Re: Product review postings (was Administrivia)

From: Alfred Huger <ah(at)securityfocus.com>
Date: Tue Jul 08 2003 - 13:51:16 EDT

On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Stan Hanks wrote:

> Maybe a good middle ground is to allow semi-anonymous "'nyms" for people,

This speaks to the central issue of concern for me. Accountability. There are two sets of concerns here that need to be taken into account. One is obviously those concerns held by the poster but the other side of the coin is the vendor or author of the software in question. Posting not only affects the poster but it also affects the other party and in some cases that affect can be dramatic.

So while I need to balance the needs of the poster I cant forget that someone on the other side is being impacted at the same time. I know from experience that having an anonymous party review your product can be harmful to sales. Also from experience Ive seen this all too often abused by people with an axe to grind or with a commercial agenda. People seem to think that their anonymity should be guaranteed to them by some unwritten rule of the Internet. I think there is merit in that, for some things. But I do think its situational and you need to be accountable for your actions when affecting the livelihood of others. I like the idea of rating the credibility of posters (although I imagine setting criteria will be thorny) but I still am leery about purely anonymous posters.

-al

Alfred Huger
Symantec Corp.

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Received on Tue Jul 8 14:13:28 2003