You suggesting that due to the 'Occasional'/'rare' pro spammer, all new members would be asked to activate their account via sms???

I am more in favour of dealing with the offenders than enforcing such a blanket 'hurdle' on all.

Moreover,

1) Not all new members will necessarily know existing members [well] who can assure them that their mobile number will never be abused, nor will these existing members really be in a position to make such guarantees on behalf of a 3rd party...

2) Not all new members will necessarily have a Swiss mobile on arrival - when they may most need Glocals. Or would you allow people to send international SMS to activate an account?

3) How does this stop spammers with mobiles??



PS is the meeting you had the one that was talked of for discussing the rating system, or I missed that one too?
SimSim, Mar 15, 2008 @ 00:03

[quote][b]SimSim (14/03/2008)[/b][hr]I am more in favour of dealing with the offenders than enforcing such a blanket 'hurdle' on all.[/quote]

Thanks SimSim, appreciate the feedback. You highlighted some of down-sides of asking new members to activate their account via SMS. We'd surely prefer to deal with the offenders only, rather than add a barrier to entry on all new members. Any ideas you may have on how to do it are very welcome.

2 quick clarifications:

1. I am not suggesting sms's (or anything else) at this point, I'm just listening (and sharing) to feedback about the issues and about potential solutions.

2. Any spammer with a mobile could ofcourse still join glocals, BUT:
i) he/she may think twice about it knowing that their number is now known;
ii) when we block the spammer (and his mobile number) he/she will have to get a new number in order to re-join, and that's a hassle.

Thanks again, and any more feedback very welcome.  

Nir
Nir Ofek, Mar 15, 2008 @ 00:26

2. Any spammer with a mobile could ofcourse still join glocals,BUT:

i) he/she may think twice about it knowing that their number is now known;

ii) when we block the spammer (and his mobile number) he/she will have to get a new number in order to re-join, and that's a hassle.



guessing it would not be possible to give random number of any unsuspecting individual (worldwide?) gleaned, for example, from FB? you get sent a code or sth you need to give in?



hope it wouldn't cause issues for people that inherited number from previous 'spammers'



dunno, still sounds a hassle to me, for you, for the odd random spammer whose account can always be deleted and method of approach made known?



Love the energy you have for improvement! Seriously. Not trying to dampen that!:cool:
SimSim, Mar 15, 2008 @ 10:32

Tinkster:

Thanks for the feedback. You're right, people can change their single / married status (or maybe a future 'interested / not intrested in dating' status) easily, if they wish to abuse the system and lie. But it's another step, and another lie, that someone who wants to abuse the system will have to make. And each extra step a hunter has to take may mean some hunters will drop out. What think?

SimSim:

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated. And your feedback doesn't damped the energy, au contraire! When we see members engaging with us on the ideas and sharing feedback, it doesn't only help , but it also gives us more energy.

Specifically for the point you raised: the idea would be for new people to have to send an sms in order to activate their account. So the person joining would have to have access to the actual phone, not just to have knowledge of someone's number.

Yes, these might be an issue with someone who was blocked then selling his mobile to an un-suspecting new comer, and this new comer won't be able to join because of his 'marked' number. It may happen, but we think it will be very very few cases, and the risk of it happening is overall worth the benefit of blocking out spammers.

What think? Any more feedback very very welcome.

Nir 

  
Nir Ofek, Mar 15, 2008 @ 11:32

OK.



Taking Nir's points in reverse order, and trying to account for SimSim and tinkie's posts:



3. As for dealing with organised spam consortia, I'm actually rather surprised it's an issue. I only really believe it happens because my wife got sent the Nigerian/father-high-end-diplomat/imprisoned-after-coup/eleven-bejillion-USD-to-share-with-you spam mentioned above. I though this kind of spam was almost completely automated, until they had established a contact. I appreciate that you would want to stamp it out completely, but the spam that comes via glocals must pale in comparison to that in your various inboxes. In contrast to the others, I think that something like SMS registration would probably completely nail this kind of forum abuse. Not because it's secure in an absolute sense, but because it's significantly more secure than 90 plus percent of the other forums. But surely this would come at a price that's higher than you want to pay.



2. Yeah. It's encouraging that your mini-sample of members didn't think this was much of an issue. Filtering based on marital status seems a bit meaningless since: (a) it's not exactly hard to lie; (b) you can, at least at the moment, choose to withhold your status; and (c) some of the odd behaviour I was talking about in the other thread came from people who were listed as married. I don't see a clear way to do this without interaction; perhaps better abuse reporting is the only way of efficient weeding? It indicates that forum admins are proactive.



