Well I can’t answer for MK but my guess is that he would act on any issue once it started to have a material effect on C2’s business or earlier if he judged it to have potential for harm.
I would also give some thought to how it would be policed, once you take action against one person you will have set a precedent in a very subjective area, no matter what protection you put in place if someone is determined enough to cheat the system believe me they will still find a way only with ever more underhand and sinister means, at least with the current setup it is clumsy and blatantly obvious when they have malfeased.
And where exactly would you draw the line? Could not anyone writing reviews on an analyst page be accused of influencing newbies rather than educating them, and thereby indirectly determining subscription dollar flow through blatantly biased system bashing masquerading as objective analysis?
I’m not sure we want to go down that road and I suspect the very people you seek to protect are a little less helpless and a lot more streetwise than you give them credit for.
"once you take action against one person you will have set a precedent in a very subjective area"
Subjective? They cheat. They get punished. I don’t see the problem here
"And where exactly would you draw the line? " Could not anyone writing reviews on an analyst page be accused of influencing newbies rather than educating them:
I don’t think this is hard at all. Intentionally cheating the system is easily recognized by most people and most companies. There is a huge difference between what TMG did, and other people giving their opinions. What is hard about this? Almost every web company I know would immediately take action against TMG. Few would struggle with this. Somehow, Collective2 is looking the other way
Now, the precedent is, go ahead and cheat. My Analyst pages are no longer reliable. Do whatever you want, and even if you are caught, so what? Why bother advertising on C2?
Where is the can of worms? In not dealing with cheaters or looking the other way? You need to re-read my last post. This is the only web merchant I know, with this kind of attitude. Most others value their reputation. Here on C2, what the hell… Do it! Just be somewhat less obvious than TMG, and you can probably get away with it.
I disagree that Jerry Jenkins did anything wrong; neither legally nor morally. There is no fraud at all. In 2006, before TMG became popular here, I had a brief communication with TMG and he closed his message to me with “Kind regards, Jerry Jenkins (Travis’ associate)”. I also received several e-mails from Jerry acting as the vendor when I was subscribed to TMG. In my opinion Jerry Jenkins is not a fake person and when you communicate with TMG you will very soon know that he is member of their team (at least this was the case in 2006 and 2007).
So why do you claim that he is a fake person? Why is it fraud when he writes positively about his system? My Analyst pages are meant to express a personal opinion, and his opinion is obviously that TMG is a good system. So what?
With respect to newbies, I don’t see how credit card identification would solve this. Most likely a vendor and his associates posess credit cards, and then they can still tout their own system without revealing that they are the vendor. I think it should be sufficient if newbies are warned that a person writing on a My Analyst page might be a vendor, not a subscriber, and that such a person may have personal interests. But then again, isn’t that obvious? I remember that when I started trading I became sick of the overload of all the silly warnings that I had to read and sign and click away. Why add another warning, number 63,021? People should be allowed to learn from their mistakes.
Because you are not allowed to review your own system. If you own a system, then it prevents you from adding it to your own My Analyst. This is the text that displays:
The idea behind the My Analyst page is to gather trading systems which interest you, but which aren’t your own systems.
So he generates a new alias to get around it. In fact, he generated TWO aliases to do so. Any other questions?
I see. So that makes it morally wrong, because it violates the idea of My Analyst pages. Nevertheles, I would rather suggest to change this rule.
I think some sort of compromise can be reached that leaves everyone happy. The most common solution to this kind of problem on community-type websites seems to be to somehow rank users.
For example… how long has the user been a member? Is the member also a system seller? If so, how popular is his system? Certainly the opinion of the creator of a top-10 system is valuable, but that also tells us that he is “analyzing” his competition, and could be biased.
Unless I’m doing something wrong, the way to see “my analyst” comments right now is to click one-by-one on each user and go to his analyst page. It would be better to see all the comments for a system in one page. That way, it would be easier to see the bigger picture and the overall opinion of users.
Maybe also include some sort of star-rating system on analyst pages. This would have a dual purpose: first, one could see how highly other users are interested in a system, even if they are not subscribers, and an average could be calculated much like in subscribers ratings. Second, it would serve each user to rank the systems in his analyst pages, for his own reference.
These are just ideas off the top of my head, but they seem to be popular across community based websites, review pages, and so on.
It is morally wrong to kill people. Maybe we should just legalize it, and save taxpayer dollars.
If a site allows people to manipulate it any way they want, and then everyone decides to do that, and it gains a lousy reputation, what kind of future does it have?
The difference with killing people is that I do not find it morally wrong if people comment on their own system. The only reason why the act of Jerry Jenkins was a little bit wrong in this case is because of what Matthew wrote about his “idea” (not law) about My Analyst Pages. It is wrong to violate rules, but in this case it is an imho rather arbitrary rule that should not exist in the first place. Probably it is just a way to protect MKs revenues from advertisements. He has the right to do that, but it has nothing to do with morale. If MK doesn’t care about these revenues, I don’t care either.
"If a site allows people to manipulate it any way they want, and then everyone decides to do that,…"
C2 does not allow people to manipulate it any way they want, it merely allows Jerry Jenkins to manipulate it this way. And not everyone decides to do that. Frankly, I see no threats to the reputation of C2 in this. Only threats to the reputation of TMG. C2 is like a newspaper where people among other things can publish their own comments, but C2 is not responsible for the content of these comments.
Completely and totally disagree. As I said in earlier, when this kind of inappropriate behavior happens, just about every web company I see immediately acts to prevent this. if it is tolerated, it threatens the validity of this site.
The only lesson learned here, is that you can cheat in C2, and it does not matter. It will be tolerated. TMG should be out in the cold, losing revenue.
We had a Mathew Graham, perhaps before you came. He tried to cheat in every possible way. Quite a few said that if the problems weren’t fixed, they questioned the reputation of Collective2.
I will not comment further. The defense of this kind of behaviour is mind-boggling. But, whatever…
I was here way before Matthew Graham, and actually I think I came here shortly after you, in Dec 2005. What Jerry Jenkins did is not at all comparable to what Graham did.
