Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Anonymous kudos

This has been discussed some time ago in one of the chats and it was originally Kim's idea, but I started really liking it recently, so I'm posting it here

The issue is that when two anonymous characters play together, there's no way of leaving kudos if the players don't want to tell each other who they are. One of the possible solutions is being able to leave kudos completely anonymously (i.e. not even as the anonymous character), and the more I thought about it the more I liked it Is there any chance of it being implemented? ";

We've historically turned this down given the potential for abuse, but it would solve the issue of anonymous characters getting no love from their anonymous counterparts.

Probably we'll not be updating kudos again any time soon, there's just too much else on the list needing attention, but I'll throw the thought into my brain stew and see what simmers out when the time comes.

Wouldnt the guest book help with this problem?

Also I am kinda against this idea, as one anon char can find another anon char by leaving a kudo, then searching for it and finding who plays that anon char

Huh? How would searching for an anon character help you find out who's playing it? There's no way to do that, and that wouldn't change with this idea's implementation.

I think what Ed is saying is that character kudos turn up on player profiles? But that is only true of non-anonymous characters, so it wouldn't aid in finding out who plays the character.

I can see why that might be a problem, on the other hand I think that could be easily solved by letting users know that moderators are still able to see who they are (if that'd be true, that is). IMO, there's even more potential for abuse in guestbooks where people can post comments without even having user accounts on the site, and hopefully that hasn't been a problem yet

Also, a completely random idea for the interface - how about an additional button saying "Give kudos anonymously" below or next to the currently existing "Give kudos" button that would show info about moderators being able to find out who the person is appearing on mouseover? Or a little checkbox saying "post anonymously" with the same info added next to it. Yup Also the issue of players of anonymous characters being unable to give kudos to their RP partners without revealing their identity.
Makes perfect sense These are just some ideas for your brain stew, I don't mean to rush you or anything like that

Not entirely - few characters have guestbooks on their pages plus guestbooks are intended for a different purpose. Also, kudos are visible in the RP finder, whereas guestbook entries are something you need to look for and that usually isn't even there.

Yeah thats what I meant. As it was suggested that anon kudos would work, but kudos as of right now just go on the player's profile....So if anon kudo's worked like normal kudos one could abuse it with an easy searchable word or something.

I'm not sure where you got that information from, but if you look at my profile's kudos:

http://www.rprepository.com/community/personalkudos.php?p=574

You will not see any kudos I gave, or kudos my anonymous characters received.

Perhaps you're talking about this page?

http://www.rprepository.com/kudosGiven.php

This page is only accessible to yourself. Nobody else can see it. There's no way that anyone can find out who your anon character is, whether you leave anon guestbook comments on someone's character or whether you post somewhere etc. Anon characters are designed and programmed in such a way that they're 100% anonymous unless you make the public, or tell people who you are. This will never change.

We normally don't access a person's anonymous characters list. A lot of the other moderators don't know my anon characters unless I tell them. We value everyone's privacy and don't want to needlessly invade it.

However, we generally start pursuing someone's identity when they've become a problem to us. That can range from repeatedly breaking the rating guidelines on their characters, to harassing others or other forms of rule breaking.

I'm hesitant to make it sound like we're big bad guys who are RPR's very own NSA and even track the people who are following the rules and not doing anything wrong. Harassment in any shape or form is against the rules, so it goes without saying that abusing kudos anonymously will get you banned as easily as harassing someone in any other shape or form on the site.

What I've noticed as a moderator is that people are very hesitant to send in reports about abusive behavior for some reason. Perhaps we can focus on presenting an option to people to report abuse in a similar fashion like forum posts to make that easier. Members usually see kudos they get before we see them in the kudos list, and we might make wrong calls on what constitutes as harassment (you'd be surprised how often people don't mind rude-ish comments!). It sounds like giving people the tools to report it to us is a lot more effective than warning our entire userbase that we can spy on their identity, only to intimidate the 1% who break the rules. Likely they don't care for the rules if they actively harass someone to begin with.

However, that's just my view on it and I may be wrong.

To expand on that: Mods can't decide to look up someone's anonymous characters. Only one person can do that, it's me, and it's actually quite annoying for me to do. Someone has to cause a huge amount of trouble before I start checking to see if they're doing the same on other characters. Even then, in most cases, I have reported my findings simply by saying something along the lines of "No evidence of misconduct on other characters" to the mods.

So in short, you typically have to be screwing up under at least two different identities to get your anon personalities fingered to the mods.

Forum and edit bans, when applied to a single person, then apply to all their characters. So if we banned an anonymous character for abuse, we'd be banning the player of that character and all their other characters, without even needing to know who we were banning. Rules are enforced alongside pretty generous privacy allowances.

That said, if we were to offer anonymous kudos, I would definitely allow the mods to see who gave them if they needed to. In a system intended entirely for giving compliments, it's hard to see why they'd need extra special protection. Letting people speak anonymously is a big sign of trust on the web, and abusers would lose the privilege.

Oop, missed this question the first time around! Unfortunately, there's been repeated abuse of it. Every time it happens it sucks up so much mod time dealing with the fall out I'm tempted to remove the feature entirely.

I'll say it again, If anon kudos worked like normal kudos.....a user could give a kudo to a anon char, then later use a simple search engine for what the kudo said to find the real profile. That is if they worked like normal kudos.

Yay, RPR doesn't have its own little NSA for spying on people! I had no idea it was that difficult finding out who the players of anonymous characters are. Thanks for explaining it in such detail

I think making reporting abuse easier for people is a good idea. Maybe a part of why people are hesitant to report it is ambiguity - for instance, I'm not often harrassed but when I have been (not here), it's been difficult to tell if, objectively, that was harrassment or if I was just oversensitive. With kudos, it's a little bit clearer - they're supposed to be perceived by the receiver as positive.

Re: spying on people's identity. Admittedly it's super hard to communicate it without problems. What I had in mind was something that would make people realize that if they break the rules it can be tracked back to them - some people just don't seem to realize, and I think that's where a lot of the rule breaking may come from. But I can be wrong and it could cause even more problems than it would prevent.

As a side note, I don't think of giving kudos anonymously as having anything to do with posting as a particular anonymous character, rather doing it the same way as it's done now but the user's name not being publicly displayed with the kudos - so as far as I understand it, it could be implemented in a way that would make it relatively easy for the mods to deal with the potential rulebreakers without getting into anyone's anonymous character privacy.

Re: abuse of guestbook. Oh dear! The funny thing is, my thought process was "Well, the feature is still there, so it's probably not abused otherwise it would already be gone." Sorry to hear you have to spend to much energy dealing with it.

Hi! This is Alecia posting as a temporary anonymous character

It's already possible to give kudos to anonymous characters. What isn't possible is to do it without revealing your username. I'd like to invite you to give kudos to Test Dummy and then go on my user profile and see that nothing appeared there! They'll only be visible on the Test Dummy's page. I'll delete Test Dummy afterwards, of course, so don't worry that I'll keep your kudos, just try and see for yourself that it's not possible to abuse the system now and it won't be possible to abuse it like that later

I'm sorry Ed, but please re-read what I said: what you're saying is impossible, and it would be impossible as soon as it's coded because Kim would never code a feature that compromises anonymous characters. I'm not sure what else to tell you.

No problem. I figure these are the sorts of issues that people want to know about in detail to put their minds at ease!

It wouldn't be hard to make it easy to find this info out. But I've never wanted to. I figure the best way to prevent myself and others from accidentally revealing private information is for us to just not know to begin with. So far, this system has made it next to impossible to flub up and hurt law-abiding citizens, and easy to zap people who abuse the privilege. So yeah.

Ed: Sanne and Alecia are right, the proposal would in no way allow reverse-searches. People's privacy would remain safe. I hope all my explanations of all we've done so far to protect privacy of anon characters will help you understand how seriously that gets considered when we create new features that involve anon characters!

Very much so, and I'm really impressed!

Edit: Okay, I see now that that was directed at Ed, but that doesn't change anything about the fact that the amount of thought and effort you've put into this is seriously impressive

This is almost a separate thread at this point, but just as an aside: Abuses serious enough to need mod attention only seem to happen once every few months, so it's not that bad.

The feature remains because even though it CAN be abused, one of the site's main goals is to provide profiles for characters played in any game, anywhere. In fact, there was a time in our history where that was the site's ONLY use! Providing a guestbook that non-RPR users can comment in increases the utility of the site for people who don't ever RP here, and simply use it as a satellite service to store extra info about their main games. Their profile can be viewed and interacted with by their primary social circle, without requiring all of them to sign up first.

TLDR version: Benefits to our userbase continue to outweigh the costs to individuals who experience rare guestbook issues.

I'm so very happy you are pleased with our privacy policies!

I yearn for anonymous kudos! I understand potential for abuse but it is such a big handicap for me when I play so many anonymous characters. I play on over 20 anon profiles and I cannot ever give my partners kudos without revealing who I am. It's frustrating, many of them deserve praise but go totally unloved. Doesn't the benefit of allowing anonymous kudos outweigh the risk of abuse? I would be okay with penalties on abusers such as a one month suspension from giving kudos every time abuse happens, with one month increments.