Nearly 500 of our members are now “verified”, helping create an online community that we can trust.

What is Verification?

“Verified” members are those who the SE23.life team has have met in real life.

There is no fee for verification, and it’s entirely optional.

Simply mention your username to a @team member or @No41Coffee staff in person, and your forum account will be marked as “verified”, and shown like this on each of your posts:

Being verified unlocks some benefits and helps add credibility to your posts.

In the first few years of the forum, @Pauline did an amazing job verifying hundreds of SE23.life members in person, while she ran Sugar Mountain. @No41Coffee has verified plenty of people in Honor Oak and continue to do so.

Given recent events, in-person meetings often happen online instead, so we’d like to propose a new way to get verified:

Proposal: Electronic Verification

Record a short video, filmed in a well-known Forest Hill / Honor Oak location (i.e. Honor Oak Park / London Road / Stanstead Road), in which you state your forum username. “I am ‘username’ and this is me at x location”

Then either:

• email the video to verify@se23.life
• tweet it to @SE23life or
• send it via Facebook Messenger to our SE23.life Page.

We’ll then mark your profile as verified.

Privacy

Videos would not be shared outside the team.

We’ll store a screenshot from the video in order to ensure we only verify one account per person.

Poll

It sounds very secret society. Go to this address at this time and say this coded message!
Not sure what we really gain from it

meet me by the knitted walrus when Sammy rises

While to many of us this would seem a simple process, for many others this may be a difficult process.

I think that’s very true, but I guess that’s why option 3 is there and asking for other suggestions - I suspect that more than 1 option could be accepted, assuming they were viable.

Quite a few other forums either show number of posts by users or give people certain headings based on how many posts they have done etc, which is slightly different from being verified, but could be an alternative, or maybe you could be auto-verified if for example member over x period of time AND over x amount of posts.

Members can achieve trust level three automatically if they participate for long enough, and positively enough (I won’t list the thresholds as this would invite gaming). Trust level 3 provides most of the benefits of verified membership.

I sense a lot of videos coming from the bar in the spoons with very slurred usernames. It’s a listed building so must be good enough

Doesn’t sound like a bad idea in general (I don’t drink coffee so probably wouldn’t have done the previous method)

While there are plenty of other forums that people may use (pistonheads, reddit, MSE, 21dayslater etc…), I think one of the defining features at se23.life is a shared interest in the the real world local area of se23, often born out of the direct experiences of living or working here.

So while the forum software can look at things like number of posts and length of membership, that doesn’t quite feel to capture the spirit of what it means to be verified. I must admit though that I can’t put into words exactly what that spirit actually encompasses - perhaps it’s just a badge of pride and a slightly warmer feeling of community.

At least that’s my instinct on it. Others may vary

Since there are no major objections, I’ve updated the instructions to include electronic verification as an option: How to get ✅ Verified

Thanks @HonorOakBloke for being the first to try this new method