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Ill will, bickering and pufferey are a fact of life in any human community. They will be there no matter what. They exist now in every dropzone forum and they will never go away. It is certainly possible to make it worse, but it just may be possible to make it better. The fact is that these negative social issues are worse online than they are offline. Opinion carries further online than off, identity is weaker, and it is more difficult to judge if someone is trustworthy online than off because we cannot see them and judge them by their actions we only have their written word. The point is everyone will always decide for themselves anyway no matter how many "point" schemes are put in place. The question is this. Is it possible to design a scheme that can help people by redressing the balance. By making the online world more like the offline world where we can easily identify our friends and enemys. I believe it must be possible. But I admit most of the attempts (ebay, slash dot, amazon) are crude and have produced undesirable, unintended consequences. Clay Shirky has a point when he says a group is its own worst enemy. As the dropzone community grows it will either destroy itself or devise a way to help individual users manage the scale. I believe this community must engage in a discussion about these issue or it may not last in its current form. John Virtual Travelog

Sangiro Thats a little more than I had in mind but its interesting. I had not thought about transfering off line qualifications online. That makes sense if those qualifications are trusted in the real world. I think there are lots of ways ways users can increase the "value" of their identities incrementally. The important point is that each incremental piece of information a user supplies should be reflected in some way by a change in a visible label that is associated with their account. Axelrod suggests that cooperation works effectively where "players" can recognize each other and remember how a given player behaved last time they met. Recognition and memory can be improved in several ways. Labels, stereotypes, status and reputation can all play a part (think ebay and slashdot). Labeling players and categorizing them into stereotypes can help make large numbers of players manageable and make it easier to make fast decisions. Reputation is an emergent property of social groups. Players are generally recognized by the group as being reliable or unreliable. This is both a form of labeling and of collective memory. So for dropzone, Certification is a form of status labeling. Which is good but your problem is with imposters lying about their certification. All you can ever do is make it difficult for imposters you can never prevent it. But it should be possible to make it very difficult. Another thing Axelrod suggests is that trust is built most effectively by many small (low value) transactions . So the suggestion from another post to "vote/grade" other users posts is a good one, but it is open to gaming. So I would suggest that only validated users can "vote/grade" posts. Everyone can still post and comment on posts but if you want to help shape the community you have to give up a bit of your anonymity. Your factors for becoming a validated user are good, But I would say that there are other factors that could be included. For example if someone provides a paypal account or other verifiable online identity that required them to have more than an email account. They don't need to give you any money just the existence of the account proves they exist from a financial point of view. It does not have to be mandatory it just adds another layer of proof. Its like a validated email account but slightly more complex to acquire. The issue of workload is a significant one. Assuming people can upload thier certificates. Who reviews them and says they are valid? Is it the 3/5 (validated) DZ.com users who can vouch for them. If so you will need to seed a group of validated DZ.com user in each country and have a mechanism to deal with clan/dropzone rivalries. (www.syndic8.com does something similar to validate RSS feeds, they have a large backlog of feeds waiting validation but the process does work) I general I think uploading scans of your ratings is a good idea. If you can overcome the workload and storage issues. The question then is how do you label a "validated" users and what extra privileges do they get. Also how does a validated users get repremanded for not pulling their weight (this is a big point in Axelrods second book) and for being an imposter if they are found out to be one. John Virtual Travelog

You are of course entitled to disagree. But I think you mis-represent some of my suggestions. The term "star chamber" is rather emmotive and not at all what I had in mind. The process I described has been used by ICANN to govern the internet for many years. It can be made to work for defining governance policy. It may need some tweaking to make it effective at enforcing that policy. In addition this process is essentially the foundation of democracy. We elect representatives to make decisions on our behalf. But the mandate is given once every couple of years. Between each election our representatives do whatever they want. Our power only returns at the next election. Sometimes politicians do bad things in our name. Yep! such is human nature, but what is the alternative? Letting everyone make decisions for themselves. I would agree with you completely in the real world. But in this world (online) there is a problem with identity. It is weak. I can change who i am by merely creating a new userid. Also my voice carries much further. I can address my message to a much larger community than i could offline. Merely by being a prolific poster I can have a greater influence than might be possible in the real world. As has been seen many times in these forums idiots with big mouths have much greater impact online that they would off line. You, and many of the other people on this site may be fiercy individual and not given to having the wool pulled over your eyes. But it is a fact of human nature that most people tend to follow community norms. Even in unusual communities like this one. Those norms are set and enforced by "leaders" in the community. Leaving aside my election suggestion. The real question is what can be done to encourage the "best" people to step forward as leaders and start setting and enforcing norms. And what can be done so that other less independent or confident people can identify the leaders more easily. This is not just a matter of moderators enforcing the norms but also a matter or leaders being identifiable within the community. They may be leaders in matters of theory, fashion or any other subject the important point is they are respected by the community as a leader in something. This is really a matter or labling. Clay Shirky wrote a great article called A group is its own worst enemy that deals with many of these issues. I would also recommend reading The Evolution of cooperation by Robert Axelrod for a more academic approach to the problems of groups and cooperation. This is a link to a summary i wrote that may be useful to read if you don't want to buy the book. John Virtual Travelog

