Something is rotten in Denmark

The meneame-fresqui controversy has gotten pretty ugly. But I have to say that this time I think Ricardo Galli has every reason to be ticked off.

Reading this post and the comment by Javier Perez (who is also a BlogMemes user), it seems that at Fresqui things haven’t been as transparent as they look.

It’s hard to judge without knowing the people involved, but Ricardo Galli, as insufferable as he can be, has a level of credibility that comes from his involvement in the FSF. Alex and I have exchanged a few very friendly emails, and I even offered to help with development for Fresqui, which was kindly declined.

Manipulating the results

When Blogmemes started I needed to give the site a push, and that’s why I used several users. Today, when you see entries by ediaz, admin or josé parinas, they’re all mine.

Some users were able to sign up more than once, due to bugs in the registration. There was even a time when the administrator had superpowers and could vote many times for the same meme.

That is gone, it has been improved, and it has always been open to auditing by blogmemes users.

It’s no longer possible to register the same email more than once.

But I think I’m going to have to add registration with email confirmation; I don’t want problems with trolls or unscrupulous spammers. Blocking sign-ups by IP seems excessive to me.

In any case, as I explained in my previous post, we have the advantage of being able to see the source code of Meneame and of Blogmemes, but not Fresqui’s.

Fresqui isn’t obliged to show its code, but if it’s using free software in violation of the licenses, that deserves censure. It would also deserve censure if they tried to gain PageRank using practices not approved by Google.

I think that needs to be cleared up. It isn’t good for a shadow of suspicion to hang over Fresqui, and the best way to guarantee trust is with transparency.

The bad part is that proving innocence is very hard, and doubt has already been sown among the users. That’s a shame for all of us who are developing social projects. It’s a shame for Meneame, Fresqui and it splashes onto Blogmemes and all the other similar systems.

Bad business.