On foursquare, cheating, and claiming mayorships from your couch…

Hey all -

Some of you may have noticed that we rolled out the first version of our “cheater code” – an attempt to catch some of the folks that are checking in from their couches to steal mayorships.  Since last summer, this has been one of our most requested features and has been one of the trickiest to get just right.

What we’d like to do is award points, mayorships and badges only when you’re at the place you say you’re at.  Last week we started using a few different tricks using your phone’s GPS to try to verify this.  (and if your phone doesn’t use GPS, we use a few different tricks)

Now, we’re never going to NOT let you check-in – you can checkin wherever you want, whenever you want – the idea is simply to not award points, mayorships, badges or venue specials if it looks like you didn’t really earn them.  

And so far it seems like it’s working pretty well.  We are seeing some issues where people should be getting points / badges / mayors but they’re not.  This could be because the GPS location your phone gave us was slightly off or because the address / pushpin where we located the venue wasn’t quite right. We’ve been keeping an eye on these problems and we’re fine-tuning the rules, so please bear with us as we keep tweaking things to get it just right.

In the meantime, if there are certain places that are consistently giving you a problem, tell us about them and we’ll make sure to look into it:  http://4sq.com/4sqGeoWoes

Again, thanks for your patience as we work to figure this out.  You’ve been asking for it, we’ve been listening and it’s a tricky problem to fix… but we’re getting there.  :)

- team foursquare

ps:  Also worth noting that we’re fine with pre-checkins and post-checkins… you know, the checkins you send *before* you’re at a place (“I’ll be there in 10 mins!”) and the checkins you send us *after* you leave when you realize you forgot to check-in while you were there.  (Trust us, we do it too to fill out our history pages!)  The only difference now is that to unlock foursquare rewards – mayors, points, badges, etc – those checkins needs to be sent from that place.  Cool?