Stacking Fake Profiles At First

One other question. About a year ago, I saw a module you can buy that pre-stacks your boonex site with lots of fake members so that it looks like other people have already joined.

I cannot locate that module in the module section.

Does anyone remember what one that was?

Thanks

It's probably one of those extensions I removed, because they're legal status is questionable (and in a few cases, clearly illegal).

 I don't think you did..

http://www.boonex.com/nextgate

I need to prove they're illegal before I can remove them.  Those are one of the few remaining.  It's annoying, but BoonEx sees nothing wrong with them.

But this will be my last post in this topic.  I don't usually answer topics for those who use fake profiles.

Not illegal. I think too many people get all uppity because of the occasional fake item on the net. The net is all about ambiguity and anonymity. Fake profiles on a site really isn't that big of an issue and although somem people get a little high and mighty about it. it's really not illegal.

It Is Illegal to post an image without that persons consent unless they agree to share via TOS/TOA.  The main issue is, "Scraping" from other websites which is totally illegal. The major problem is; legal costs involved in fighting such an action... In-which one person most likely will not take....nothing else...

Well, I originally wrote this as a PM...

It's illegal to sell real profiles without user consent, which allowed me to remove the extensions that were scraped from production sites.  I can't remove extensions like the Profile Generator because of this.  I can, however, remove the Profile Grabber and "5K USA DATING PROFILES" extensions, because those use real profiles, and in those cases, the developers failed to show that users agreed to have their profile data mined.

So it can be illegal, and in many cases, it is.  I should add that even for the legal fake profiles, you can still find yourself in hot water over them.  For example, having someone purchase membership on your site to interact with fake profiles is a common tactic that has lead to lawsuits.

I understand the concerns over fake profiles, but I wouldn't use them as real people. My main reasoning was to make it appear that people are using the website. This way new visitors will create accounts and start looking around and hopefully telling their friends.

you should ask the person who was contacted by homeland security for having purchased 300K fake profiles. not only is it illegal, its immoral, unethical, and anything deceitful such as misleading others into believing your site has members or traffic that it does not have, is 100% ILLEGAL.

Sorry DosDawg. Although I do not condone using fake profiles, they are, in fact, fake. I think we are talking two different things. profiles that have been mined that belong to real people, that would be illegal, but making profiles up, although underhanded, isn't illegal and don't talk 'homeland security' with me, that offices entire job is spying on it's citizens.

BTW, you can buy 'stock images' in a thousand different places on the net. i am quite sure profile images are also readily available and legal to use any way you see fit for a small fee.

REgardless if they are fake, real, legal, illegal...

Its a bad idea to start a site this way!

Trust me. Ive built loads of Dolphin sites over the last 2 years, from launch.

The ones that succeed are the ones that have a genuine user interest. 

I understand the thought behind putting up a few hundred + fake profiles to give the impression that the site is busy, then attract real users... but it doesnt work. 

what it does is allow a real user to click the profiles of fake users, and see that that profile has ZERO interaction within the site. They will have a tiny bad resolution profile thumb, not pictures. No details other than age, sex, city. Nothing personal, nothing real about their profile. 

When a user sees that ALL the other site users are like this, it will look like a dead site.

Fake profiles bring no life to a site. No forum posts, not individual profiles, no photos, nothing.

No point.

Building and launching a site just takes hard work and time. Lots of both.

If you cant do either, then your site will not be successful anyway. 

Shortcuts like fake profiles in my experience, make things worse....

I tend to agree with daihlo on this one. I can clearly see the temptation to have fake profiles when you launch a site. I have just launched, and to be honest. A handfull of my profiles are psydo profiles - I use them to test all the membership levels and functions etc within the site. So, they do serve an essential purpose. But there is no way I would load up several hundered peofiles. Its a matter of trust. I value every single member of my site and they MUST be able to trust the integrity of my site and me as a site owner.

Getting the first few hundred members is a real bitch! But it can be done. And there are tools out there to help smoth the process. I know that it is going to take atleast a year of hard graft to get some real momentum behind my site, and at the moment I am still collecting those first few hundred... but when those first members actualy begin to use the tools that you have created on the site, it is all worth it. Its such a great feeling to see genuine life being infused into something that you have created, to see it being used and to see members making friends, inviting friends and sharing their events. Isnt this what a Community is about???

Far better putting initial effort into site content instead of fake profile to make it look busy.

Better to have 10 real members with lots of content, then 1000 fake members with no content...

