That voting thing makes me uneasy, but "in God we trust". Do your thing cg.
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If I may make a suggestion, I think you could add the store page game link to keywords. For example, If I am looking for The Fall and write The Fall on search, it will list dozens of games that have "the fall" on their names. If you put http://store.steampowered.com/app/290770/ as a key word we will be able to find that specific game we want in thread wich the users were careful enough to list The Fall instead of The Fall.
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Looks awesome! I'm really curious to see what the new layout looks like. Now, a moment of silence for all those confused traders who never visit the forums.
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So are we going to see dozens of threads on SG discussion board about "please vote against my negative feedback"?
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You don't get to choose which feedback to vote on. It's displayed to you at random, and you don't even know whose feedback you're voting on.
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So you are voting on a feedback you know absolutely nothing about whether it is legit or not, and randomly decide if it is good or bad? Why not just add a randomiser script to it then, it would net the same result.
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You decide if it meets the bare minimum standards of the community. Allow comments that give reasoning behind the negative trading experience, delete comments that fail to do so (that means, comments like "scammer!", "-rep", "lowball offer", "scammed my friend, do not trust", etc.)
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Okay, I randomly add this negative feedback to a random guy with 100+ positive:
I contacted him to buy South Park: Stick of Truth from the Humble Monthly from him. He added me and we bargained in chat. I paid with two CS:GO keys and he sent me the code. The game worked, as you can see on my profile, I had logged hours and achievements in it. Then today when I logged on to Steam, a warning window popped up saying they removed Stick of Truth from my account because of issues with the payment, see attached image.
I have tried to contact this user, but it seems he has blocked me.
[PhotoShopped image where I swap the title and date, because Steam uses easy-to fake fonts: https://i.redd.it/rr5lhc1snipx.png]
Who will downvote it? They don't see a name, they cannot look up any details, and I provide enough fake evidence to convince anyone that I have a legit claim over something that is actually a known scam type that even the more seasoned traders have no protection for.
And if the random people counter-rep me? I have an alt that is not publicly known (and an alt that I pretty obviously tell it is an alt of mine) and which uses a different region and random legit proxies I log on from, so it is impossible to know it is actually mine. (And yes, I do have an account like that, although currently it is not trade-enabled because I never bothered too much with it.) I meet whatever requirement SteamTrades will have and go on a -rep spree. Since it cannot be traced back to me and it won't actually trade, I can do whatever I want. And I didn't need any shady shit or mess around with VPNs to even do that account, it took 3 damn minutes.
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If you receive feedback like this, you will reply to it stating that this is all a bunch of bullshit. If someone visits your profile, he will be able to read both statements and decide which one is legit.
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I provide a detailed explanation with evidence, they respond with "it is bullshit I don't even know you". Since there are no names to look up for the voters, which kind of explanation will a random person believe in your opinion? the one who presents a long argument or the one who just dismisses it with words only? You cannot prove you weren't friends with a Steam user or that you never had any chat activity in the first place. Voters cannot look up users if they are known for talking shit and accusing randomly. And if you don't have recurring grammatical mistakes to give a tell, not even patterns emerge for a few people to catch on.
And I didn't even get on with what if I enter a large Steam group that has lots of low-level traders registered and just play a little game: 10k key drop for those who log on with their Steam Trades account ant upvote at least 100 negative reps, so they never go away. Or downvote them so all scammers get a clean sheet. What can you do against this?
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Like I said above, voters decide if feedback meets the bare minimum standards of the community. Voters won't be deciding who's right and who's wrong.
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But my fake rep more than meets and standards, whereas the retort could maybe not. So congrats, I just did a successful smear campaign on a random trader. And I can freely copy-paste the same thing with slight variations in game title. And if I paste it enough times, people will start to downvote a claim like that, meaning real scam attempts will be flagged as not meeting standards.
There is nothing preventing a user from -repping thousands of people with carefully constructed claims just copy-pasted, and letting random people vote randomly on that won't solve the self-policing issue, it will just add self-policing onto the self-policing, creating two layers of the exact same problem.
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But that's how Steamtrades works right now and how its been working for the past 4 years. Any registered user can write any negative comment on someone's profile and we won't be able to tell if they're telling the truth if what they wrote is convincing enough. The update will at least add the option to reply to that comment instead of waiting for ages for support to get to your ticket and start investigating the claims made by both parties.
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But that's how Steamtrades works right now and how its been working for the past 4 years.
Yes, and this is what everyone is complaining about SteamTrades for the past 4 years and why so many people told newcomers to just go to barter.vg instead. But now barter is essentially dead and SteamTrades is supposedly comes back as new and improved, only to have the exact same issues why people left it in the first place or why it has worse reputation as a trading site than friggin' CSGOLounge.
