Tuath Network

[nx20595]

I need help coming up with a tiered trust system. So, when someone adds you as a friend or you add someone as a friend you can specify how much you trust this person. I'm thinking of doing a -1 to 4 system. But I've only spent a few minutes thinking about this so there's probably much room for improvement:

4 With My Life
3 Very Trusting
2 Trusting
1 Friend
0 Acquaintance
-1 Distrust

I would do something like 0 to 100..  0 being total distrust, and 100 being total trust.  Semantically simpler.  I would also put some more safe guards in place, such as how long you have known the individual, in what circumstances you met the person (on line, from work, school, through a friend, curch, etc), how financially stable the person is in your opinion, the person's profession, other people who can vouch for the person, how well you think that person judges character of other people (you don't want a good friend who is a sucker introducing you to others, right?)..  You can probably think of more things.  I think that this would be one of the most important features of a site, so trust is paramount.

[nx20595]

In '06 I started a website to help people network and specifically to link job seekers with job offers (threads: nhfree, fsp, ftl). The website sortof died off because there didn't seem to be a great deal of support for it and this was also right before my move to NH so priorities kindof shifted eslewhere. I'm now ready to start the project back up I have more ambitious goals than last time. Here is a preliminary feature list and vision for this project:

1. Website will be by invitation only, any existing user can invite someone else.
2. Create job listings and resume listings. Rate others on their work. (similar to ebays rating system, but I'm open to other ideas).
3. Ability to list items for sale and/or barter. The system will facilitate an bartering interface where you can make offers.
4. Personals.
5. An optional public page displaying whatever attributes of your that you would like to make public. A resume for example.
6. Possibly integrate with Porc 411, any new messages will be displayed at the top of the site.
7. And other stuff I haven't thought of yet...

If it's invite only, this site should be SSL, too. No point in keeping people out if you're not also keeping eavesdroppers out.

I will add SSL before it goes out of beta.

In terms of security, the most secure thing is not to have the site, seriously. There is always the possibility of social hacking whereby a Tuath member is befriended and invites the hacker into the tuath, in the end there is no way to have a truely secure system, the best we can do is keep the honest people honest and the undetermined hackers out. SSL, invite only, and other features will go a long way towards that goal but you shouldn't let your guard down just because your connection is encrypted (hackers never target the encryption, they target the pre-encryption (sitting on your computer) and post-encryption (sitting in the servers database) parts). As for the government, they could simply ask the ISP for the database and I wouldn't even know it (this of course can be remedied, maybe down the line if some is willing to take responsibility for protecting the data and is able to host it on their server, although this goes back to trust...)

Think of the Tuath Network as more of a collaborative tool than a safe data storage medium.

I think though this could work if you really put forth the effort to add features (see my previous post) to grill potential new members to make sure that they are worthy of trust.  Also some form of primitive Digital Rights Management might be something to explore.  So if you wanted John do to see something, you could let him view some data and not others.  Also filling the site with bogus data to confuse potential hackers, running automated bots to pose as users to expose people trying to compromise the security of the system..   This could be a really interesting security experiment... 

[Barterer]

Regarding trust levels, why not just have users upload their public keys and have GnuPG calculate trust like this:

                 -         No ownertrust assigned / not yet calculated.

                 e         Trust calculation has failed; probably due to an expired key.

                 q         Not enough information for calculation.

                 n         Never trust this key.

                 m         Marginally trusted.

                 f         Fully trusted.

                 u         Ultimately trusted.

Seems like that would take the least programming effort.

To save further effort I'd also cobble together a SimpleMachines forum for the "trading post" area, and of course drop in the Ripplesite package for actual trading (I'll shut up about that for now) 

[Lex]

Trust stuff has already been implemented and will be released tonight! I think you guys will like it. It's simple and intuitive.

[Lex]

Will be releasing within the hour! :-) Are you guys ready?   

[Lex]

Code was pushed. Everyone who was already in the system before should have gotten a new invite.

Here are the changes since last time:

1. The username bug was fixed, so if you enter Friday when registering you also have to enter Friday when logging in.
2. Menus have been slightly moved around.
3. Fixed the bug where you could enter invalid price ammounts. If you chose something other than USD or LD the input box is greyed out.
4. You can now add your own category to a listing. Choose other then use the text box to enter a custom category.
5. You can now delete listings. Click on a row of the listing and then click on the trash can icon.
6. On the find listings page you can now see the description by clicking on the row.
7. Trust can now be changed for the user, it's on the Network -> Links page.
8. You can now add user links by looking at users in the Network -> Search section and clicking the + sign.
9. Added some more fields to the registration page, we need the city and state to make things thing useful for you to find people in your area.
10. Random bug fixes here and there and some UI improvements.

Also, the site may not work in IE. I have only tested it in firefox. I also know for a fact that the icons will be broken in IE. I'm working on fixing that at the moment.

Enjoy!

Give me some feedback after you check it out.

[Lex]

I justed look at it in IE7 and it is broken. So if all you got is IE7 don't bother testing it 

[Lex]

After thinking about it a little I'm even considering just making the site require only Firefox as the webbrowser. I don't feel like having to develop the same thing to two different browser, it's just a waste of time and considering IE sucks major monkey balls it's not worth it.

So, are there any die hard IE users that wouldn't be able to visit the site if I take this course of action or is pretty much everyone here using Firefox?

From looking at my logs only 10% of users logged into the site using IE, so I'd say that's a good indicator that I can ignore trying to support it.

[Friday]

Give me some feedback after you check it out.

I would like to see a comment field in combination with the trust rating system.  There are so many variables in trust, they can never be fully captured by a scale, IMHO.  For example, there's this joker named "eukreign" in there...  I'd probably say something like "I have only met him a couple of times, but we have several mutual friends, and I've heard good things about him"

[Lex]

Okay, that'll be the first thing on my list of things to do. Maybe i'll even finish that tonight.

[J’raxis 270145]

I see it let me pass through a <b> tag in a listing I made. Is that intentional, or is it letting any HTML through?

If you do intentionally plan to let markup through, the square-bracket stuff these forums use might also be useful. A "preview" button would be handy, too.

[error]

If you do intentionally plan to let markup through, the square-bracket stuff these forums use might also be useful.

BBcode? I hate that crap.

[J’raxis 270145]

If you do intentionally plan to let markup through, the square-bracket stuff these forums use might also be useful.

BBcode? I hate that crap.

Anyone from one of these forums should be familiar with it, though.

[error]

I'm familiar with universal healthcare, but that's crap, too.

[Lex]

I'm going to be using the first post in this thread to keep track of features and the progress.