Confidence that new posters are interested in their thread - an idea.

[PaulSB]

Good morning,

Thanks for keeping me realising that this is not an easy thing to explain, or just a terrible idea.

Do The four images posted above, the power meter question/advertising and the food review add any clarity?

I think that if the food review in particular doesn't give clarity as to why I think that this is a good, then probably you do understand the idea and just think that it is a terrible/pointless one.

Imagine that lots of people did think that this was a good idea, please humour me with this, and imagine in 2 years time where 50% of the new posters on forums and people leaving reviews on Trip Advisor started of their posts with a code. Would you give those posts/reviews greater credibility?

If your answer is no then the code is a waste of time, at least for you.

If your answer is yes then the question is how to get from now, where all new accounts on all on-line sites are completely anonymous to one where a new anonymous account can have immediately have reputation or credibility?

I am pretty convinced that the complexity isn't an issue if you believe that the objectives are worth while, once you've done it once and your browser autocompletes fields if you want to get a code. Or if on a forum you trust another member who may say, I checked the code and it's okay or it's not.

As suggested by @PaulSB I made some changes the pages for mobile phones, and they now seem fine to me if you rotate the phone to landscape but mobile usability isn't my thing, I hate them, so I may be making more changes.

Bye

Ian

I hope you don't feel I'm being a PIA. I'm only commenting to be of help. You're probably aware mobiles can be set to auto-rotate between landscape and portrait. This function is, for me, very annoying because only slight movement will cause the auto-rotation which if one is doing something in one view it's really unhelpful to be switched to another.

I have auto-rotation switched off and my phone is permanently in portrait. I have to actively switch to landscape mode. I'm only likely to do this when I'm extremely interested in something. An example would be a GCN video.

Most websites open by default in portrait, as does this one, and if something I'm only vaguely interested in doesn't open in portrait I may be deterred from from continuing.

I realise this could be frustrating for yourself but, in my opinion, the majority of people access the web from a mobile or tablet. If a site is not 100% mobile friendly it immediately creates a barrier between the site and the user. As the "customer" I am right even if I may seem to have unreasonable or unrealistic demands.

I'd argue it's essential for a developer to fully understand mobile use in this sense. My son is a developer. He tells me with some projects all the development is focused on mobile and tablet use with PC or laptop use coming second by some distance.

I don't mean to be awkward, this is simply my experience and feeling.

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Edit - Deleted as post duplicated below

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Good afternoon

I don't mean to be awkward, this is simply my experience and feeling.
Thanks for your thought they are very useful.

I don't normally do any general audience browser stuff so although I know how to, I have no idea what is normal. Background wise I went assembler, c, c++ and C# using 80x25 character VDUs and upwards, at my first job we wrote our own operating system.

So this whole area of mobile browsing is completely alien to my mindset, when I have had to put up a browser based front end I always knew that the users would be on large iPads or laptops.

I have auto-rotation switched off and my phone is permanently in portrait.
I had no idea people would do such a thing, I agree that this means that I need a very different layout.

If I’m understanding this correctly, it’s a sort of trust pilot for individuals.

Yes, this is the best description yet, except that Trust Pilot displays the business name, this service would just display the "stars", the substantiated misuse of the code.

I may be missing something here, but if there truly was a market for this then one of the big players like Facebook would expand their Single Sign On technology and amazing analytics to rate users. They already offer single sign on over many platforms, jumping into bed with the likes of XenForo would be simple and gather even more data on their users.

The issue for the big players is that there is a conflict of interest as the idea of the service requires that accounts can be marked as "bad", something that is hard for a business whose model is based around collecting as many accounts as possible.

There is also a conflict of interest between Facebook and many other sites, for example Facebook groups often compete with forums.

There is also a portion of the internet userbase that won't use Facebook or Google or won't use their accounts for single signon making this a harder idea to sell on the basis of a universal service.

I aim to be clear about this the only information that this service would collect would be what is displayed when you lookup a code plus an email address.

This information would be so general as to be useless as a stolen or sold database

Back pre GDPR I worked on a project which was basically legal opted in SPAM and we tried targeted emails based on the device that was likely to open the email, one that went to an email address that was likely to be opened on an iPhone 4 with a small screen was different to one that went to an email address that was probably opened on an iPad.

