need backend for endorsements

[jspaaks]

This is just a record of an option that came up in a discussion. The issue discussed was that we need to have some kind of backend and possibly curation if we want to do endorsements for institutes and for individuals.

For institutes, we settled on having an email address, with curation by a person on our end. This is because such an email exchange is unavoidable anyway when it comes to institutes' logos.

For individuals, there are some issues to think about:

• we want to avoid bots filling in the form
• we want to avoid people filling in the form multiple times
• we don't have people available to curate the list of candidate endorsers
• we must consider the GPDR regarding people's personal data
• we'd like to avoid tracking cookies and other such techniques, they are at odds with the sentiment of the site

Proposal: have a button on the website for individuals. When they click it, they get a form where they can fill in their email address. We then send a confirmation email to that address with an activation link. This way we ensure that the accounts are real. Once activated, we store a hashed representation of the email address. This way, we avoid duplicate endorsements.

This solution does require a minimal backend as a place to store the email addresses. Which probably we need a backup of as well.