I am against exposing users IP. You can easy imagine Mods computers targeted by angry spammers. And besides, in many of the cases IP identification is not very precise. Thats the way for cookies to crumble.
Ftr, all ideas there have merit. Anything you do that exposes the guys that think " the key to credibility is a convincing lie" is a good thing. I realize the ip is not always precise, as I've seen my own air card register me as in kansas or something when I know I was in the fort worth area, but pinpoint precision isn't needed... We aren't using this to call in an air strikes, only to call bullshit when some guy in Tehran claims to be in London or some such. When someone claims to be in a different country to intentionally mislead WTS guys to think he isn't out of reach of the law, it's fraud, pure and simple. Lest anyone think this is unimportant, I'll mention that two guys I've turned in here had one ID selling financial services and other IDs selling the CVV info collected from same, or using those credit cards to defraud dp users in other ways. An example, selling discounted directory listings which they paid for at full price with stolen CC info. When the true CC owner discovers the fraud, the directory had to refund the money, the DP members that paid the guy lost their listing and the money they paid, and the guy that started the thread pocketed the money from the safety of a true location well out of reach of the law. Have seen that twice now. The fake location was just the tip of the dishonesty, but if someone lies about the small stuff, what makes you think they aren't lying about other things? Policing this little detail can go a long way toward stopping this stuff. One thing that migh be worth considering is making the location blank non-user specified and having it filled in by the ip function... Then adding an asterisk if it is on a proxy. It'd put a serious hurt on guys that bring in puppet IDs to praise their service and other members notice all the users trying to make him credible appear to be in his immediate vicinity. It'd give your WTS section a boost since it'd seriously hamper serial liars and self promoters. If you want to get seriously fancy, a system that automatically flags posts by users in the same thread that are on the same ip range would put a major dent in puppet shows. Anything that keeps people from grading their own papers is going to give you a vastly more credible sales section. Kudos for making an effort at this.
Have also been tossing around the idea that anyone who wants to use Buy/Sell/Trade simply needs to be phone verified...
Also a winner. If you limit access to people that aren't trying desperately to hide behind anonymity, it makes the marketplace more credible. Anyone that wants to play games will move on to a forum that doesn't make it so hard to do.
Well, I would go one step further and make any new signup telephone verified. After all 99.999% of people have only 1 phone number and only some of them use cell as second, which will limit, as Rob says, puppet Ids to 2 at the best. fastreplies
If feasible it'd be convenient to also make that IP hash visible on mouseover as well. Not a complaint, just a way to get a quick reference.
Actually, that's how it was originally (with the mouseover), but ended up disabling it because it was needing to drop into 20 sub-routines (one for each post) for a single page view to calculate the hash, when it really isn't used all that much. The "cost" of doing it that way outweighed the convenience for the very few times you would want to mouseover it, so... I'm an efficiency freak.
Well it's not a huge load for a single page view, but when you factor in how often it's used... like even if calculating hashes 20 takes 0.01 seconds, and probably 1 in 100,000 page views is one that someone would want to see the hash. So now we are talking 1,000 seconds of calc time for each time it's actually used. Certainly wouldn't be detrimental to page loads or anything, but I always factor in resources relative to how often something is actually used.
Honestly, one of the best thought. With the latest swarm of scammers and spammers, I would love to see the implement. +vote from me.
Rather annoying when users claim to be from somewhere they clearly are not. For example, "Location: Miami, Florida"... but their IP address shows them in Pakistan. So now premium members get a little more info on the IP page... in addition to the hash that everyone can see, they also can see the user's true country based on their IP address. For example...
Hey Shawn, Along with country - I've a better idea I guess. How about showing hashes in subnet parts? Like the IP address is in format of aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd - so the hash should also be of each subnet like wwww.xxxx.yyyy.zzzz The benefit for this would be that most peoples who are having duplicate accounts, have dynamic IPs. The Class C and Class D part of IP gets change, however former ones are same. So if two members have same IP hashes for even the first part (along with other similarities between their behavior) - it my come handy in detecting duplicates.
After enough time here, you can pretty much discern where people are from simply based on what and how they post. This feature should make less of a challenge, but equally as convincing.
There is no valid reason for lying about location If someone needs a map so bad they miss their own location by a continent or two I'd just ban them and tell them to play their fantasy profile games on Facebook. [Immediate permabans for that are remarkably convincing.] The guys that lie on location are historically a lot more likely to provide false info in BST threads and play puppet games to provide fake third party praise that isnt merited by their actual work. The term "fraud in the inducement" comes to mind. They're just scammers. Location is a matter of fact... not opinion, not interpretation It shouldnt be used to mislead. Oughta make the location field uneditable by user and just let the system autofill it based on IP. Wouldn't stop serial proxy users, but it'd put a dent in profile spammers pretending to be someone else.