Incidentally: what does it actually mean to ban a user? Is it just the termination of an account, or do you also ban the IP addresses of the bannee? Is bannee a word?



1. So event no-shows can wait then... good, I've got to shopping in a bit.



0. Most important of all is the long term sustainability in the forums / community. However, from what I have heard, this is not the heyday of the forums . At least in my experience, the bulk of forum membership comes from people that only turn up for a quick look around. Anything that makes interaction/joining harder will surely have a detrimental impact here. Maybe it doesn't seem like a big issue right now; some areas seem quite active. I'm sure you do think about these issues but it doesn't hurt to say it.



I'm actually watching the death of another forum right now. One that was extremely vibrant 18 months ago. They have 20,000 members but you only see 20 of the old regulars knocking around, regurgitating the same in-jokes, talking about classic threads, generally getting bored of each other. Every tenth post is "quiet here, innit" and it's pretty sad. Plus without new blood, who else will the aging regulars sleaze onto using the Chat function?



So. Er, yeah. Right, here's an idea that I haven't heard anyone say yet: find and talk to admins from other forums? Ones that have implemented some of the schemes that are mentioned above and find out how it impacted the forum activity. I get the impression that there must be an abundance of this information on the web somewhere, although of course all communities are different.

hayes, Mar 15, 2008 @ 12:36

Must. Get. Own. WWW. Connection.
hayes, Mar 15, 2008 @ 12:38

After a year with glocals, and receiving only one real spam from an outside source, I really feel this is almost a non issue.  But from the point of view of the site admin, they need to stay on top of it as it could happen at anytime.  There were a few options brought up, this one which consists to a step in the initial registration process, a step (meaning a security check step like sms or email coded process) that many other sites currently use is perhaps the least harsh of the options.  No solution for this is going to be completely perfect, so if the decision is made to further tighten security, an option like this one, if selected as the correct one to take, would be the less intrusive to the membership. 

In any situation it is always better to deal with the offenders rather then blanket measures that have an effect on everyone, but this one is pre - registration, so the it has no effect on the members themselves. 

I wonder about the possiblities of randomly inheriting a phone number from a spammer. I wonder how often that happens. 
TonyT, Mar 15, 2008 @ 13:00

nir, good that you take the time to meet with your members and listen to us. not all communities do this. if / when you do more meetings like this, i would be happy to participate.

i like the idea of sms activation for 2 reasons. 

the first, is some members having ghost accounts. if each account now requires a seperate sms activation, this will become much harder.

the second, is members knowing that if they don't repsect the glocals rules, they can be kicked out for good. i chatted with some hunters, and when i told them i'd report them to siteadmin, they just said they would open another profile with a new hotmail account. if members know that there's now a way for you to block them permanently if they misbehave, i am sure it will lead to behaviour that is more inline with the guidelines you set out.
pink_bunny, Mar 16, 2008 @ 11:04

All: thanks for all the feedback. we're reading every post with detail.

Hayes: thanks, good idea to speak with other forums to learn what they do. What is the forum you're currently watching die? Will be good for us to get in touch with them to learn what not to do.

PinkBunny: You raise indeed another side benefit of the sms-activation system.

Gracias, any more feedback ideas welcome...

Nir
Nir Ofek, Mar 16, 2008 @ 18:43

[quote]

Hayes: thanks, good idea to speak with other forums to learn what they do. What is the forum you're currently watching die? Will be good for us to get in touch with them to learn what not to do. [/quote]



I can field the details with regards to the other forum, but I don't think it's really comparable. It probably wasn't worth mention, aside of saying it's sad to watch a forum that was once highly engaging and populated with very creative people die. Now every post echoes like your apartment when you've moved out all the furniture and you're just waiting for the final inspection. Then you can walk off in the rain. OK, it is a forum linked to a WWW-review magazine. The reason for the downfall is simply that the rate at which they were adding content wasn't high enough to attract enough new people. Once the regulars all knew each other reasonably well (it was pretty Londoncentric), too much of what would have been forum content was diverted to IM, email, or meetspace.



All you needed was a valid email address. There was nothing sophisticated involved. I remember only single case in which someone got banned.



But here I'm comparing a single set of forums with a whole community site, which isn't really appropriate. But interestingly I keep catching myself thinking 'Glocals should totally do this'. But it seems to be working well and it's not my business.



