# Welcome to Peer Content A simple privacy protected P2P content creation forum # History The Internet has a lot of bright, minds putting forward their points in many discussions. Unfortunately many minds (bright or otherwise) sometimes end up annoying other members of a discussion group. Then obviously the discussions deteriorate and not much useful content are generated. For e.g. many threaded conversations in discussion boards often end up as "I said this" and "you said this" and it is difficult to know whether the vocal ones are the relevant ones. In fact, often the non-vocal ones do have points but they can get overwhelmed by verbose people, and hence the shy/reticent ones do not contribute. And if the discussions are over a chatting system; people sometimes type irrelevant one or two word spontaneous responses such as "100% true", "K", "Wow" which just adds to the noise. Wikis do solve this to some extent. But wikis need quite a large number of people for it to produce quality content. Also, wikis need to be put on a central server -- and that may be unacceptable to a body of people discussing with each other; wanting to develop serious knowledge among themselves. The author of this system, Mr Sabu Francis, has been studying this area of credibility on the Internet for many years. Finally this was started after Sabu was perplexed at the turn of the events in a whatsapp forum. On reflection, he realized that it is extremely difficult to correct perceptions -- This gave birth to a new kind of P2P content forums. The ones provided here. This has been inspired by a well respected content-by-consensus system called "The Delphi Method" (explained in this documentation) This P2P content forum was created so that healthy non-personality based content creation is possible. People can craft thoughtful posts instead of writing spontaneously the way people do in chats. Of course here too there will be overwhelming people but since there is a good attempt to preserve anonymity, hopefully the quality of content would be sustained. And it will not result in actual or pecieved one "up-manship" # The Delphi Method named after the oracle at Delphi As per Greek mythology; there was this hill whose top was surrounded by mists. That hill top was the residence of some oracles -- and the villagers were forbidden to go up there. Instead, the villagers would stand at the foot of the hill, and implore the Oracle up there to make predictions. Nobody could see the Oracle, but they would be able to hear the answers to their question floating down from the hill. *The Delphi Method* was a system of obtaining consensus invented (discovered?) by people at the think tank; Rand Corporation. This is a method to crystallize some serious points about some specialised topic -- such as Nuclear Science, etc. It was particularly suitable for those topics where one can expect to find lot of strong, opinionated and intelligent personalities. The problem with such learned personalities is that if you try to put them together into a room in order to obtain a convergent discussion, it is often like herding cats. There will be, invariably, some personal; equations such as one intellectual is over-awed by another one. Or one person here has some deep seated envy of another person there -- and so on. ![getting intellectuals to agree is similar to herding cats](https://2707863189-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-MY75cW1zr2o_UFP5Ibn%2F-MYHGsFEKq_r9nHLNEl4%2F-MYHHgVStPiE9M5TCwwK%2FherdingCats.gif?alt=media\&token=b674c78e-630e-47bc-9767-8ebf51eff8c6) In the Delphi Method, a group is gathered together but they are never told who all have been selected in the committee. Then the moderator prepares some questions and passes those to one of the learned intellectual. The answers given by that intellectual is returned to the moderator, without the intellectual knowing where those answers would be put to use. The moderator then *anonymizes* the answer -- i.e. removes any identifiable marks and phrases that can indicate who had given those answers, and distributes that to other intellectuals. Asking them for their responses. When they do, the moderator iteratively does the same process: anonymize; and re-distribute. In short, that bunch of intellectuals end up actually discussing with each other. Since only the contents are passed around and there is no knowledge who is actually behind the contents, the chances of personal equations coming in to corrupt the contents gets reduced. In the end, the Delphi method of obtaining consensus gives very valuable answers. The Delph Method is still used in medical research, mission-critical situations such as the moon mission, inventing something disruptive and so on. The ***Peer Content*** system we invented actually works very similar in principle to The Delphi Method. In our case, even the moderator is actually anonymous *(That was one of the criticism of the standard Delphi Method: All the intellectuals know the moderator -- and then what happens, if there are personal equations between the moderator and the intellectuals in the group?)* # Terms of Service When you create or join a forum using our PeerContent system, it is assumed that you have read these simple terms of service and have agreed to all the conditions we have placed here. If you do not agree with any part or whole of these legal terms and conditions, you should NOT setup any forum here. Any changes to these legal pages would be announced on our [Twitter account](https://twitter.com/@knownemail). *It is your responsibility to ensure that you keep yourself updated on the latest version of all the documents placed under the "LEGALS" section of our documentation here.