Web of Trust

Another web application I like it W.O.T. (aka Web of Trust) – http://www.mywot.com/

This web application is installed as an add on to your web browser. What is does it helps you evaluate the trustworthiness of a site or url. This is indicated by a circle located by an URL link for example in Facebook or a Google search, and in the upper right hand corner of your web browser.image of a google  The circle will be either a gray (no ranking), red (poor ranking), yellow (caution ranking), and green (high ranking). Naturally, you want to stay away from any site with a red circle, and you should feel relatively safe with any site with a green circle.

As you can see, the right hand image shows this website with a yellow ranking. How did this site get a yellow ranking? The way the ranking works, is that visitors who have a WOT account can rank a site in the following areas: Trustworthiness,  Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Protection.

Currently I show yellow in the first three categories. Users who visited the older version of this website had negative experiences because of a WordPress add on called Buddy Press. I failed to keep that portion of the website adequately updated and my site was hacked and misused. Hence I earned that rating through my mistakes.

So why am I putting up on a post on a product that actually steers people away from my website? No, it is not to get WOT to raise my score. It is because the application did what it was suppose to do. Based on my poor rating, it told people my website was suspect, reducing the number of people who could have been harmed by those who hacked my site.

For those of you who are asking is my site safe now, it is as safe as I can make it. I erased everything from the old version of the website and did not re-install buddypress because of my failure to properly maintain the program, not because anything the makers of the add-on did or didn’t do. I also have do not collect information on any visitor to the site.  I have never shared information from this site with anyone. 

…as far as my WOT score turning green, that is up to you. As WOT says to website owners, trust is earned. I hope I earn your trust….

 

 

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