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On the website I run, I ask for an email address during signup. All I do to check whether someone appears to be real is to use Rapportive in Gmail and see whet
by buro9 16y ago
On the website I run, I ask for an email address during signup.
All I do to check whether someone appears to be real is to use Rapportive in Gmail and see whether they appear on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
http://rapportive.com/ http://rapportive.com/
I don't force users to use real names, I think there's a real benefit in allowing people to use aliases. Rapportive allows me to really quickly grok whether the alias has an underlying real ID in terms of fighting spam and trolls.
It's hardly a fool proof technique, but it answers the questions 9 times out of 10 which removes any need for me to create obstacles for my users to jump through.
PS: Interesting aside: I really loathe Facebook due to a personal incident in my life that occurred on there. Rapportive were kind enough to understand this and then to write an exception into their codebase such that it never prompts me to connect with Facebook. Talk about customer service.
- ars 16y agoWhat do you do for people who don't have an account on those? Or people like me who use a different email address for every site?
- buro9 16y agoLook at other things like your IP, user agent, etc. Spammers, things done by scripts... They give themselves away really easily. All I want is an obstacle enough that I know people aren't spamming and that if they troll they understand that it will reflect on their reputation. Do I need a real id? Nope. And clearly Quora don't either as they don't require over 99% of users verify their real id. It's just a spam prevention policy and helps cut down on trolls as it will (or has risk that it will) reflect on you. It's really not a good thing to start applying onerous terms and your users.