But at some point you find that making decisions based on "probably this but maybe that" type of general information doesn't lead to improved results over just assume the norm.

Finally there isn't $200 million to be made, or whatever the minimum value is for a new Google or Facebook project.

I understand barely a word of this thread, which I suppose makes me ideal fodder for the data miners or whatever they're called.

It all boils down to do you trust the review on the right more than the one on the left?

@mistyoptic 's description is lovely it’s a sort of trust pilot for individuals.

Bye

Ian

 

[classic33]

Good morning,

Yes, almost, but slightly less than that and more global.

The idea is a global anonymous id that is not a reputation score as implemented by one site or an aggregation of those sites but a much simpler indicator that says <i>I have been posting on 20 different sites for 20 years so I am likely to be serious in my post as new member to your site.</i>

The implicit score that I am aiming for is Good or New Account.

There will be few a "bad" accounts with lots of upheld reports but I would expect that "bad" accounts will either be deleted or not used by their owners.

I see adding any score beyond these two/three as being outside of the remit of the idea and none of my business.

It is then up to the reader to decide what value they attach to these 2/3 scores, today every account is new so this is a long term idea.

As a side thought, I am not averse to account holders having the option to hide the forum/site name and user name in the lookup screen but I currently feel that doing this may reduce the value of the id.


... and there was me thinking that you were going to say how to drink.

I have just a thread on this deleted as being spam elsewhere.

I wonder if the two images below add anything, the first is an invented advert for a power meter on an invented cycling forum and the second a fake review on am invented food forum.

The second image is the same reviews except that they start with an code.

The cycle forum post is both a reasonable question and a good advert. Clearly if it is an advert then there will not be a code, if it a real question then there might be.

If you stumble across the food forum entry because you were planning on going there does the review with the code give you any extra confidence, possibly after checking the code.


View attachment 580220

View attachment 580221

Bye

Ian

As presented, is it not a means of diverting traffic to your own site. Thereby increasing your site's chances of rising in search engine rankings.

As regards the removal, as spam, from another site, would you be willing to trust a listed spammer?

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Good afternoon,

As presented, is it not a means of diverting traffic to your own site. Thereby increasing your site's chances of rising in search engine rankings.

As regards the removal, as spam, from another site, would you be willing to trust a listed spammer?

When you consider the work involved in operating the scheme if anybody thought it a good idea then it would be a very, very expensive way of optimising search engine ranking for a pretty obscure area of search and it would NOT have that effect.

Are you aware that links in posts on forums and review sites are nearly always marked up with rel="nofollow". Use the nofollow value when you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site, Bing does something similar.

So there is no value in having a link in a forum post or review, I am unclear on this but there may even be a cost as the search engine would see an abnormally large number of occurrences of the url within links with nofollow.

Google have recently said that they may treat nofollow as an advisory, but that may be covering themselves.

I am not really sure that there is another way to present the idea if you want to be able to actually try it rather than just talk about it.

trust a listed spammer?
Can you clarify this please, what list?

Bye

Ian

 

[classic33]

Good afternoon,

When you consider the work involved in operating the scheme if anybody thought it a good idea then it would be a very, very expensive way of optimising search engine ranking for a pretty obscure area of search.


I am not really sure that there is another way to present the idea.

trust a listed spammer?
Can you clarify this please, what list?

Bye

Ian

Yes, but not on here as it's against site rules. Were you posting via the Three network on the two sites that reported you, with a slightly different username.

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Good afternoon

I would be fascinated to know as genuinely I can't think of who they would be as I have no automated tools posting or emailing things.

If you don't want to use the PM you could email me at IanS on the listed domain.

You can probably work out for yourself just how much time it has taken to write the replies on this thread.

Bye

Ian

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Good afternoon

Yes, but not on here as it's against site rules. Were you posting via the Three network on the two sites that reported you, with a slightly different username.

Thanks, but don't bother I have found the entries using https://www.stopforumspam.com/search

I know who it was, it was the same organisation who I mentioned had deleted the post, reported it twice.

Bye

Ian