At some level, there needs to be trust in your community about the identity of the members. There is (currently) no truly perfect way to uniquely identify someone, even in IRL. There are good ones, like fingerprints, DNA, infra-red, retinal, voiceprint, face-matching ... but they can all be fooled. Online, we don't even have the capability of simply counting heads, so trust is even more important.

The best way I've ever seen for basic authentication is the one used here on PM - username/password. I mean, that's all PayPal uses, at the heart of their authentication system. The thing is that PayPal makes it desirable for someone to only have one account (usually).

If you're dealing with voting privileges, a good system is to give votes based on seniority, activity, or other criteria. On PM, it's based on XP (which is a very rough judge of activity and fitness, but it is a judge of those things). Now, remember, you don't have to restrict yourself to "One person, one vote". In fact, voting systems that do so are inherently flawed once you have more than two voters and more than two candidates. (I did my undergraduate Math thesis on the topic.) If you allow for "preference voting", things become very easy. (I want 4 votes to go to X, 1 votes to Y, and 0 votes to Z. Or, I want X 1st, Y 2nd, and Z 3rd. Either works.)

Now, how do these dovetail? Well, you give certain members more votes or more preferences. For example, a newbie gets 0 votes/preferences. Someone who's been active on the system (for some value of active) for some period gets 1 vote/preference, and so forth.

Yes, this means that those who are more active get more of a say in the community's affairs. However, isn't that just a more honest way of describing the standard political system? Also, isn't that fair? Those members invest more in the community, so they should be rewarded with more clout.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

In reply to Re: (z) Insuring Uniqueness on the Internet by dragonchild
in thread (z) Insuring Uniqueness on the Internet by zigdon

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