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I don't get it, if I post negative feedback on your profile and provide convincingly made screenshots proving my point, who's going to decide if I'm telling the truth? A SteamTrades moderator? Will you still believe in the infallibility of a SteamTrades moderator if he decides that I was telling the truth, punishes you for scamming and refuses to remove my feedback from your profile?
Our current approach is to let both sides of the story visible to anyone who is interested and to let them decide if they want to trade with you or not.
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I don't get it, if I post negative feedback on your profile and provide convincingly made screenshots proving my point, who's going to decide if I'm telling the truth? A SteamTrades moderator?
Yes. We have a site that does that, follows up claims and sometimes counter-claims. SteamRep. If it wasn't obvious, I am hammering in that if cg wants to play trading site, then like all other trading sites on the goddamn internet, it needs staff and support that investigates accusations and claims. And yes, nobody in their right mind would volunteer for that, those crazy enough are already overloaded at SteamRep.
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Is there a point in turning Steamtrades into another SteamRep? We will use a different approach to user feedback here. We'll see how it goes.
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Point? No. Merging the two similar (or exact same) things? Could be. Would it happen? Somehow I doubt it.
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it needs staff and support that investigates accusations and claims. And yes, nobody in their right mind would volunteer for that, those crazy enough are already overloaded at SteamRep.
So I guess the solution is just to close down the trade site? Can't be moderated? Don't bother even opening the site!
Seriously, you already know how overloaded SteamRep and SG are, there are not going to be any improvements in moderation on Strades. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
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I thought you couldn't do this, because only logged in accounts would be able to give rep. I assume the requirements for creating the account would be the same like on SG?
So one wouldn't be able to use an instant alt because they can't create an account with it.
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If you need to meet a 100-dollar requirement of games that are not present on a list that currently features more than 50% of the Steam library, then it is moot to have it as a public trade forum.
Also, if you can leave feedback on any user but they have to jump a pretty damn high bar to be able to respond to that, then you can just scam any newbie outside SteamTrades and -rep them to death here, so they have no way of proving they were wronged, because they cannot reply to false accusation. Granted, it is a fun system for show trials, as long as you are not the one sitting at the accused seat.
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I don't see the real point in this.
First of all this would need a huge amount of work and could already now be done at moderated websites like steamrep also. The only thing that would be hinting towards abuse of feedback, were a lot of those messages from one particular user in a short amount of time. And even then there's no proof of false accusations, only the vague feeling that something is wrong.
The only way this could be countered was if all reps one user left on other profiles would be visible to anyone. So then one can decide if one particular user handing out -rep left and right is full of bullshit or for real. So that's a feature I would like to see.
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The problem is that combined with the lack of moderation check on accusations and just dropping the reins completely by letting feedback to be added to any Steam account (and even worse: BY any Steam account), you are not opening the door to let scammers discredit reputable traders by upvoting false claims and remove their own tracks with downvoting anything against them, but spreading it wide open and putting a neon arrow on top of it.
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To be fair, it never said that just anyone could give feedback. And I hope this won't happen, since this would be the real problem.
And from what I understand they cannot down or up-vote specific reps. I guess it's like with the "categorize old discussions" here on sg. You decide to vote on some reps and you'll see a random -rep and decide if it's a legit reason for -rep or not.
(So -rep for not accepted lowballing and the like would get voted off)
However it is essential to have a reliable voting base... (And make the principles for voting up or down clear to them.)
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and even worse: BY any Steam account
You need an account to add feedback. And having alt accounts gives you the same permanent suspension as on steamgifts.
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And having alt accounts gives you the same permanent suspension as on steamgifts.
but.. others have said the moderation and support team from here won't be the ones that mod/support it there, and you just stated a few minutes ago above that there won't be improvements on steamtrades moderation. so, now i'm a little confused.
by "improvements" what was meant?
if there is nobody to moderate it, who would suspend those alt abusers?
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if there is nobody to moderate it, who would suspend those alt abusers?
Uhhh, so I'm really confused why people think there won't be any moderation at all? I said above that the moderation probably won't be an improvement from steamgifts moderation, not that there would not be any.
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by combining comments together
sleepcat here
No, SG support won't handle ST matters.
&
yourself here
there are not going to be any improvements in moderation on Strades.
together it sounds like no moderation to me, that's why i'm confused. it's not that i thought there wasn't going to be, but from the sounds of the voting and such, that the site was and is shooting for self moderation instead of a true support team, which is why i think several are worried.
