You need a few people from outside of your training group to verify some of you. Could be friends, friends of your coach, etc.

In 24 hours of site being open, there's already approximately 25 verified black belts here. Maybe your coach knows some of them and can ask them to help with verification.

Once the user base grows and more people are online, this will be easier. For now, we are still in the very infancy of the site :)

Yeah, I guess as it grows it will become easier for new accounts to get votes.

What about a way to verify by uploading a picture of your IBJJF membership card? To fit into the current paradigm, have this verification be worth the same amount of points needed to verify your current belt level.

No there will only be one system for verification and it’s the community votes. All you need is a bit of patience and work to make the user base to grown first :) site is only 24 hours old after all :)

Having an IBJJF card really only proves that one black belt has verified your rank (with IBJJF). So instead of using that as a parallel voting entity, it would make much more sense if that black belt just had a verified profile here and voted for you directly :) No need to implement IBJJF's verification system in ours.

The people currently verified are surely almost exclusively from the initial group of people who were verified by means other than votes. It's a cool idea, but seems like growth could fizzle if people are just frustrated. I'm a vetted black belt in many ways... Strange position to find myself. I do hope it takes off!

Alex >> Total of 12 trusted black belts have been pre-approved before they received enough votes (necessary to get the system going). Total of 82 profiles are fully verified at this point. More than 70,000 vote points have been given already. So you’re wrong, sorry :)

Site is 1.5 days old. Give it time. Help it grow. Invite people along. Votes will come and they will trickle down, but it doesn’t happen instantly, especially not in the beginning. The system is designed without shortcuts; proper verification from the community takes time and effort, no matter what diplomas or medals anyone can show :)

Understood. I don't see any faces I know... Seems to be predominantly EU grapplers so far. Being here in Texas it may just take some time to trickle down.

Alex >> Yes, it's been only 1.5 days of the site being live. Let's see how things look in a week. Or a month. Or a year :)

Let's hope it doesn't take a year for legit people to be acknowledged here.

It may be incentive to attend a Globetrotters event ;-)

I'm in the same situation as Alex. I don't see anyone here that I know and I'm out of the EU loop for GT events.

Then invite some :)

Have invited some already

Good! The more people here, the easier people will eventually get verified.

I posted a link to the site in my Gym private group and told everyone to join. If everyone who has a home gym does this then the growth from outside members has the potential to be rapid and huge.

Also feeling the catch-22,

Curious to see how this social experiment plays out with spreading to more remote and/or non-English speaking areas, as I'm apparently only the 2nd person from Japan (Hi @aaron ross! hope we cross path sometimes ^^)

All my coaches and training partners are Japanese, and actually all my 25+ competition matches have been against locals too.
Most of them don't speak enough English that it would make sense for me to invite them here.

Next time I travel I'll make it a point to try and meet up with fellow globetrotters :)

just making a mental note that it might take a couple of years for me to meet enough folks to get verified here, perhaps by then I'll have gotten to black ^^

131 verified profiles and 125,000 vote points given in three days. Don’t worry, the ball has officially started rolling :)

How about pre-verifying at least the Who Is Who of BJJ? I mean, you are not really expecting Marcelo to fill out your form and patiently wait for others to upvote him? What would be the purpose of that, anyway. Just send a pre-approved link to everyone who medaled at major international events, and to the founders of major academies, and get the ball rolling for real.

I know you want this to be community based - well, as a BJJ community we definitely trust those folks a whole lot - perhaps even slightly more than the we trust the venerable pre-selected group of mostly European black belts this site was seeded with.

Ah Oleg, I don't think you understand Jante's law.

Part of the fun is seeing how the democratic process functions compared to the top down approach that you just described.

If Marcelo Garcia fills out his profile, he will almost certainly be immediately voted up and verified.

The system does reward celebrity, popularity, and to a certain extent baubles of vanity such as photographs and medals.

On the other hand, the baubles of vanity are evidence of a sort that there was at least activity, and in some cases, noteworthy accomplishment.

I would add, I doubt Marcelo Garcia would need to do much other than fill out his promotion history and have his ID verified to be immediately voted up to the verified level.

Nobody in their right mind would bother asking for pictures, since videos of him crushing larger expert grapplers are all over the Internet, as are instructional videos by him, etc.

I don’t see any point in trying to pull in celebrities and preverify them just because they’re famous. As William say, when any celebrity sign up, they will probably get upvoted to verification by the community in no time. They will still need to fill out and ID verify their profiles like everyone else, of course.

You must have patience. The user base has to start somewhere. In three days, already 138 profiles are verified. The ball is rolling and the system works, but if you’re desperate for quick verification, then it won’t work for you :)

Hi Webmaster,

I don't think anyone suggested pulling in celebrities. My personal suggestion was to pull in community AUTHORITIES. There would be two reasons to do it: increasing community trust in BeltChecker, and making it relevant.

Point 1: trust. I think we all would trust one vote from Andre Galvao telling us that person X is a black belt even more than the votes of 100 purple belts we don't know - not because he is a celebrity, but because he is a BJJ authority.

Point 2: relevancy. I know there is a ton of progress, and there is a lot of work that people are putting in for free to verify people. At the same time, 138 people, to me, being so far away from the project, means that the ball is not rolling, but is standing still. A project like this needs a critical mass of people. Just the one BJJ gym I go to in Minnesota, USA has way more than 138 members. And there are a dozen BJJ gyms in Minnesota. And there are probably two times more BJJ gyms just in Orange County, CA than in my entire state. From that perspective, there is really no difference between 11 verified people and 300 verified people. Neither is close to the critical mass.

We have 8x number of verified profiles in the last 36 hours. It will only go faster and faster as the user base spreads. If you don’t have patience then get off the site for a week or two and come back. It was never intended to go from 100 to 2500 profiles register in a few days but it suddenly blew up, so we’re trying to catch up. Right now our priority is on stability and performance. Speed of verification is not important at this stage :)

Sounds good! You can also revisit that decision later, based on how the first couple of weeks go.

Yeah we’re of course pre-verifying some trusted black belts here and there, but holding back as much as possible to observe and let the verifications grow organically. Looking at the number, albeit still small in the big global picture, they have been growing exponentially over the last few days. 50,000 vote points given over the last 24 hours alone. In the first two weeks of beta testing with maybe 80 profiles, I believe 3000 points were given.

So for now, we work on stability, user experience, performance and functionality. The voting process has already taken shape as its own living organism and we just observe it feed itself and grow. Very exciting to see :)

Oh Webmaster, you are cheating a little bit.

It would have been more fun to only pre-verify the absolute minimum necessary for organic growth.

One verified black belt could verify his blue belts.

And then they could have verified the purples, then the brown, then other black belts collectively.

And you must be subject to being downvoted like everybody else.

The game is only truly fun, and novel, if the rules are followed by all.

Quite an interesting project. I didn’t realize how new this site was when I signed up at first, on a whim, during some downtime in my lunch hour.

It’s certainly not the only way to prove one’s legitimacy, but it’s an interesting one. Also, I can see using this to connect with other BJJ people who I may not have a chance to meet in person.

Regardless, I’m intrigued by this site, and luckily folks on here seem pretty cool overall.