Yik Yak, a US based company, must appear to have a moral conscience and through public pressure and issues with the app in the United States have made this feature available. Once a user leaves the school grounds the app will work again though. This feature cannot be bypassed as the setting has been activated via the owner of the app, Yik Yak. When a student, teacher, or anyone else for that matter enters the school grounds the app is disabled and will not work.

A request for this feature to be enabled must be made by a school or organisation. Yik Yak can geographically identify a school grounds area via Satellite maps and then ban the app once a user is within the school grounds. This school, and another nearby who became aware, utilised a feature made available through Yik Yak to enable what is called ‘Geo Fencing’. Students quickly notified teachers who informed administration. The app spread amongst students and within hours serious issues were being created which included threats and bullying. Students at the school informed us that one student stumbled across the app and installed it on her phone and then encouraged her friends to do the same. The app was brought to the attention of the school via students who reported it’s use, and the almost immediate misuse, whereby serious bullying was occurring amongst certain students. And so here I am.While speaking at a school in early May this year Internet Safe Families founder Brett Lee became personally aware that the school had identified and blocked the anonymizer site Yik Yak. You can find out more about the app from our previous blog Why the YIKYAK app is a concern for parents. In the back of my mind, I know one of the main reasons I worked so hard these last few years, is because I knew that one day this is exactly what I’d want to end up doing, far away from the big city, the madding crowd. I guess I’m currently finding my own equivalent here in Alpine, Texas, minus the copious amount of booze. I’m not sure I like the idea of staggering home drunk every night, but as somebody who likes to write, likes his beer, and likes the simple life, I can’t say I find their overall Modus Operandi unappealing. Women came and went, friends came and went, children came and went, money and fame came and went, but the daily writing-booze combo remained the great constant. Then they’d do the same thing the next day. Then they’d head for their local café, drink gallons of booze for hours on end, and stagger home late at night. They’d get up early each morning, then write diligently till noon. The Florida Keys and Cuba in Hemingway’s case, the South of France in Greene’s.

Though their books were very different from each other’s, their daily routines were quite similar, so I heard.īasically, they’d live somewhere cheap, quiet and relatively conducive to getting a lot of writing done. I remember well, hearing all about two of my favorite writers, Hemingway and Graham Greene. And I always liked hearing the true-life stories about the authors who penned them. From the age of nineteen, for over a decade I devoured books.

Yakyak yak