I for one like Steve's idea, but it might be tough for some to swallow.
("Unreliable sez' who!??!?!!")
How about something like this:
Imagine a webpage attached to a database. The database contains
(nominally) a first/last name field(s), a "good" field, a "neutral" field,
a "bad" field, and "submitter" field.
So, I just bought something from Paul F and I'm happy with the transaction,
so I go to the webpage and submit a:
Frazee, Paul:good:clay@supra.com (through a form on the webpage)
Paul's entry shows one more "good" transaction, and my name.
Now when Al wants to buy something from Paul, he goes to the webpage and
enters "Frazee, Paul" and clicks 'lookup' (or whatever).
Up pops:
Name Good Neutral Bad
Paul Frazee 1 0 0
The idea being that people can kinda "vote" their experiences into the
database. Attaching an e-mail address could be used in a couple ways--
only allow one vote per e-mail address (last vote takes precedence), and/or
have a "detail" checkbox that shows the e-mail addresses by category or
something:
Name Good Neutral Bad
Paul Frazee 1 - - clay@supra.com
- 2 - al@spies.com, ray@mayo.edu
So that will discourage trying to "stuff" the ballot box.
Good can be defined as something like "transaction completed as agreed",
Neutral as "transaction not exactly as agreed, but acceptable" (slow to
ship, dead on arrival and swapped for another unit that worked, etc.), Bad
as "transaction not completed as agreed".
Whatcha think?
(I'm open to take this discussion elsewhere so we don't clutter up
vectorlist... It's just that we get all the good ideas in here and the S/N
ratio is better than the newsgroup anymore...)
-Clay
Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
Received on Tue Aug 19 09:50:43 1997
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