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I'm retired from trading since begin this year but out of curiosity I have a question.
I was impersonated by someone while I was afk and I woke up with -6 rep and it took me a lot of befriending and explaining that I was impersonated to clear that but with the new voting system wouldn't people/voters say or think : someone with 6 neg rep has more chance to be a scammer instead of someone with 1 negative rep?
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i have to agree with talgaby. i am very skeptical about this (even though i appreciate the effort to change something about the current situation). this new system seems to be exploitable quite easily, just by writing convincing negative feedback. and in most cases, people will not have sufficient data to judge whether feedback is legit or not.
do i understand this correctly? we only see the negative feedback. not the profile of the feedback creator? because often you can more or less identify fake rep by looking at the guy who wrote it. if someone has 0/-20, is an obvious scammer and writes negative feedback as a revenge act, you can easily spot that by looking at his feedback. but if you don't have that information, it may be impossible to understand the real situation. well, we'll see how this turns out.
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Voters decide if feedback meets the bare minimum standards of the community. Voters won't be deciding who's right and who's wrong. If someone -reps you and says you're a scammer, chances are that their feedback will be downvoted and removed. If someone says you're a scammer and provides detailed evidence, it will stay. You will get a chance to reply to it and present your side of the story, and it will be up to your trading partners to judge who is telling the truth. It's pretty much the same how it's done now, but with the reply option and deletion of obvious troll comments.
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i admit, it starts to make sense if you say it like that. i still think there is potential for exploits. right now we have the situation, that honest traders might have a few fake rep on their profile. that's annoying, but not the end of the world. with the new system, it seems a successful scammer might avoid some negative rep, if the scammed person is not able to provide decent feedback, and/or if the scammer writes a convincing answer. not so sure about all that yet. but at least, the quality of negative feedback will increase. so, that's good.
what if my feedback gets removed? can i go for a second try then? maybe after a waiting period?
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It's pretty much the same how it's done now, but with the reply option and deletion of obvious troll comments.
Thank you. That's the TL;DR summary.
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Problem is, the issue with the current system is that it is totally unmoderated and all debates are left for the actual users to sort out among themselves. Now it is "solved" by telling the rest of the users to randomly cast a vote on which side of the users have to believe. Meaning that the lack of moderation was delegated to the users, and now the problems it caused are solved by delegating the moderation of the users to themselves.
Or, if I really have to spell it out: "We created an anarchy in the trades section, and instead of hiring people to act as an authority and bring order in the chaos, we tell the anarchist to just decide themselves what they want to do."
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well, i'm not necessarily against giving power to the community. it could turn out to be great. i am still skeptical and concerned about possible exploits. but i don't generally reject the idea of letting the community decide. we'll see.
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The last time in history a large community could decide anything was in ancient Greece, at some city states. Thing is, it worked as long as no issues arose, because when they did, it was not the plebs that decided but a delegated community of judges or one single dictator.
To use a parallel: since we are dealing with real money here, voting on claims is like as if you go to court with a fraud case and instead of a judge or a jury ruling, they start an SMS/internet voting campaign. Guess who wins: the one who is right or the one who makes a better facebook advertisement?
There was an episode like this on Sliders, where court cases were television shows and the viewers decided. Guess what, the moral of the story was that even when they presented obvious evidence of innocence, people voted death sentences just for the kicks anyway, because they had "power" over an individual.
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It's a good thing we won't vote death sentence, then.
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I think you misread what the voting is all about.
From what I understand from Sleepycat, you are not voting on whether the comment is legit and honest.
You are voting on whether it is syntactically correct and well formed.
This is only distributed spell-checking I think.
And I assume you will only be able to vote a comment down, not up.
There are still ways to rig the system to use the votes for something else, of course
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That serves even less point. User cannot speak English, gets scammed hard, writes a terribly phrased message, it gets removed, user will think this site propagates scamming because his voice was snuffed out. And consider this: majority of the registered users on this site are from countries which are ranked the lowest in terms of population who can hold a decent conversation in English.
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That's what I got from Sleepycat answers. Maybe not spellchecking, but just downvote "this guy is a scammer" and upvote "this guy is a scammer, because ...".
But I agree it's not useful.
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well, trades happen mostly in english here, so i guess you can except at least basic english skills from traders. and as i understand it, part of the goal of all this is to increase feedback quality. "SCAMMER!!!11" might get removed (because it's indistinguishable from legit feedback, even for support members), while actual evidence stays. doesn't sound too bad, the more i think about it. but you're not wrong, a scammer who can speak proper english might have the advantage over the victim who can barely form a complete sentence.