1 will grow, the other will not.

Depends what your site is, is it based on niche interest, location, or just an open social network...

If youre running a general open social network, then good luck as you have your work cut out! 

Competing with the big guns such as FB, MS and Twit is no job I would want to bother with!

However, if youre niche, then focus on niche content. Give your users a reason to be on your site. 

If they want general chat, they will go on the big sites as thats the done thing already.

Content is key...

It's called "astroturfing" and it's not illegal. Microsoft for example commonly creates tons of bogus accounts that give positive reviews for it's products on it's website/forums , as well as public review sites/ community sites or blogs. I don't see how a social medium is any different from a forum or bogus community website. The intent is still to impersonate a movement/opinion that is inflated by one person or companys agenda.

While I agree your energy would be better spent on actually promoting your site , it's far from illegal.

-barry

I will say this though dolphin date stamps everything so if you have low traffic I would remove most of these. They spent a tad too much time (IMHO) with public stats and such, as I don't know of any mainstream dolphin sites that actually have impressive numbers. If your most recent posted image is 300 days old I would not bother registering for an account (or 90 days for that matter). The dolphin sites I have done I removed a lot of the "days old" stamps, because they are niche sites where the age of the content isn't important.

-barry

100% correct... if people aren't interested in what your site has to offer they aren't going to join, regardless if it has 2 members or 10,000 members.

 well clearly there is a misunderstanding, because the guys who were selling FAKE- RIPPED OFF, STOLEN profiles on boonex, those profiles are Illegal, they are using data-scrapers, and the users have not granted permissions to share their information or images. they are selling stolen property.

so its not astro-turfing, its theft.

 theft, deceit, immoral, unethical. if one can stand and say that using stolen profiles purchased from the market or any market, has been prosperous, please share your story. i know of about 10 unity members who purchased, fake stolen profiles, and ended up deleting them after a short term of usage.

Yes dosdawg we are talking about two different things.

-barry

 if this was the case of creating by hand manually, or by script, a set of profiles, for testing purposes, then that is one thing. but my issue is and has always been that when you purchase 20K profiles, you are asking for trouble, as you have no means of knowing where those profiles came from.

they each have email addresses in most cases, and those emails start reporting your site as sending spam, then you at some juncture end up sending an email to the profile owner, and they end up on your site, and now you are into the realms of legal ramifications, and this is where it gets dirty and nasty.

 your mention of what MS does, could be true, however, they are not scraping the internet for those results. where it may be a marketing ploy, or strategy, it is not per se' illegal, not what i would consider moral or ethical either.

and you mention that why should it be any different, i think there are a multitude of stories about some of the more prominent dating/matchmaking sites running fake profiles with fake autoresponses, being sued. i have never been a member of such a site, but i could see where that would be utterly annoying.

then some will spout off, i am not charging for my site, well then you wont be running a site with 20K members on it either. i can assure you of that statistic. fake or otherwise

Sorry I could not join this interesting discussion before. But here is my point of view. Creating fake profiles is not illegal as long as you are not using illegal images or personal data from other people. This is the reason why profile grabber was deleted, it could grab complete profiles from other websites and you were able to use it.

It is very common to use fake profiles at the beginning of website. Bigger companys have huge teams that only create fake profiles, discussions and so on. The only point that would be illegal would be if you create for example a dating site with 20000 fake profiles and you start collecting money from users that want to join. In this case the user would be paying for something that does not exist.

If you create fake profiles for the first weeks or months for your website you will delete them after some time anyway and then you will not need them anymore.

This is all very interesting but I have a question about real profiles. I have a site that is only for a few surrounding cities I got a new site that I want to be for my whole state I informed my members that I was adding a new site that will be for the entire state and would be an updated version from my old site which hasn't be updated for 5 years. My members was thrilled at the idea and even though my site is totally free and rely on google ads and donations some of my members do not want to create a new profile because they have kept their profile and photos up to date and some of them told me that they deleted some of their pictures and do not want to copy them and repost them or have to request for friends and family members all over again to add to their profiles. Is their a way I can move the entire data base?

If you have old version of Dolphin then you can upgrade step by step.

If there is another software then you need some custom script which will migrate necessary data to Dolphin.

 Also, you can clone or copy the site and database to the new site/domain and start the upgrade process there as your probably not live yet and can take your time. If that process goes well then you can upgrade the other/old domain.. PM if you need help.

I have already been discussion options with this person on how to easily clone their site.