This note, "Please note: On Saturday morning, we made a small change to this site. Posting, commenting and voting on ideas now requires users to log in. This change was made in response to concerns that settings that allowed anonymous posting may also have allowed users to vote more than once on the same idea." while nice, doesn't get at the root of the problem. A given *individual* may still vote multiple times, all they need to do is obtain additional email addresses to register with.
This is a basic problem with allowing 'online voting' based on registration from an email address. Anyone even remotely internet savvy can obtain multiple votes if they so desire.
For an 'idea swapping' interface, this is not a huge issue. However, it does mean that results can be skewed to not represent the actual will of the people.
Thank you for trying.
If you want to restrict one vote per individual, you will need to do some basic level of identity checking for new registrations. This would require:
1. A secure web site for setting up new accounts, at the very least.
2. A verification process that an individual should be allowed to create an account (using SSN if nothing else, but more robust would be to have the user verify their income and taxes for the previous year(s), which is information the government should have on file already), and also verifying that the identifier (in the example, SSN) has not been registered before.
Account identifers could be completely abitrary after the verification process was performed so that sensitive data for the account set up process was not required to be submitted all the time.
Comments (11)
When the vote is not binding, its reasonable to just provide some barriers to multiple voting, and not worry too much about multiple voting. These things are not perfect; requiring the kind of verification process described here would cut the amount of activity on this site at least by a factor of 10, probably more like 100, and possibly more.
yea spy on everything, bad idea.
i don't have to explain why spying is bad or do i dumbies.
IP address cookies would be a good start. And they do need some kind of solid verifier. This is a good idea but there's a few freaks ruining it for those who genuinely want dialogue.
It may be reasonable to have a combination of levels of verification, and just present that data in the interface. e.g. 50 anonymous, 20 registered, and possibly a way to do a deeper id verification (which would lend your vote even greater weight).
Then there are options like what ladyhawk is proposing which could be used to flag and present suspicious activity.
who are you, that you are taking off postings? Are you OB's internet Czar (another unaccountable person with too much power)
Faith, I'm not taking off postings, I'm just flagging postings as being duplicate topics. Any user on this board can do the same, ergo: I'm nobody special in this regard. If enough users flag a posting as being a duplicate, the system will remove it. It is a sort of policing mechanism given to everybody so that contributors to the site can determine for themselves what are and what are not new ideas.
Your verification scheme would be a nightmare to administer. But you're right, without some sort of 1-person-1-vote verification, this whole thing is absolutely useless. I just don't know what such a system would look like.
My idea of tax information as a verification scheme shouldn't be *that* bad. Most people file their taxes, and most people keep their records in a reasonably well known location. As far as the government side, a computer should be able to do this no problem.
I fully acknowledge that tax info is probably not the best option, that's just what my mind was hung on at the moment.
However, drivers licenses, passports, having people register for it with other pieces of valid documentation are also options. These are things that are much more common to have around. Again, the government has this information already, creating a computer program to do the verification is not that hard once you have the data on both sides to verify.
My one concern about passing license info / passport info to a 'secure' web site is that if folks have malware (keystroke loggers, or web site redirections) on their home computers when they do this, it could lead to problems. But in that case maybe you need to sign up for your account over the phone, or at a public building. But that's probably only worrisome if you are really paranoid about electronic security. Which I suppose I am.
Most software has built-in duplicate detection systems and blocks. I'm assuming this one does as well. I think they're going too far overboard to be inclusive and not using those tools, and a few spammers are taking advantage of that.
You could probably lose 90% of these BC spammers just by blocking 2 IPs.
Agreed Ladyhawk. I saw one user who was posting the exact same BC 'idea' word-for-word every 2 minutes. That was probably how long it took for his browser to refresh and copy / paste the thing back in. I reported about 10 of their posts as Spam. A simple check to see if the text matched exactly any other existing idea would prevent that kind of posting.
Obviously, there's plenty of other auto-check logic that could be done along these lines. If that sort of thing is built in, they haven't turned it on...
I resent, as much as anybody, that I have to read, over and over the same objections. Yet...
Yet, this could be taken as a very small price for easily posting my views and, more importantly, for me to be informed of the views of fellow Americans. That I do not know their real full name and address is compensated by the fact they do not know mine.
I am willing to live with that, if I may continue to read your comments and views. By the way, Thank You!