User blog comment:Skwerrel/Reccomendations for wishingtorch.com and other thoughts/@comment-24791286-20140408171607

I personally have no problem with the "I light when I can" folks. The "only show friends who lit for you" checkbox takes care of that - if they can't light every day, they don't need their torches lit every day either. Of course, I've also found that "I light when I can" in the note text is very often overlaid with " has not logged in to the site for 14 days" - in other words, "occasional" lighters have a strong propensity to stop playing entirely. Again, a problem that takes care of itself.

As for cheaters - a lot of the really egregious sorts don't even seem to care or even notice if you call them out, nor do they catch on to torchless "bait islands". They'll just go on blindly clicking your leftmost island on the website day after day. I think they're just aiming for high spots on the front page so they can draw in new suckers to replace the people who catch them - and they're certainly putting minimal effort into their scamming. (Fake-lighters generally are lazy by definition, anyway - if they were willing to expend any effort into the website or game, they'd light for real in the first place.)

Non-matching name people usually fall into one of two categories: they fix it promptly once you call them out in your note field, or they never visit the website again. As with the occasional lighters, the "only friends that lit for me" checkbox and culling of people who don't visit the website take care of that problem. (I actually went for a week as "New Player" myself before I figured out how to change my in-game name. This was before they added the note field, mind you.)

Finally:

I do want to give kudos to Jake for being very responsive! I sent him a mail suggesting the spinner when you tap an island (given the 2-5 second delay that the server often has when accepting the click) and he implemented it within hours. I do sympathize with him not adding private-message or chat functionality. Given the slowness of the website with just clicking islands, chat would probably cause the server to burst into flames, and even PMs would lead to massive database bloat (PM database storage goes up with the square of the number of users). Even expanding the length of the note field would put extra load on the server, since it has to load the note field for everyone on your friends list.