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I think the idea behind it is not to decide if someone was a scammer or not, but to remove useless feedback like "-Rep changed his mind" or "-Rep giveaway key was a dupe"
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from the sounds of it though it will be able to be used for both those purposes. doesn't matter really if the idea was one direction, the functionality of it will still allow the other direction as well.
those that have known impersonators/scammers (myself even included there), from what i understand will be able to now leave a negative feedback explaining they are (or at least frequently) impersonating you and that now would be a legit negative feedback. in my case that user is not even a SG/ST user so they won't even be contesting it with a counter review.
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I bet the mods would just close them, maybe even suspend.
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That "Negative Review Voting" is an interesting idea, but I think it will only solve the issue with dumb trolls. Those intelligent enough, will probably figure out lies that manage to get their negative feedback approved.
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That's where the review replies come into play. Post an informative reply to a review you do not agree with and let other traders decide who's right.
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Would there be rules that prevent topics created over here on SG forums requesting people to "use their judgment" or would that be perfectly acceptable? (I don't have any negatives but I'm asking for others that will want to know)
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Why would there be topics created in SG? If it's to vote to remove neg rep, it sounds like users won't be able to vote on all the neg rep, and they're deidentified.
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Why would there be topics created in SG?
Idk if there will be a forum section over on ST so it was more of an example, but even if it were ST forums, are people allowed to request it or not was more the question I suppose really.
If it's to vote to remove neg rep, it sounds like users won't be able to vote on all the neg rep, and they're deidentified.
This part I'm not quite following. From my understanding of the new implementations that was exactly what it was for, users vote on the rep being valid or not, so i'd imagine several topics getting created right away requesting people to fix their old obvious fake reps.
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People couldn't vote specific reps, they will access a page in which random neg reps will appear with no names on it
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ohhh, okay. now i see.. that makes more sense, and now i understand what fubar meant. thanks for clarifying that for me. xD
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In the end, it's one user's word against another's. Even if it was a mod deleting neg feedback they would still need to review the evidence (which may be a sack of lies) and make a judgment call. I don't think that's any better than crowdsourcing it.
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It is better, because you delegate an authority who makes a decision. This is how law works. The law can make mistakes as well, but eventually the parties have to accept the decision, even if it was misjudged. Same would go for a support decision on disputes as well. When it is one group shouting at the other, there is no resolution. When you appoint a person of authority to make a decision for them, they eventually have to accept said decision or leave that system.
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When you appoint a person of authority to make a decision for them, they eventually have to accept said decision or leave that system.
Or foment revolution. ;-)
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delegate an authority who makes a decision
How would you choose the authority? What qualifications would they have? Real life is different since there's more accountability.
My view is that nothing is exactly better, just different.
We already have SteamRep, would there be any point in making a clone of SteamRep?
cg is experimental. SteamGifts came from SteamGameSales. SteamTrades came later. Let him experiment.
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The same way any other online marketplace like amazon and eBay does? With support staff.
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That requires money. People who donate then feel like they have a say in how things are run.
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I find it funny that you are comparing ebay to strades. Especially since ebay has a very similar feedback system - negative reviews are rarely, if ever, removed by support, which is why they allow replies to reviews. And this is speaking about a company with hundreds or even thousands of paid support members.
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But also millions of users. And negative feedback is still a smaller issue compared to scam reports.
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Can we assume that existing misuse of trade feedback reports won't be acted upon?
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Every negative feedback will be submitted for the voting process.
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Nice, sounds very good, I'm very glad you are updating steamtrades, it's best place for trading and now it will be even better.
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Instead of trade feedback I have giveaway entered now
Great!
Now other people can see how much a failure I am at winning xD
Negative Review Voting
Won't this kinda a bad thing?
I can see some way to abuse this.. you know scammers got friends and bots to help them
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Trade reputation is moving to ST. It will not exist on SG anymore. They are now separate sites, as they were once before.
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For the purposes of this discussion, copied means moved. We'll know if I'm wrong in a few hours.
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While we're shamelessly copying our comments, here's my 2 cent:
Actually, I don't think Trade Feedback will be back. I'm saying I would prefer that it to be back, but if I had to bet I'd say the Giveaways Entered that replaces it would remain regardless of what most people prefer.
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Since both site will be using separate databases from now on, it would not be possible to have the trade feedback on the Steamgifts profile because the information will no longer be present in the Steamgifts database.
The current content is probably not deleted from the SG database (at least not right now) and that would most likely be why it's copied and not moved to the other database.
