Just don't worry about it, mate. This isn't e-bay, there's no mechanism that ties rep to an actual trade. It's pretty inevitable someone will neg you a few times just because they hate your guts or are having a bad day. If you do a lot of trades you will have much more positive rep than negative and no one will care.
Yeah, it really sucks for new traders to get negative rep early though. I don't care much about anyone removing negatives from us established traders, but it should be a priority for the newbies.
Seems like a rash of scammers this weekend. Pretty sad.
Lots of good keys from Amazon & GG held by new people around lately. Scammers are having a field day with them.
I was left random negative rep from some guy I'd never heard of, but he was suspended a couple hours later and the negative rep gone by morning. Maybe not enough people are leaving them negative rep in return - I did, but only to say the rep I'd received was bogus.
Oh, well. I guess I did all that I can, neg rep on him with links to the bad trade, explanation in my thread...
A textbox in our profile would be great too though.
I have always thought that a vigilante group of veteran traders might be good to organize. We could protect the innocent and mass neg the scammers. Not sure if it is against ST rules, but considering how ineffective the system currently is to regulate feedback, it would be great. That scammer would get one shot to scam, and they would have 20-30 negatives to assure that tyhey would never be traded with again.
Again, I am not suggesting it SHOULD happen, just that it MIGHT be interesting to explore as feasible/in line with the rules..
Terrible idea. All that is going to do is get a lot of false negs flying all around and confuse the playing field. Scammers and assholes will benefit because they will become indistinguishable from everyone else. Got a neg? Neg them back and ask for mutual removal. If they don't want to then just move on with your life.
Well, maybe it would spur the mods to actually come up with a solution. As it is, new traders are screwed.
Besides, I don't know many scammers/assholes with lots of rep. So, I am not sure how they would be indistinguishable. And a new trader may get a neg from a scammer, but when someone looks at the scammer's steamtrades, it will have 20-30 negs on it. That would render them unable to trade with anyone with half a brain.
What is the scammer gonna do? Nothing, they are gonna be impotent.
You start vigilante negging a lot of people - you get the same number of negs back. You'll look just like any career scammer after a while.
Not quite because I wouldn't do this alone. You would need a large group. Because if a group of 20-30 people neg repped a guy, then he would sit there with a +3/-30 rating. I would have a +98/-2. I can live with that. How many scammers would need this treatment - just the ones proven on steam rep. Get a rotation of 30-40 guys and the problem solves itself pretty quick.
Besides, a career scammer sure doesn't have a +98, and this would pretty much make sure career scammers don't have a career.
How about this as an alternative: A vigilante crew that mass positive reps newbies that get legitimately scammed? To outweigh the scammer's negative on them? Risky because the newbie may end up not being reliable, but it wou;dn't affect the crew negatively with their rep.
I do think it is worthy of discussion rather than being dismissed out of hand.
I still think you're looking to completely discredit and wreck the rep system. It kind of works right now as long as you don't allow yourself to be butthurt by an occasional neg. Count me out of any vigilante initiative.
Fair enough. I would actually like to come up with some way to help the newbies out a bit. If the mods aren't doing it, then it would be great if the community could do something. Obviously, if it is against the rules, then I guess the new guys will just get preyed upon without true recourse on the site.
Oh well, just spitballin' ideas.
At first, I didn't really think that the massive neg's would help, that it would be exploitable, and it could be bad if the inverse was done.
The +reps would be bad though, because if a scammer set up one bad scam and got a flood of +reps, that would be hard to balance out afterward.
After a bit more thought though, if someone provided the proper proof, like what steamrep does, then a flood of negatives filled their profile, that would be kinda great> :D
I often see a person with a few +rep, and a -rep and it makes it hard to trust them (even though I'm currently in that category myself). It makes things hard for noobs who are obvious victims like tourists are, as experienced traders don't fall for the easy ploys that noobs do.
Another pondering; What if there was a chat-logged steamtrades instant messenger?
:( I wish I was farther along in my programming courses, I'd volunteer to do it myself.
Is anyone on the staff working on coding a way to legitimately remove negative rep ratings from proven scammers?
It seems like it would be a great addition to the rep system to prevent negative rep being rained on to just and unjust alike.