Post-of-the-month results - March 2014

[Richard Frost]

Loz68 had 5 “votes” from regular Imutual users who are most likely all UK residents, Why hasn’t Loz68 had his/her award uplifted to 25 shares?

Agreed, I've now increased the reward to 25 shares and have also made a special award of 10 shares to Squire, whose post came fourth in the original list.

As macliam suggests, it's not an exact science to filter out non-UK users by IP address. It's particularly common for genuine UK users to be misidentified as non-UK members due to the ISP or corporate network they use. At this stage in imutual's development, one genuine UK user could turn out be a great advocate and bring in hundreds if not thousands of new members with them; if we accidentally prevent such a person from joining by over-zealous IP blocking, that will be to the detriment of all members.

That said, in these instances our automated system did identify these registrations as suspect and removed their forum rights within minutes of joining. However, the thanks had been already been given by then

I'll look at screening these out for next time around. I hadn't looked at this so far because, in 4 years, it has never been an issue - or if it had, nobody ever brought it to my attention I'm grateful for cbl doing so this time

This won't totally solve the issue though; what if we get registrations from UK IP addresses which also look 'artificial' Some of you may recall that, at the outset, I expressed concern about this possibility which is why I wanted shareholdings to be taken into account. But some argued strongly that it should be a simple "one member one vote" so I relented.

We'll never get a perfect system first time; as with all aspects of imutual we just have to respond to issues as they come along and make "tweaks" and continual improvements

[Squire]

One SHAREHOLDER, one vote then (no weighted mean shares multipliers)?

Thanks to CBL for the detective work, and I apologize on behalf of his detractors that gave unfair criticism for what turned out to be valuable effort.

Not that me and CBL are best buddies, but if people are going to criticise, be sure the facts are actually facts and not assumptions before launching into an attack.

The aggro here is why I locked my internal message off and do not usually try to make helpful suggestions any more.

With the occasional exception, like the one that got me 10 shares unexpectedly, thanks for your votes.

Just some random thoughts, now back to setting up my second hand replacement Lenovo Corei7 2.9GHz 1TB Windows 8 P.O.S laptop so I can earn more rewards on the internet.

[rayf]

why not change the voting system to reflect the total amount of cashback received by each voter - that way genuine users of imutual would have by far the greater say

[blythburgh]

I'm always open to changing the rules. Bear in mind the previous discussions though - e.g. here

[macliam]

why not change the voting system to reflect the total amount of cashback received by each voter - that way genuine users of imutual would have by far the greater say

I see where you're going here - but such an action would always weight any voting in favour of the "established" members and may make newer members feel less valued - not everyone can avail themselves of high levels of cashback. Equally, someone who earned a lot 2 years ago but has done little since then can hardly be considered "active".

Surely, what we want is to make the situation one active member one vote - i.e. a vote for those who have earned over a given (but relatively low) threshold in the last month/three months......

The problem is, all these filters and checks and balances make the administration more difficult and are prone to error .... so how far do we go?

[Squire]

Shareholder membership status, being used as a qualification to vote, cuts out "foreigners" as well as the ones that complain they do not want to be shareholders because the shares are "worthless", and those that cannot be posteriored to engage fully enough in the site to become shareholders (so by implication not earning much or at all).

That Shareholder flag is already taken heed of by the scripts, no extra coding (much) needed, whereas weighted means of shares held, how long for, cash-back earned, how long for, how long being a member, how old you are, inside leg measurement and so on, all makes for unnecessary extra work in changing the site scripts and also the admin man hours involved.

Just a suggestion, not a criticism.

[blythburgh]

My inside leg measurement is a secret known only to me and not for sharing, Squire

[blythburgh]

That Shareholder flag is already taken heed of by the scripts, no extra coding (much) needed

Yes, it would be easy to implement. I can do this, if most members agree

[Mel]

That Shareholder flag is already taken heed of by the scripts, no extra coding (much) needed

Yes, it would be easy to implement. I can do this, if most members agree

Get on with it Richard, or this thread will go on for ever.

[xxxraichxxx]

You all seem more stressed than i am with my wedding nerves