Jahanshah Javid

Attention please !

 The unethical habit of posting under different aliases should be condemned and stopped if possible. This falls under the same principle of cheating , lying and pretending which is abhored by all decent people. This may start as a small and maybe funny thing to do but later one develops into a hobby and dishonesty, giving unfair advantage to the unethical people. Please warn them privately if you know them and expose them if they keep doing it . make sure your tracing system works fine and maybe two different names with the same IP address are flagged down by your firewall ( keeping in mind that a family might log in under different aliases from the same PC).

Jimzbund , man of thousand faces but only 1 aliases?!

Bund, Jimz Bund

We have all done it....fess up

You know what, I have left comments on my own posts as unregistered user and I am certain most of the people who have responded here have done so more than once in some cases in the past.  I guess only Foaad can comment on validity of my statement.

Just be honest about it.  The absolute best thing about Iranian.com is the fact  JJ allows all to say their piece/peace.

Obviously profanity and severe personal attacks should and are not allowed as in any professionally managed site.

Nothing's gonna happen...

As we all know JJ with his 'beh tokhmam' policy, absolutely nothing is going to happen UNLESS someone 'joft paa bereh roo seemeh asaabesh'.

There will be blood

I wonder how this will turn out. Will JJ make a decision? Tune in next month for the comment chronicles of iranian.com. 

why should it matter?

It could be annoying, and as you suggested, is not that widespread (and even if it was), why should it matter? Is this publication keeping score on popularity or number of comments for or against a given subject?

In my opinion it is waste your time or your staff's time to even spend a minute to follow this up? Let them be. If they don't violate the codes you have established for a civil public forum, let them enjoy their slizziness. It doesn't bother me.

Dear JJ , please do it!

This issue has been effecting this site  for a while. Sometimes I get so fed up with people having so many registered ID's and messing conversations, that I try to stay away for a while, then I come back and it is the same thing.

I personally agree with you 100% for bringing this issue to open ,this is not a conspiracy theory anymore it is real issue with these people. I wanted to do it , but , I guess did not have the courage to say it!! Thanks for talking and addressing it.

Regards,

Tahirih

Do all three...

JJ, use the old strategy of:
-tazakor
-tir-e havaayee
-khalaas!

You asked;
"Should I tell the offending person to stop leaving congratulatory or supporting messages for her or himself? Should I just delete them? Should I expose them (I'm not going to that, I don't think)?"

Do all three:
*First, you send the person an email and give a warning...
*Second, if it's a case that gets on your nerve like you said, just delete them...
*third, if the offending person does it again(!), expose them (that would be fun!)

BTW, good thing you blogged about this ,,, they might feel ashamed. Might...

David, he said it is a case of 2 registrations

If someone is writing a blog and then signing in under another alias to leave nice comments for himself/herself, I think it's sad, like Nazy wrote. But:

"This was an unusual case. The sinister, manipulative nature of the comments just blew me away. Believe me, this is as rotten as it can get and I had to talk about it."

If this is true, and it is about hate, racism or other cruel comments, I think you must deal with this. Either privately or publicly, depending on how extreme the person is or if they do not listen to you in private e-mail. 

I love mysteries. I love them love them. But this is a little sad. Even if JJ reveals the identity of this person, what good will it do? We'll all come away a little traumatized, but if the comments are hate-filled, then maybe it is good. Until he deals with it, after "venting" this out to us, we're going to keep second guessing comments of people we don't know personally! LOL

Dear JJ

The problem you mentioned goes much deeper than just the WRITERS, it is much more common with the READERS.

It is SO OBVIOUS that some people under different ID's populate the comments in their favor. They write the same opinion in different wordings and different ID's just to supposedly show that the author's view is not (or is) popular and they have majority 

The solution is still the same as I mentioned long time ago. Registered users only! It takes 1 minute to register and no personal information is necessary.

It won't eliminate the problems totally but reduces them substantially.

Now if you want to be more restrict to reduce multiple registered ID's too, can limit one registered per IP address.

A comment should not

A comment should not necessarily be supporting and appreciative. We should reconsider that at times, a constructive criticism will do more good to the writer than never –ending “thank you what a good job”! However, it is understandable that for some types of writings (poetry, stories, and so on) which deals with abstract and subjective materials (versus analytical articles), finding a critical viewpoint might be difficult.

Dear JJ

I don't mean to be harsh, but to serve the justice ,I would suggest you

reveal their aliases.If you do not do it,

1-They think they can foolyou and everyone to serve their own ego .

2- You knowingly allowing them to abuse the right of others to a fair assesment of what they read int this site.

Who are we kidding?

What do you mean "only one case"? I consider myself a good judge of character and I can find you more cases without even having access to your logs. You can verify them. Dishonest people have and continue to use multiple accounts, multiple names and multiple personalities.

It goes on all the time.

