Allowing names to be exposed by court order doesn't solve this problem -- people will just sign up with throwaway email addresses and, possibly, use Tor.

The best solution is a combination of reviewer reputation and compatibility matching. First, very few people are going to go to the trouble of creating a bunch of valuable reviews just to build up enough karma to be able to smear a particular business.

Then, even if someone were that motivated, if Yelp weighted the reviews I see based on how closely my reviews matched the reviewer's past reviews[], standalone smears would have very little impact.

[] Yes, I know that sentence should be taken out and shot.

>people will just sign up with throwaway email addresses and, possibly, use Tor.

But what if real name was forced, like on facebook or google? There's plenty of precedent now if a judge wanted to declare that as a minimum amount of due diligence.

I can't comment at the Chicago Tribune without telling them who I went to high school with (through facebook comments.)

>But what if real name was forced, like on facebook

Facebook doesn't force real names in practice, I know a bunch of people who have Facebook pages under non-real names and a bunch of joke ones, ones for dogs, one for a trash can. Really, Facebook doesn't seem to care to enforce these.

Facebook doesn't force real names. But they do sometimes force you to use a fake name.

If your real name is Ben Dover or Mike Hunt, or Mike Michaels-Michaelson, then you might have to use a fake name.

And yet this happened a couple of years ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/salman-rus...

How realistic is that? Neither facebook nor google require a photo id\birth certificate so real name is vaguely plausible name + we will kick you off if we find out you lied. Not exactly something that I would present to a judge as evidence.

Sometimes, Facebook does require a driver's license or Government-issued ID:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632533

It's happened several times over the past few years. That's the most recent occurrence.

Knowing it came from a throw away would give the plaintiff evidence that is fake, which will pressure yelp to take it down.

I believe Yelp and other sites that offer user reviews already implement strategies like that, weighing comments according to a reputation score based on comment frequency, average rating, bad language, time of/between submissions, IPs, etc. There is an article about that somewhere.

Last I heard, Yelp blocks all Tor exits. So no, Tor won't work.

Excellent question. I don't have a solid answer, but slander and libel claims could form a civil case, while intimidation, physical threats and using social media to extort could be criminal. I would file both a restraining order and a temporary injunction.

Frankly, I'm concerned for small businesses and raise a flag on using reviews as a leading source of authority.

It's a broken system that Yelp (and other intermediaries) should definitely be held accountable for perpetuating.

Have the identities reviewed by a third party against your client list.

The issue here is that they claim the reviewers aren't legitimate customers, so the reviews are fake. If this is true, just verifying them would solve the problem without revealing who they are. If they turned out to be fake, then the business should be able to take some action at that point.

Good idea, but not feasible for a restaurant:)

For one that is going to a court to subpoena records from Yelp it is, I wasn't proposing a way to stop fake reviews, just to meet between releasing data and unmasking people's names who may have written legitimate reviews.