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Frequently Asked Questions
What is TrustPlus?
TrustPlus is a web service that enables portable, pervasive online reputation. TrustPlus allows you to aggregate your existing reputation; generate and receive new reputation from and about any person and online site; and provides you with meaningful, thorough analyses of the reputation of people with whom you are transacting and interacting. What is the TrustPlus Reputation Viewer? The TrustPlus Reputation Viewer overlays reputation scores on the pages of supported third-party sites. For example, when browsing craigslist or eBay or Facebook, you will see a TrustPlus reputation icon for each ad indicating the reputation score of the person or ad poster. When you mouse over the icon a pop-up appears with more detailed scores and buttons allowing you to do various things including researching the person or leaving a rating for them. Your TrustCircle is a collection of your friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances all working together to keep each other safe. By inviting people to join your TrustCircle, you are promising to notify them of who to trust and whom to avoid online. By accepting your invitation, they are promising to do likewise for you! When you rate a person you can decide whether you want to share the rating with your TrustCircle or with the entire universe of TrustPlus users. When you examine a person's reputation online, the opinions of your TrustCircle will usually matter more than the opinions of strangers - just like in real life. You assign the people in your TrustCircle to one of three groups, as follows.
Nothing! TrustPlus is a free service. In the future we will be offering premium reputation services to people who need more than the basic features. I can aggregate my reputation across my Identities? How? In the Identities section of the My TrustPlus account management pages, you can tell TrustPlus about the ways by which you identify yourself online. For example, you can tell us about your email addresses (e.g., "janet@acmecorp.com") or about your username on a site you frequent (e.g., "JanetGrows Flowers" on "GardeningChat.com"). When ratings are received or given within TrustPlus, they are received from or given to an Identity. You may ultimately have many Identities, each of which has ratings. TrustPlus aggregates all of your ratings across all of your Identities to generate your reputation. The more Identities you have, the faster your reputation is likely to grow, and the more accurate it is likely to be. When aggregating your ratings across Identities, TrustPlus is careful to maintain your privacy between your Identities so, for example, your dating ratings don't show up in work-related situations. Do my ratings for each of my Identities get shared across my other Identities? No, not by default. All of your ratings, from all of your Identities, work together to generate your reputation summary information. Your specific ratings are only shared when requested via the Identity they belong to. So in our example from above, if someone wanted JanetGrowsFlowers from GardeningChat.com's reputation they might only see the ratings from that particular Identity of Janet's. They would not, by default, see ratings that Janet might have associated with her email address "janet@acmecorp.com". How do I use TrustPlus with craigslist, Backpage.com, etc.? Please visit Using TrustPlus with Free Online Classifieds Sites. How is TrustPlus related to craigslist, Backpage.com, etc.? Other than the fact that we think they're good folks and run great services, TrustPlus is not affiliated with them. If you would like to see TrustPlus more tightly integrated with these sites or any others, please let the folks at those sites know that! What do these TrustPlus reputation icons mean? You have probably encountered some of TrustPlus's reputation icon graphics by now. Here is some detailed information about what each icon represents:
You may have used rating systems in the past that were rather simplistic - often with only three choices along the lines of thumbs-up, neutral, and thumbs-down. Statistically speaking, it is difficult to draw certain types of important inferences from those limited choices. Those systems are effectively engineered to benefit the site they are on, not the persons interacting or transacting. TrustPlus serves only its users, and as such our goal is to provide you with accurate, contextually-relevant reputation information when and where you need it. Accomplishing this requires a bit more data. How is my reputation calculated? How do you figure out what icon I get? TrustPlus uses a number of non-trivial heuristics to derive your summary reputation score. These analytics take into account a variety of weighting variables including the type of ratings, when they were received, who left if for you, and so on and so forth. If Michael and John request Janet's reputation, they are likely to get two different responses because Janet's reputation will be analyzed in the individual contexts of Michael's and John's requests. These algorithms are being constantly refined and updated. What does it mean if a rating is related to a transaction versus an interaction? You can generate and receive ratings for any reason - or for no reason at all. When you create a rating, you can assert that it was related to a transaction. When your reputation is calculated, the facets of whether it was transaction- or interaction-related, as well as other specifics, will be used to weight the analysis in various ways depending upon the context. I received a totally unreasonable rating - how do I dispute it? All of these issues can be handled via the dispute resolution process. You can dispute any rating you receive by clicking the [Dispute Rating] button in the Explore Reputation section of the site. When you initiate a dispute, you'll need to tell us why you are disputing it and we will get back to you via email to resolve the issue. Click here, enter your email address, and we will email you a link that will allow you to reset your password. Yes, we have an API for access to the reputation system. It is currently in testing. Various third parties will be implementing reputation systems on their sites utilizing our API. What are the browser requirements for TrustPlus? The TrustPlus web service has been tested on and should work on current versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. If it does not appear to be working properly on your browser, please email us and let us know what browser and version you are using. The site requires cookies, JavaScript, and pop-ups. I have a suggestion / compliment / gripe / question - who should I bug? We very much want to hear from you! Please email us and let us know what's on your mind! Visit http://www.trustplus.com/optout |
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