Invitations

What if somebody finds the site for the first time and wants to join, but does not have any regular contact with a member? Can that person see the profile information and contact an existing member to get an invitation?

How about creating a cool-off period of say a week before a new member can post?

Tomoko: I generally agree, and I’m committed to keeping Lightstalkers open to all. Invitations don’t really change anything; any of our 34,000+ members can send invitations to anyone they want. There’s no moderation or approval process to slow things down. If anything, we may need to add more steps, to deter spammers.

Some Web sites use the invitation model to create the illusion of exclusivity, but that’s not what we’re trying to do here.

To answer your last question—cooling-off periods cause headaches, since there are many completely legitimate reasons a person would want to post in their first week. Right now we see invitations as lesser inconvenience. We’ll keep our options open, though, and I appreciate the idea.

I really am out of my league here in suggesting a solution, but I too am a little concerned about the exclusivity part.

And practically speaking, if I am contacted by someone seeking membership, and I don’t know them, how do I know if they are not potentially a spammer? I get regular Facebook requests for “Friending” from people I don’t know, and except for the fact that they may know ten (or fifty) people whom I know and thus I trust them, they could be bad people too. So there are some issues with this.

Having said that, I am willing to let Shinji run this place…I ain’t no control freak.

I was wondering as Neal suggested above if some spam-preventing posting scheme might be tried first. I get an impression that early photographer members knew each other and I am afraid that this community will become as exclusive as the core at the initial stage of this community development.

With regard to Facebook, that’s a very different situation. Facebook is a very tightly closed network; you’re only ever exposed to content created by your “friends”. You could compare it to Lightstalkers’ Personal Network filter. Lightstalkers is much more open than Facebook, and we want to keep it that way. On the downside, it’s more fundamentally susceptible to spam.

You asked “if I am contacted by someone seeking membership, and I don’t know them, how do I know if they are not potentially a spammer?”

I trust your judgment; my guess is that you can be pretty casual about sending invitations. We’re receiving invitation requests here, and fulfilling almost all of them.

Tomoko, thanks for your feedback. If the invitation system turns out to be detrimental, we’ll try something else. If we can find another approach that blocks spam equally well, we’ll do that instead… all suggestions are welcome. In the meantime, we can’t allow spam in Lightstalkers; every time you don’t see pharmaceutical spam in the On the Move section, it’s because of the invitation process.

http://www.projecthoneypot.org

xo//es

Brian!

Brian