Editing Advogato (section)

== Trust metric ==
The motivating idea for Advogato was to try out in practice Levien's ideas about attack-resistant [[trust metric]]s, having users certify each other in a kind of [[peer review]] process and use this information to avoid the abuses that plague open community sites.  Levien observed that his notion of attack-resistant trust metric was fundamentally very similar to the [[PageRank]] algorithm used by [[Google]] to rate article interest. In the case of Advogato, the trust metric was designed to include all individuals who could reasonably be considered members of the Free Software and Open Source communities while excluding others.

The implementation of this trust metric was through an [[Apache modules|Apache module]] called ''mod_virgule''.  ''mod_virgule'' is free software, licensed under the [[GNU General Public License|GPL]] and written in [[C (programming language)|C]].

Despite the trust metric, posting privileges to the front page of Advogato were gained by controversial individuals, leading some to claim Advogato's trust metric solution was faulty.<ref>See the question "User Foo is certified but I think he's a moron ... doesn't that mean the trust metric is broken?" in the [https://web.archive.org/web/20170718151006/http://www.advogato.org/faq.html Advogato: FAQ]</ref>
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Misunderstanding of the purpose of Advogato's trust metric was common, which often led to the assumption that it should exclude specific individuals on the basis that they were known cranks.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20170628190710/http://www.advogato.org/article/928.html Advogato: Advogato Has Failed<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref>