Ratings do not refer to listing CID

[JustinDrake]

See an example rating here. The listingSlug is in the rating, but not the CID. This makes it trivial for vendors to abuse ratings. For example:

1. They can edit the listing slug to "invalidate" a bad review
2. They can edit the listing slug to make the review of a listing look like it applies to another listing

IMO ratings should refer to the listing CID for a cryptographic link.

[cpacia]

If it refers to a CID then every tiny change in the listing resets all the ratings to zero. We need to group ratings by slug. As far as I can tell that's the only way to build ratings for a listing.

[JustinDrake]

Every tiny change in the listing does not have to reset ratings.

We can use IPFS for version control on listings. (Actually, IPFS is the perfect tool for that.) When a listing is edited, the new listing includes the CID of the previous revision. Ratings can then agglomerated cryptographically by following the hash chain. This solves the two abuses I listed above. Services (such as Duo) that are serious about reputation and ratings will want that cryptographic certainty and granularity.

The listingSlug can be used as a first-approximation heuristic for the reference client. But adding the CID clearly adds value.

[cpacia]

There's nothing enforcing a requirement to include the previous ID though. If someone were doing a scam like this they most certainly wouldn't include previous hashes.

[JustinDrake]

Someone that didn't include the previous hash would lose the previous good ratings, and they would not be able to pull off the attack outlined above:

They can edit the listing slug to make the review of a listing look like it applies to another listing

[JustinDrake]

IPLD versioning should be standardised at some point. Having IPNS versioning (for roots) would be very cool, and may even become an IPFS default. IPNS versioning would automatically version profile.json (because of the injection from profiles to roots). Granular versioning at the listing level would allow for a given listing to meaningfully accumulate reputation over time.

[JustinDrake]

Also see discussion here.