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CG removed the trade feedback because there won't be the trade section on SG anymore. Instead of the trade feedback he put there the number of entered GAs (the number was showed in another place before so he just moved it there). There won't be both because there won't be the trade section on SG and without the trade section there cannot be any feedback from trades (from the same reason why, for example, eBay feedback is not there - it is not needed for giveaways). It's not a big deal.
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Actually, I don't think Trade Feedback will be back. I'm saying I would prefer that it to be back, but if I had to bet I'd say the Giveaways Entered that replaces it would remain regardless of what most people prefer.
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Heh, I suggested replies to negative reviews like a month ago. But it didn't seem like there was to much interest it. Still glad that support team sees potential benefits and came up with the same/similar idea.
Not really into trading but I think those are good improvements and a step forward. With a to large community there is not really any other way as letting the community decide for itself.
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I suggest to replace the entered GAs number with ratio. It would be more useful. Yesterday, It took a person just few hours to start to speculate if an user uses a bot or not when they have so many entries. I know we could see the number even before but it was not so visible, at least.
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Ratio sounds like a really bad idea. As others have said: The numbers of entries had been there on SG version 1 and it did never really cause any real problems. If there was ever some thread about it then I have missed it. And where is the problem if user A speculates if user B uses a bot? It will happen so or so. The worst that could happen is that he gets a blacklist which is neglible.
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A good number of users wouldn't understand what a ratio is. Or be confused what it means, just like the expected number of wins statistic.
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less than?
wouldn't it say "Relaunching in XX minutes." instead of hours?
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Online
oh well... i need dark version //i hope to some script as on steamgifts will be created
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Looks awesome!
It would be nice if there was a button that links back to SteamGifts. (If there is one, please tell me where ^^)
Edit: I don't think it's good that people aren't notified on sg when they are messaged on SteamTrades =/
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sorry to say this, but dividing this site into two sites makes it a bit of a pain.
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yes, I know, but the sites shared the same design and it was obvious they belonged together. to me this new site doesnt look that "improved" at all just because one can vote about feedback.
back then I used steamtrades exclusively, though I was aware of steamgifst also. only after the new site's launch early last year(?) I started using/reading/commenting on steamgifts as well, because it was technically the same site now and there was no need to have two sites for the same community.
also, I think they missed the oppurtunity to devide the trades section in sub forums, e.g. for cards trading, or item trading, or whatnot.
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Hi SG, we're rolling out some updates to our trade section in the next 24 hours. These changes are mostly geared towards the separation of trades to SteamTrades.com, and improving on the feedback system. No major changes to the core of the trading system are happening in this particular update and the site will still maintain the familiar discussion based format. However, like most users, I'd like to see improvements in that area in the near future. Below is the upcoming announcement to be listed on SteamTrades.com, highlighting some of the more noteworthy changes.
User Reputation for All Steam Users
To help SteamTrades continue to grow as a leader in Steam user reputation, our site now allows reputation to be written for every individual with a Steam account. To leave a review for a user, simply visit our homepage and search for a Steam user using their Steam ID, Steam vanity name, or Steam profile URL. Once forwarded to their SteamTrades profile, you'll see an input box at the bottom of their profile allowing you to leave a review regarding your trading experience together.
Replies to Negative Reviews
If a user has left a negative review on your profile, SteamTrades now allows you to write a public reply to their review. This way you can better inform users visiting your profile about why that review exists, and at the same time it provides you with an opportunity to share additional details the user might have excluded from their review. Below a negative review on your profile you'll see a Reply button, which you can click to add your reply. Please note, replies are only available for negative reviews.
Negative Review Voting
To help improve the quality of negative reviews and to help remove negative reviews that do not meet our standards, we added a voting page, where users can vote on negative reviews from others in the community. Using the guidelines listed, users can vote on whether a negative review should be allowed, or whether it should be removed from our site. Reviews will be automatically removed if decided on by the community.
User Profiles and Safety Check
User profiles now contain a safety check. This data is updated hourly, and helps you to be aware of any Steam infractions a user may have against their account (such as VAC or game bans). As well, user profiles show when a user registered on Steam, when they were last logged into Steam, their Steam level, and their game count (if their Steam account is public). Combined with our user reviews, this data can help you better determine a user's overall reputation before trading.
Design and Interface
Our entire site has been redesigned and recoded with a wide variety of improvements. The changes allows for quicker replies, and overall faster load times. Our database is now separate from our sister site, SteamGifts. Users with previous trades or reputation have been automatically moved to our new site. However, with separate databases, this will mean usernames on SteamTrades may differ from those on SteamGifts, and suspensions on one site do not affect usage on the other. For that reason, profiles on SteamTrades link to Steam IDs, rather than usernames to help avoid confusion.
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