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Comment by h0l0cube | Hacker News Reader

Ah, I saw that link on the BW forum post and now have my data :) It would be great if the data was signed, and it could be verified with a public key. That way you could have validated references for import into BW. Alas, I see nothing of the sort in the JSON.

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I'm one of the Trustroots contributors, we have an old work-in-progress pull request to import couchsurfing data (https://github.com/Trustroots/trustroots/pull/1086), but it needs some love.

As mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219760 references is coming.

The verification issue though for import is a big one, we couldn't just trust a JSON file the user has uploaded to have real references, there would be nothing stopping them writing their own glowing references.

I still have an active CS account (Taiwan-registered) and can cross-check the references for any imported profiles. If there's a huge rush then no doubt my account could get blocked for bot-like activity, but I'm willing to do the verification for the first few thousand.

At the moment I would think its not likely for you to just scrape the profile on CS and then paste that in the right filled. Its something that if someone wants to exploit they can code anyway, its mostly there so users spend less time filling forms. We did something similar for Thingiverse at the time shapedo.com was in the 3D printing. It worked fine and we had a few hundred people migrating. True validation comes from people accepting friendship requests and some form of endorsement.

> there would be nothing stopping them writing their own glowing references.

Verification wouldn't be trivial, but a Trusted Human, could check that both their CS and their import match, at a glance - or the public profile could be extracted to partially automate the process.

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