

Ask HN: Community Validated User Profiles - alanthonyc

I'm working on a community based web app and have been pondering ways to identify spam accounts.<p>Aside from the usual suspects during the registration process (captchas, honeypots, etc.), I'm also thinking of adding a "feature" where someone in the user community validates or vouches for a new member.  The username of the user who vouched for you would be stored as part of your registration information.<p>There would functionally be no difference between a validated and a non-validated member aside from being unable to vote on some community related activities - in which case it would be a simple matter for someone in that community to vouch for him/her.<p>Any thoughts on or criticisms of this idea would be appreciated.<p>thanks
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bdmac97
Are you sure you're not going overboard with that? Is spam that much of a
problem for your site that this is necessary?

I've never been a big fan of throwing up too many roadblocks to real people to
keep out the minority of spammers. If you already have captchas and honeypots
and JS updated "type this [value]" fields in your signup process, do you
really need more???

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TallGuyShort
I think you might be solving the wrong problem here. Someone could very easily
set up an account and have it vouch for a bunch of spam accounts before you
figured anything out. To solve that problem you'd have to limit "vouching"
privileges to a few trusted accounts, and then you're not getting much of a
benefit, IMO.

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alanthonyc
Hi everyone,

Thanks for all your feedback. Your comments are well appreciated. I had come
up with many of the same objections as well, but didn't have anyone to bounce
the basic idea off. (I guess this is where having that co-founder comes in
handy, as pg suggests.)

@notaddicted - that was a good read, thanks.

@TallGuyShort - your perfectly valid point would be solved by a solution that
brings up other problems (i.e. who would be the trusted authority for
validating accounts) as per notaddicted's link

In the end, some subtler means of identifying, managing and controlling the
undesirable accounts would be better. I'm thinking along the lines of what pg
is doing with this site with karma thresholds, etc.

Thanks again for all your insight.

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notaddicted
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust#Web_of_trust_probl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust#Web_of_trust_problems)

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shorbaji
Well, this would rule out anonymous contribution to "community-related
activities". Not sure how, but this may be an issue.

