynthia Germanotta, Sister of Natali Germanotta”.

That’s probably public inforamtion for Lady Gaga but I wouldn’t want that kind of information be public about my family (none of us is famous). Also, as the manager of many profiles in my family tree I feel obliged to keep their privacy. So I searched around to find if it’s possible to hide it without deleting the family tree. And without further ado the solution:

1. find the profile that is managed by you;
2. on the profile page locate and click “Edit” link just under “Immediate Family” section;
3. click “Hide” for every person you don’t want to be publicly linked to that person and voila!

I wish that Geni would be more restrictive about this (hide everything by default). but as long as the aforementioned solution works, I’m okay with that service.