What I guess I am saying is that *I* would find it interesting to pursue this tack; find a few sites that had introduced something like SMS confirmations and see what impact it had on their statistics, and compare that with glocals' stats. It'd most likely be impossible to draw anything quantitative conclusions but it may qualitatively help the decision-making, at least. That's the approach I would take if I were considering tightening access to my site.
hayes, Mar 17, 2008 @ 10:41

To add to Nir's summary:

I was really happy to take part in the discussion and to be in a community where you are consulted about important issues. Nir and Oded really take the time to listen to you with a completely open mind, even if you disagree with them. Thanks guys!
Bustan_A, Mar 18, 2008 @ 20:23

As for no-shows, another consultation would be needed. Here is my view:

1) Don't use outing or punishment. Nobody wants to be in a community where you can be outed publicly as a bad guy. Glocal's success also relies on the fact that we feel confortable on that site.

2) Use first education instead, for example by sending a standard message to no shows to explain them why it's a problem. I made a few no-shows myself as a new member (one of it really nasty, sorry guys). Then I saw a thread on the subject and realized that it was bad. Now I don't do it anymore (or do I?).

3) Use also prevention: make a list of no-shows available to organizers on demand.

That's all folks 
Bustan_A, Mar 18, 2008 @ 20:25

hi,

this is definitely a hot topic. In my mind, focusing on actual bad behaviour instead of installing joining restrictions to new members/ new set of rules would seem more productive. It would seem to me that this wouldn't sound very "glocals". Plus I would agree with Bustan A, don't expose offenders publicly. It would seem like quite a harsh response.

Now I actually have a question : how high is actually the % of non show people and of members which have been reported for misbehaving ?

Could it be that we're talking about a non significant number  ? (it is still a major pain though)
titoan, Mar 19, 2008 @ 15:26

Exactly. Trust is built on trust. Treat people like kids and they behave like kids. . I'll stop on this topic now.
hayes, Mar 19, 2008 @ 18:10

Nir,



I have a suggestion.

Myself, Syd_Brown and Jay_Stiff will organize a punishing (extermination) brigade. We collect complaints of glocal members about those who misbehave, no-shows etc. Given that we have phone numbers of those people/addresses/other personal information, we will get to them. I am not going to tell what will happen to those people, but I can guarantee they will never do the same mistake again.
extremal, Mar 19, 2008 @ 18:35

[quote]hi,



this is definitely a hot topic.In my mind, focusing on actual bad behaviour instead of installing joining restrictions to new members/ new set of rules would seem more productive. It would seem to me that this wouldn't sound very "glocals". Plus I would agree with Bustan A, don't expose offenders publicly. It would seem like quite a harsh response.



Now I actually have a question : how high is actually the % of non show people and of members which have been reported for misbehaving ?



Could it be that we're talking about a non significant number ? (it is still a major pain though)[/quote]





Hi,

being biased by a taste for number, I like the idea to use numbers.

Along with profile one could show

1-the ratio of chat invites received and chat replied

2-the number of no shows that a glocal user has recorded as event organizer.

numbers or color codes or smileys, etc.

3-the member should be able to reset the counters to 0 at anytime



Then, as chat invites seem to be all concentrated on certain members, they d have a chance to spread (no reason to waste energy on a harassed member);



potential no shows would be aware that a given event organizer has experienced a quantity of no shows and did take notice (no reason to make a extra bad impression with a no-show harassed organiser);



and since we re all lifetime members we need a counter reset to take a new start within the community ;)



Just a thought.

Cheers,

B.
brooster, Mar 20, 2008 @ 02:12

Hi,
being biased by a taste for number, I like the idea to use numbers.
Along with profile one could show
1-the ratio of chat invites received and chat replied
2-the number of no shows that a glocal user has recorded as event organizer.
numbers or color codes or smileys, etc.
3-the member should be able to reset the counters to 0 at anytime

Then, as chat invites seem to be all concentrated on certain members, they d have a chance to spread (no reason to waste energy on a harassed member);

potential no shows would be aware that a given event organizer has experienced a quantity of no shows and did take notice (no reason to make a extra bad impression with a no-show harassed organiser);

and since we re all lifetime members we need a counter reset to take a new start within the community ;)

Just a thought.
Cheers,
B.[/quote]

ok, my head is spinning.
titoan, Mar 20, 2008 @ 09:35

occasional pro-spammers ? - oh yes, how about few girls chatting me up, trying to portray interest, and in so doing alluring me and my folks into dirty night disco-bars?... that's disgusting what few people can decide to do here to promote their business or benefits.



how can you prevent that?
Good_One, Mar 27, 2008 @ 17:42