support explicit disavowal of association with Gittip

[chadwhitacre]

Currently people who don't opt in to Gittip are noted as such "Foo has not joined Gittip." But what about people who want to explicitly disassociate themselves from the site? This surfaced as the "Eric" user story on #28. We should support it by allowing people to claim their account and then click a big "Cease & Desist" button.

Or better yet, can we put a "Cease & Desist" button right on the unclaimed account page that uses a different redirect back from the oauth provider to make this one step? Should be able to do that.

(Note that I believe this will require a db schema change, which would be our first since launching.)

[chadwhitacre]

This should include a non-offensive way to undo the cease and desist in the future.

Maybe "lock" and "unlock" buttons? Will play with the UI ...

[chadwhitacre]

Sorry, I chose to prioritize #58 and have to punt a week on this one. :-(

[chadwhitacre]

Thinking the way to do this is with a "blacklist" table with columns for social network and id. That should be flexible enough to support the use case where someone opts in or has money pledged to them (thus creating a participant record) and then they want to opt out. We want to keep their participant record around in that case, because it's even possible that someone has accepted tips and even given them in the past, and we don't want to lose that information. For those without a participant record we can simply add their id to the blacklist without creating a participant record. We should make sure we add a check to the function where we "claim" userids to check this blacklist and fail if trying to claim an blacklisted account.

[chadwhitacre]

Actually, let's maybe just add an "opted_out" column to the social_network_users table.

[chadwhitacre]

Hmmm ... looks like I need to tease out the circumstances under which we reserve a gittip username for someone on another social network. Right now I believe we do that when someone pledges money to someone, but really we shouldn't do that until the person opts-in to gittip. Although if someone wants to opt out of gittip they may very well also want to claim their username on it to forestall squatting. Hmmm ...

[chadwhitacre]

Yeah, I'm thinking when someone opts-out we should set aside their username as well. Even under a multi-network regime that would mean that the first person to either opt in or out gets that username, which is fair I think.

[chadwhitacre]

@jacobian, @toastdriven: This is deployed now. Let me know if it's broken or not sufficient.

• https://www.gittip.com/github/jacobian/
• https://www.gittip.com/github/toastdriven/

[chadwhitacre]

I'll wait a bit to hear back from @jacobian and/or @toastdriven before closing the ticket and promoting the new unclaimed page (#71).

[chadwhitacre]

Someone who has tipped a person with a locked account can still modify their tip to them on their own profile page. This should be locked down. Reticketed as part of #72.

[toastdriven]

Hm. I don't have a problem being associated with Gittip, I was just in a position where I only wanted to give money & not receive any. Otherwise it looks good.

[jacobian]

Yeah, I'm with @toastdriven - I want to give to others, but not accept myself. Doesn't look like that's possible.

[jacobian]

The "hack", I guess, is to just make sure you give out more than you take in. So I'll do that for now.

[toastdriven]

I wasn't aware of the "hack", so I might do that instead as well. Did I miss something on the site that describes that?

Regardless, I think this was a good feature. There will be people who want nothing to do with the site but won't want other squatting their name & falsely taking money.

[jacobian]

@toastdriven - sorta, though not directly; https://www.gittip.com/about/ goes into the details of how payout works, and as you can see it pulls from your current balance first. The only downside of the "hack" is that people who're giving me money might think I'm using it on beer instead of buying other people beer, but frankly if you're gonna give me money for nothing you don't get to tell me what to do with it :)

And yes, I agree it's a good feature regardless of my/our specific use case. I've been pissed off when other sites of imply my association without permission before, glad to see someone finally get it right.

[chadwhitacre]

lol, oh well. Looks like I misunderstood the requirements, sorry. :-)

Yes, you can give money back out. Another hack would to set up a separate GitHub account and use that to pay people.

But see also #82: I plan to start publishing aggregate giving amounts as well, which could address the beer concern, @jacobian, though I suspect @toastdriven (at least) would still prefer to do his giving anonymously.

Another possibility is to start a community chest (#84).

Closing this ticket.

[chadwhitacre]

Opt-out of receiving tips reticketed as #114.