Confirmation identify should be configurable by profile

[jdmarch]

Surely the confirmation identity should be able to be set differently for each profile?

Also it would be helpful to be able to turn challenge/confirmation option on/off separately for each profile.

Thanks!

[--VQ--]

These comments by JDMarch refer to our confirmation feature.
[See it in action] [Choosing an Identity]

First, JD, we absolutely do let you disable the challenge feature. In fact, many users who are very careful to train their personal filter find that the challenge feature unnecessary.

Regarding your second point, we hear you! We may revisit this issue in the future. But our experience has found that this can be a problem. In the original version of Vanquish Pro, the Confirmation Identity was configurable for each profile. But we suffered a great deal of abuse.

vqME is the personal edition of Vanquish and is intended for use by a single family. When we increased the number of protected addresses from 2 to 5, we found a great many users were splitting accounts and offering services to unrelated parties. Even worse, some of them did not explain that the password was the same for all profiles.

So now we recommend (and insist) that our users choose a single identity. The above link gives some creative tips on choosing an identity that suits all your different roles.

[jdmarch]

I really appreciate the amount of thought and hard work that has gone, and continues to go, into the design of your products.

At the moment I'm a little confused by the responses to these requests.

One request was to be able to disable the challenge feature differently for each profile. I'm aware that it can be disabled globally (as I did immediately upon opening my account), but I would like to experiment with CR on a less sensitive profile while still leaving it disabled on more sensitive profiles.

My other point was requesting profile-specific confirmation identify. I appreciate the potential for abuse to which you refer. However
in this thread I asked:

[czyler]

jdmarch, I think the manual vetting of confirmation text is something to be avoided as the service (customer base) scales, one does not want to be getting into taking on any additional administrative burdens if one can help it.

I too would like, though, to be able to set different challenge strings for each of the profile addresses.

I do not want to see the service abused either as this places demands on the service to its, and therefore my, detriment.

Nothing leaps to mind at the moment on how to resolve this.

Stuart

[jdmarch]

Thanks for the support, czyler. I fully understand the difficulty with manual vetting, but I do not understand why there has been no comment from Vanquish on this issue.

Assuming that the service actually works well at least for a single project, which I have not yet had the opportunity to substantially investigate (I'm on the road this week), then I will probably end up buying separate subscriptions for my personal-personal and nonprofit work, and simply not use VQ for my personal-self-employed work, which gets less spam.

But short of some positive resolution of this issue, I don't think that the service can fairly be represented as being usable for an individual's separate projects.... or even, realistically, for multiple people within a typical family, if, for security reasons, one prefers not to include one's last name in the challenge message (and recognizing that many young people would balk at having the first names of everyone in the family included in their own challenge messages)

[jdmarch]

As I understand it, the fraud problem with allowing multiple challenge identities is that someone buys a single account, and essentially resells the separate profiles to provide the Vanquish service to multiple individuals or entities.

Possible Solution: provide an account option "Single User with Multiple Identities", which is less share-able in two respects:
a. a single login provides full access to all profiles.
b. it enforces a "no multiple simultaneous logins" rule: If the user logs on from a different computer, any open logons to this account on any other computer would automatically be logged off.

But this "Single User with Multiple Identities" account option would also be more lenient in that it would permit a different challenge identity (and, also a different custom challenge message, when/if Vanquish implements these) for each profile.

This would solve three problems simultaneously:

1. It would be a much less appealing target for fraud, because if one account was used by multiple individuals, each would have access to all of the others' email, and each would be getting in the others' way whenever they logged on from a different machine.

2. A single individual wearing multiple hats could have challenge names and messages which are appropriate to those different roles.

3. It would also make it much easier for such an individual to switch between those functions, rather than having to log off and on when switching profiles, which is actually quite a nuisance.

Thanks for considering this!

[czyler]

That is a good suggestion IMHO. I currently have one account with profiles for each member of my family but would be happy to split my accounts up a little to take advantage of such a feature for myself.

Stuart

[lovemyseneca]

This is a real make or break issue to me. Had I taken the 15 day trial, I probably would not have signed up for the service.

I am happy with the spam that the service filters out. Am disappointed that the wife and I can not personalize our challenge. And will not recommend to any friends or family till they do allow personalization.

[--VQ--]

Whohah! Please...Hold on! The discussion was about the number of Challenge Identities. Indeed we are working hard to support personalized challenges. (another topic)

This is a seriously helpful discussion. I can't recall another thread that guided us so practically and with such thoughtful consideration. Your comments are postively influencing our design meetings here at Vanquish.

We recognize that our users are ecclectic individuals. It's not uncommon to encounter a user who wears 5 different hats. We don't expect a Girl Scount leader to respond to scouting business as "Bill and Cindy's family" or as "Toyota of New Brunswick".

For us, the question has bitter irony, because the criticism results from an increase in benefits rather than a restriction! Our original product protected one address / one identity. Now that we have increased to five addresses, users are critical of the "global" preferences. which effectively limits these five addresses to one family or one focus ("The Law Office of Dan Grady").

You already know the reason that we limit the Challenge Identity to one role. In our first security product, enterprising users (or unscrupulous people - depending upon your perspective) were giving or reselling protected addresses to unrelated parties.

Additionally, the observation that we must be scaleable is true (thank you for recognizing this). It is difficult to make individual exceptions for basic feature settings (I am not saying that we have never done this). But for now, the scam artists and a the current design schema is pushing our hand. Our decision will not please all of you...

• If you use the personal edition of Vanquish for more than one role, you are limited to a single Challenge ID. In the future, we will support custom challenges, and we may even be able to pass you a text string that will tell you which address was used.
  
  Incidentally, if you actively use five addresses supported by vqME, we hope that you acknowledge that $5 per year per address is a remarkable bargain for the features and benefit.
  
  
• If you work for a small office or are the den mother of Troup 52, please consider having that organization use vqNow, our small enterprise platform. It costs less per user (in quantity) and supports individual settings for password, lists, identities and feature activation.

[jdmarch]

Thanks for responding. In my experience, an active, interactive user forum tends to promote user community and product loyalty. Long silences have the opposite effect. You don't need to wait to reply until you have a full plan. It's fine if the response is often simply "we hear you, we're working on it." At least that way we know that you are listening.