Don't tolerate it! Most other websites do not, but you allow these people to artificially promote or (more likely) attack a featured article in your site. Isn't this clearly an abuse of "freedom of speech" ?

My suggestion is

1. to disallow anonymous comments altogether from the front page featured pieces. (They can be allowed in all the blogs where the real clashes happen anyway). This way people can be sure that their contribution will be treated a little more seriously if it's good enough to be on the front page promoted. It's only fair if people put in a lot of time to write well for the community.

2. you say you're only talking about people "leaving a comment for themselves." Don't you see that this is probably a response to the abuses that article writers (like myself on my Obama piece) suffer at the hands of anonymous fakers leaving multiple comments under different names? For the record, I haven't done it and I don't approve of it, but it's understandable. You have to address both sides of the problem. So, my second suggestion is: MAKE SURE people who already have an account don't open another. If need be, make everyone wait 3 days after registration before being allowed to post anything.

3. Expose the IP numbers of all anonymous posters. If it's good enough for Wikipedia, it should be good enough for your site.

tamum shod raft!

JJ jan

you also know how I feel about the "whatever" attitude. To me a lot of the people online are not just IDs and I have made many friends who are also online like I am every day. We're all iranians who are looking for others like us to exchange ideas, memories and enjoy the familiar iranian humor. Some of us meet and have become real life friends...

JJ jan I would never tell you what to do and what not to do on your own site. I hope I didn't sound that obnoxious in my previous comment!

IRANdokht

Honesty

Irandokht, when you live your life on the internet, as I do, you can tell who's honest and who's not. Just like real life. Eventually you get to know various characters, to a certain degree.

I personally take no one and nothing seriously enough to worry about who's really who and doing what and why on this site. My general policy is "whatever"!

Anyway, chashm. I won't bring up stinky situations again, especially when I can't talk about the complete picture.

It's true JJ

For the most part everybody will get over it, but unfortunately this blog added unnecessary fuel to assumptions and accusations and in resullt created some hard feelings. 

You're doing a great job and I know how hard you're working on the site. Believe me, it shows! I feel right at home here and I come back here every chance I get, I know a lot of us appreciate the effort you put into it. 

I also believe that if a case gets so out of hand that it bothers you to this extent, you should act on it as you see fit, but I would hope that resolving these problems is done without worsening any existing issues that may exist between some folks. It's easy to assume the worst and doubt people's integrity. Unfortunately some people do not rise above that easily and continue to take advantage of any occasion to point a finger at others. 

Keep up the good work and I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.

IRANdokht

Keeping quiet

Thanks Nazy. I see your point. In retrospect, I should have kept quiet. I am not the type to make a fuss over such things anyway.

This was an unusual case. The sinister, manipulative nature of the comments just blew me away. Believe me, this is as rotten as it can get and I had to talk about it.

Has it made some honest people uncomfortable? Probably, and I'm sorry. But my guess (hope) is that this episode is not going to affect the vast majority who are not in the business of deception.

It's your thing, do what you wanna do...

I encounter a sort of a similar problem with the site I help admin. Some people change names and post several comments and sometimes they use that technique to gang up on another commenter, but in our system their IP's show them up!

That sort of practice really sickens me and I just can't say exactly why...

May be it is the underhanded nature of it!

To make the long story short, in our case, warnings have for the most part been effective, and in some instances we've also had to resort to completely denying the privilege to comment to certain individuals...

This is an excellent website you are running, JJ. I want to commend you on that and leave you with this advice that do by all means whatever your mind and instinct tells you to do in regards to the issue at hand and any other thing related to your baby, the Iranian.com

Cheers...

Jahanshah

This was a sad post to read on several levels. I won't belabor the ethics of writing congratulatory notes to oneself and how the act is a sad one in and of itself. I won't address the subject of anonymous (unverified user) comments, either, as you and I have discussed the subject to death already.

I do, however, want to remind you that your site enjoys the writings of many novice and experienced writers who donate their work to the community for free. Without their contributions, the site will lack something in color and excitement and variety. When instead of contacting the culprit directly or forgetting about the mischief you write such a post for everyone to see, hoping to make one person uncomfortable, it makes the rest of your contributors uncomfortable, too. In this light, all complimentary comments appear suspect, and some joy in giving the gift itself dies.

When so much criticism, hate, venom, and labeling are spewed on the site by anonymous verified and unverified commentators on a daily basis, why would it matter so greatly to "catch" someone's self-congratulatory notes? What skin is it off our noses to read them? Some of us are looking for dialogue, anyway, so we skip over overtly hateful and congratulatory comments alike, speaking our own minds.

My two cents.

"Anonymouns" comments

I think some got confused. I should have explained better. The issue is not un-registered users, but people registering under different names and leaving comments for themselves under these various registered names. Again, this is ONE exceptional case. Not a general problem.

