The follow-up to our “mayorships from your couch” post

Hmm… we posted a follow-up to some of the questions folks were having about our efforts to thwart “cheat” checkins.  Looks like the comment didn’t take (having some problems w/ Disqus – stay tuned), so here it is re-posted:

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Hey all - 

First of all, I can’t tell you how psyched we are to see so many people passionate about foursquare – this is crazy!  Second, a few quick updates that didn’t make it into our original blog post.

#1.  We are going to be *constantly* tweaking the rules that determine whether a checkin is “accurate” or not.  We’re using some GPS, the GPS’ accuracy reading, some elements of your history, a look at your checkin patterns, etc.  We’ve already turned the knobs a few times since we launched and we tweaked them again this afternoon.   For those who saw lots of “you’re a little far away” messages yesterday, you should be seeing fewer of them today and even fewer of them tomorrow.  This is a hard problem us to solve, so bear with us

#2.  If you’re using an iPod Touch, iPad or another device that uses Wi-Fi for location, you probably already know that the GPS coordinates that come from Wi-Fi can be a little off sometimes.  If you find that you’re seeing flaky GPS fixes, you can always use the mobile website to checkin as you may have better results.

#3.   If your phone doesn’t know your location – for example, if you checkin using SMS or the mobile website – you are NOT out of luck.  When we don’t have a lat/long, we use a different set of rules – your history, frequency, etc – to determine whether you are the cheating type or not.  :)

#4.  The API.  Our iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps all work on the same public API that everyone else is using – which means everyone is playing by the same rules.  Most of our API apps pass along the current lat/long on checkin and we use this for cheat detection.  In the case where an API app does not pass along a lat/long, we use other methods (history, frequency, etc) to determine if the checkin is “accurate”.

Anyway, we hope this clears some things up.  

 - team foursquare