Sangiro This is off the top of my head but i've been thinking about this recently too, for other reasons but... Run a poll. Get everyone to vote for the top 25 (or however many you need) people on the site they trust. Not the most pofieint experts but he most trusted (yeah it's open to interpretation but so what). Give those 25 the power to bless anyone else's post as trusted. The more cumulative blessings you get from trusted posts the better you are. Your trust quota needs to be visible, But you also get negative marks for being an asshole. All votes/bessings are public not anonymous. and each member of the 25 must make at least 3 votes/blesing a week or they are stipped of thier position and the next person with the highest number of trust points that is not already in the 25 guardians gets the job. Sme of the 25 could specialize in hunting down trolls and others in finding cool newcomers etc There are only ever 25 trust guardians. Probably make Sangiro and the moderators (nice band name!) trust guardians as well. Just to keep things honest have elections every year. There are probably all kinds of reasons this does not work, but trust is a tricky thing. it is closely tied to identity and the problem with this site is that the identites are weak. Any way to make the identities stronger by getting other users to bless them would help. The trick is avoiding the gaming aspect where users cheat to gain advatage, It will take some work from Sangiro to setup bu i don;t see why he has to police it.It should be a self policing system. Of course this site has a more extreme definition of trust than say a website on bowling. So you might need caveats. Maybe these are not trust points at all. How many of people on this site would be willing to unconditionally express trust in another user (maybe its enough) but most trust networks are built from frequent small transactions not big all or nothing tansactions. Maybe by voting on individual posts each transaction will be small enough. That way individuals can redeem themselves over time. The best book i have read on this is called The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. I am just reading his second book The Complexity of Cooperation which is even better, but don't get it unless you have read the first one. John Virtual Travelog

Hey Sangiro If you liked that your gonna love TouchGraph. Enter any URL try www.dropzone.com and watch while it uses the google "related links" feature to draw a network of related sites. Very nice! Also checkout the Amazon browser that does the same thing for books John Virtual Travelog

Thanks. Works fine now. I am now the proud owner of a whole dollars worth of credit. I always wanted to be a media buyer...... John Virtual Travelog

Hi Sangiro I am trying to test the new classified functionality. I get the same problem with IE 5.2 and Mozilla 1.3b on a mac running OS10.2.6. I am a registered user, I have setup a bidder profile but i have never placed a classified add. When I click "make a payment" on the bidder home page i get the following error -- Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [no address given] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. -- Just before this error is return I get a popup message saying that there is a problem with the security certificate from your site and the attempt to establish an https connection has failed. The error occured at abot 11:30 PST 24-05-2003 John Virtual Travelog

This is my first post so be nice! Having lurked here for years I think a problem is starting to snowball. The volume of posts is increasing and it is becoming difficult to identify the "interesting" posts (obviously "interesting" is a personal that will be different for everyone). I think there are two basic alternatives. Forum segmentation or better filtering. First segmentation. The forums are already segmented along thematic lines. The question is how to manage the talkback forum. Suggestions for segmentation could be Geographic, Linguistic, Thematic, Temporal (by timezone!), or what about climate or even gender.... There are many ways it could be done. All of which have problems. Having thought about this a bit I think the only one that would "improve" things is Linguistic segmentation. I suggest HH run a poll on the first language of members of dropzone.com. I suspect there are many people out there who use English as a second language and are stifled by the difficulty of finding people to converse with. Linguistic segemntation would not prevent people from joining the English language talk back group but it would give (say German speakers) somwhere they would be guaranteed to find someone they could talk to. There would need to be a critical mass of speakers before it would be worthwhile. There may only be enough for a few languages. I would guess Spanish, German, French and maybe Italian. Each language would get a single forum for all subjects until it got big enough to support Thematic segmentation. This is all very well but it still leaves the problem of excessive velocity in the talkback form. Splitting into seperate regional forums would reduce cross talk. Culture is defined by common tools practices and beliefs not geography. Geographic segregation seems to defeat the purpose of dropzone.com. But equally when you can't find relevent local information because it zooms by too fast there is also a problem. I think the best way to handle this is to create some mechanism to allow classification of threads or maybe individual messages. Initially threads could be classified as belonging to a single region right down to a dropzone. The dropzone database already has a hierarchical classification of these regions defined. This could be reused. Now the problem is if everyone used it, it would be great but most posts are not geographically specifc. ...... You could reuse the information from the user profile Region, Country, Home DZ etc and let people select from that list for each post. Maybe that would not be too much of a burden. Of course all this is work for HH because there would need to be matching search facilities to filter posts by region...But maybe it would be worth it?