* We do NOT allow any illegal use of the Internet; that can be deemed to have originated due to you having an account at our system. You can read the definitions of all the illegal usage as they are clearly defined by the Indian IT information act of 2000 (and its various revisions) \ \ Here is a[ website that explains this act ](https://www.meity.gov.in/content/information-technology-act-2000)-- we assume here that you agree that all the internal documents referred in aforesaid website; are deemed attached to this one you are reading now here -- and you agree never to perform any illegal activities using our system, as defined in those referred documents. Please pay special attention to this one: When you take an account with us, please ensure that your behavior on various forums here is in such a manner that nobody registers a complaint about you with us. If we find that the complaint is genuine and also it would be in the interest of the well-being of others that your account has to be blocked; then we reserve the right to block your access to your account here. If we are asked by the Indian authorities to give them information about your account, we will be doing so -- after due consultation from our legal counsels. We take absolutely no responsibility for the emails and messages you may receive because of your participation in the forums here. We are only the *facilitation* system -- Don't shoot us please. We have no control on the contents of those emails/messages; as they are not generated by our system. Neither do we have taken any steps in our server to read them. In fact, we cannot read any of the posts in the forums as the content therien would be encrypted right from source. We do NOT guarantee that these posts that you receive in your forum will be permanently available in your computer. It is your responsibility to make backups of those forums that you believe are important. We charge for some parts of our service. You should keep yourself updated on the current pricing -- they are [published here](https://price.peercontent.com). We use our own internal currency called "*Koyns*" as a method of payment. These *Koyns* are ONLY available for use at our site and other offerings from [Limen Leap Labs Private Limited](https://limenleap.com). We do not have any process to refund unused "*Koyns*" -- however we can return unused *Koyns* of a forum you had created provided the setup process has not been completed. This is returned as a "*Koyn code*" - - that can be used in all places where such "*Koyns*" are accepted. You will have to email us using the same email address that you had used when you purchased the Koyns for creating that forum. \ \ "*Koyns*" cannot be converted back to fiat currency or even cryptocurrency. Note that the Koyns of regular members who pay a joining fee to join a forum cannot be returned at all. One part of our system here is based on MIT licensed open source software. You can read that in the files supplied with the installer of our PeerContent Client desktop software. ALL the functionality of our system, including our own code and modifications we have made to the aforeaid MIT licensed open source software are copyrighted to Mr Sabu Francis (son of VV Francis from Navi Mumbai, India) and it is proprietary to him. You must not reverse engineer our work here, distribute our software either by itself or bundled with some other software or use the features provided by us here for any purpose whatsoever without the explicit written permission from Mr. Sabu Francis Our system has been developed with the best possible efforts and standards of software development. We however will NOT accept any liability of any loss you may incur due to any issues/bugs/hardware failures/software failure/financial failure or force-majeure events; that may affect and/or disrupt our service. \ \ In no event shall we be responsible or liable for any failure or delay in the performance of its obligations hereunder arising out of or caused by, directly or indirectly, forces beyond our control, including, without limitation, strikes, work stoppages, accidents, acts of war or terrorism, civil or military disturbances, nuclear or natural catastrophes or acts of God, and interruptions, loss or malfunctions of utilities, communications or computer (software and hardware) services; it being understood that we shall use reasonable efforts which are consistent with accepted practices in the software industry to resume performance as soon as practicable under the circumstances. # Privacy Policy We are very serious about privacy of our users and we have implemented several measures to ensure that we execute that intention. We have only one method to identify you. That is by using a hardware based ID generated by our client application when you run it -- and that too only when you create or join a forum. Such identifiable data would be used ONLY to create your account and nothing more. We do NOT insist on collecting your email address. If you do provide it, we use it only for notifications. We may occasionally send you important messages and or payment reminder. Our users are not really creating any meaningful data on our servers. All the main work of our system is done by the client application that runs on your computer. So all the forum data and the control over the data are with you. The contents of each forum are protected by a strong symmetrical password. That password is generated only at your computer and we have no access to it. None of the content that is generated by the client application ever reaches us. Instead the encrypted version of it gets pinned by the client application directly from your computer to the IPFS (Inter-planetary file system) cloud. We do NOT use cookies in our system anywhere on our own servers. For some subdomains (such as this documentation) we use external services. We also use an external payment gateway. They may have their own privacy standards which we have no control over. We may implement some statistical analysis system such as Google analytics. There could be cookies that those systems may set in your browser. Please note that those are NOT cookies created by our server.