Well...

IP leases from ISP are dynamic not static and can be release and renewed on ones router at any time on demand. Plus most routers can be set to reject Ping from WAN! Perhaps investing in a network protocol analyzer like Ethereal which can be used for analyzing TCP/IP packets and further forensic is a good idea. 

PS. Let's pluck those turkey's! :0)

dear Majid

What's wrong ? You just sent an email for me asking if I was referring to you, and I replied: No!

Why now you decided to make it public ? I said almost 43 comment, less or more I don't know.....Why did you right away thought it was about you ? Your friends call me " a paranoid" for less than this.

If you are not that clever, this is not my fault. Would you stop harassing me please ? I have no more patience for those kind of argument.

Thanks.

and hope you have had a great Thanks Giving party today.

Just curious

about who you're talking about Souri?  How many blogs are there with 43 comments that you counted and compared registerd and unregistered comments?  And I wonder how you can tell they are the same person?  I guess I'm not that clever.  :-)

End ,registered users placing anonymous posts

One way to minimize the habit is to set up the code to verify their IP address at the point of sending an anonymous comment . I had done game programming as a hobby for a while back on window programming platform & C language (it,s ancient now)..this is a tiny bit of my code for multiplayer & password verification (you can write it in java checking   register users IP and add lines to make sure the ID used matches the IP..other wise zepeleshk , they are rejected..so it,s a  case of If( ==) else .. offcourse there are times they use friends computer, but rare . one can also go by method of hashing the browser, IP and a traceroute,  this would ban big chunks of subnet (companies ) , yet It,s more practical than coding the subnet . I never done Java or net programming so Foaad should be able to have a way around it . As well building a database eventhough painstaking is an option too with the use of cookies(if not turned off) . cheers!!!

Dear Marge...

Your hair looks exceptionally blue today! ;-) 

SALTY IS RIGHT

Yes I agree with Salty %100 and have to congratulate him on his comment. I also think that he is so dreamy!

EFSHA KON, EFSHA KON

Yes name names J, we need some excitements on this site

From a General Reader

I'm not a registered user. Probably for the same reason some other people aren't. It's because I don't feel I have the time and energy to participate in the discussions the way the core registered users do. But I do follow the discussions when I can and I get to know these registered users, they are like a core community. They are as important now as the articles and blogs themselves. I pay attention to certain ones in particular and I value their opinons. I just post occasionally like now and when I do I don't expect to have the same "status" they do.

So I want to know they are who they say they are, whether they use their real name or a cyber-name. It's very disappointing to find out they are being someone else, whether it's to compliment themselves, attack someone else or basically for any reason at all.

So I think that registered users should not be allowed to post unregistered at all. Does that sound extreme? I'm sure if you warned someone who was registered not to do it they would just stop and it would all blow over like everything else does. And if you decided to only let people who are registered post, that would be fine with me too. At that point I'd just decide whether to register or to stop posting all together. And if I registered I'd still only post from time to time. Either way would be fine with me.

Keep up the good work!
--General Reader

Hmm. Election is over. Traffic (might be) down? Juicy Question

I think this is fascinating. How can someone do this and not be obvious about it? I mean, it can be a totally innocent, lame comment like "this was an eyegasm thanks for writing this." Which doesn't bear any kind of malice in my opinion. No need to expose someone for that.... unless they are writing complete boloney and or racist stuff. In that case, some public shaming could be ok in my eye...... and fun for the angry mob depending who the culprit(s) is!

jj jan

on the days that you feel good about yourself:

as long as they are not rude (which they won't be) i think let them pat themselves on the back. it is really a kind of cheating but since no one gets hurt it is ok. 

on the days that you are in a bad mood and nothing is going right for you:

find them and kick their ass.

JJ jan

This is very nice of you to talk about this subject, indeed a sign of showing your care and responsibility.

Yes, there was a case like this recently and I believe many people did notice it. That blogger, indeed is a very nice person and we all (almost) like his humor. At the first comments, I though he was playing a joke, but when it got to almost 43 comment (with only a douzen from other users) it was really getting too ridiculous.

My friendly suggestion is: You send them a notice (email) saying the truth. That this kind of playing with the time and energy of the website is not honest, nor nice. That if they continue doing that, you might delete all those comments.

We all like jokes and humor, but we don't like people playing with our time like this. Of course we can also abandon that blog, but if we let this behaviour going on the site, soon we will have our  website becoming a  hots for those kind of garbage, and people won't take this site in serious, anymore.

I have respect for that blogger who did it last time, even if I saw many times, he posted irritating comment against me, but I forgive it and don't confront him, as long as he prefers to stay anonymous.

But taking all of us for the idiot who can't read that behind all those comments there's only one same person, is really a sing of disrespect to all of us.

Thank you so much dear JJ, for evocating the subject.