Add protocol for verification via social media and personal websites

[eblanshey]

It's important to have a specified method of verifying OneName ownership via social media and personal websites. Without a single way of verifying ownership, it is impossible for crawlers to know whether or not a post actually does what it claims to do (in this case, providing verification of OneName ownership).

By specifying what to put in the post, such as "onename-username", a crawler can simply load the proof URL and search for the required text.

[shea256]

Yeah very good point. An alternative for non-english speakers is important.

Also, I thought we could have something like this:
#verifyMyOneName

It would be great for searching on Twitter and Facebook and seeing who has been verified.

Plus, I feel like including that hashtag in tweets and posts is socially acceptable (and could even be fun).

What if the message required that tag as well as +<username> (e.g. +bob)?
(And users could be flexible with formatting as long as those two were in there).

[eblanshey]

Oh I like that a lot. That would be both acceptable and easily parsable. That could work for any service at all that uses hashtags.

I think it would makes sense to keep the verification rules as universal as possible so that you won't have to apply a different verification check for every service out there. For example:

For hash tag enabled services: #verifymyonename and +myusername
Default for ALL services, including hash tag enabled: I am username on onename. or onename-verify:username (for non-english speakers)
For URL-based verification (like files on websites): onename-verification-username (in the URL)

For websites, like I said above, I think it would be important to require the files to be uploaded to the root folder. I can't think of any other verification type right now that would require verification through the URL, though.

[eblanshey]

Also, this isn't so important, but do you think verifications should be made for companies/organizations? For example, instead of I am username on onename. you would have We are username on onename..

[shea256]

Ah interesting - I was actually thinking to only have the hashtag option, and for sites that don't have searchable hashtags, it just wouldn't be searchable, but the formatting could still be parsed just the same. This way, we only have one format. And there isn't any need for "I am" or "we are" or multi-language compatibility.

And as far as URL verification, we have an outline that we were drafting for that - we can discuss it in a separate thread. Basically, it allows a single website to verify/vouch for multiple users at once (think sites owned by corporations, schools, shared blogs, etc.).

[eblanshey]

Ah interesting - I was actually thinking to only have the hashtag option, and for sites that don't have searchable hashtags, it just wouldn't be searchable, but the formatting could still be parsed just the same. This way, we only have one format. And there isn't any need for "I am" or "we are" or multi-language compatibility.

You're absolutely right, that's much easier and makes perfect sense.