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Guide for Reporting on the Main Site


Teeny Tiny Cat

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Introduction

 

We get a significant number of proofless or invalid reports regularly we thought it would be a good idea to have a guide available here. Feel free to share this with anyone needing help with reporting, and of course feel free to post in here or PM me with any additional questions that you have.

 

We'll go through the different types of main site reports and what we typically consider valid or invalid, what kind of additional proof is required, etc.

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Suggestion Comments

 

Valid reports for comments are primarily rude or abusive comments, and spam on currency suggestions. Spam comments on general suggestions are tolerated as long as they are not excessive. On suggestions for items which typically get a large number of comments anyway - currency such as keys or refined, craft hat blanket, etc - spam can mask constructive feedback and will not be tolerated. This includes general comments about the economy and comments such as "good proof upvote."

 

Occasionally people report a suggestion itself as a comment report in order to add proof. Instead, please do this by commenting on the suggestion. If a suggestion has already been accepted but you have valid counter proof, please PM a price mod - preferably Teeny or Woifilicious - on the forums.

 

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Classifieds

 

Classified reports are the bulk of our daily regular reports, and the ones we try to clear the quickest. The drop-down menu available when reporting a classified is as follows:

 

This user is a scammer - self explanatory, but if you can include some background, information about why you think so, etc, that is helpful. It may be more useful to report a scammer as a user report via their profile if there is a lot of information you need to include or if you have personally been scammed by this user.

 

This comment is rude - self explanatory.

 

The seller is refusing to sell this item at the offered price - when reporting a user for refusing to sell at their list price, it is important that you include proof. We need a screenshot of the declined trade offer or chat in order to remove these, we will not do so just based on your word. Please note that declining offers from users with trade holds is fine, even if they offer at your list price. No-one is required to put their items on hold if they don't wish to.

 

If the user is ignoring the trade offer for a long period of time we'll need a screenshot of that trade offer with the expiration date showing. Please allow a minimum of 24 hours before reporting, traders often have other things to do besides waiting for your offer. 

 

This user's trade offer URL does not work - self explanatory

 

Other issue - such as line cutting, buying only modified items, misleading notes, troll listings, duped buy orders for the same item, etc. Duplicate sell orders are not against the rules. One we get regularly is people reporting a listing because the item has been sold or the buyer no longer has enough pure - you can fix this yourself by refreshing the user's backpack. If you do this, it will automatically remove the listing.

 

Which option you choose from the drop-down menu is not that important and we will evaluate each report regardless of whether you picked the correct category. If what you are reporting is not evident from looking at the listing alone, please include screenshots as evidence.

 

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Trust

 

Not too much that needs to be said, here, reporting trust is fairly straightforward.

 

Valid positive trusts include, but are not limited to:

  • Trades involving real world currency
  • Lending items
  • Brokering
  • Gambling where it involves trust, e.g. spycrabbing
  • Anything else that demonstrates how the user in question is trustworthy

Valid negative trusts include, but are not limited to - these must include proof:

  • Any kind of scamming
  • Misrepresentation of items
  • Running from spycrabs
  • Running with brokered items
  • Anything else that demonstrates how the user in question is not trustworthy

Invalid trusts include, but are not limited to:

  • Generic +reps or -reps without context
  • Vague or unclear trusts
  • Negative trusts with no proof
  • Retaliatory trusts

 

Please do not leave negative trusts for trading with scammers. Instead, file a user report to alert the staff so that we can properly handle it. A neg trust will not be seen by us unless the user in question reports it.

Please do not leave negative trust for "sharking" - see our post here for our view and rules.

The only reports on negative trust that will be looked at are from the user the trust was left for - the rationale for this is if they care about their rep they will report it themselves so additional reports are redundant, and if they don't care about their rep then there's no reason for us to waste mod time on it.

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User reports (via profile)

 

The bulk of user reports that we get are for scamming, trading with scammers, or on scammer alts. All of these require proof in order to be properly assessed.

 

Scam reports - as with any other community that bans scammers, we require clear evidence in order to ban anyone. What this means in each case will be slightly different, but in generic terms we will require at least proof of your trade agreement (screenshots of chat), proof of your trade (screenshots of trade history) and proof that you were scammed (screenshots of paypal, for example.) We do not accept pasted chat logs as proof. The most important thing in scam reports is screenshots of chat showing your trade agreement, without this we cannot do anything. Please don't submit videos as your evidence - we get this relatively frequently, and we do not have time to sit down and watch videos most of the time. It also makes it difficult to get a good view of the specific proof we need. Please submit screenshots instead. If you are not sure what is required in your case, submit a report with everything that you have - too much is far better than too little, we can always ignore the bits that we don't need.

Since we are steamrep partners we can accept scam reports to apply steamrep marks, and you can find a good guide on standards of proof required here.

 

Trading with scammers - when reporting for trading with scammers, it is important to link the item histories of the items involved in the trade. You need to show evidence of a two way trade or your report will be closed, simply linking one item history is not sufficient to show a trade with a scammer. The guide for background checks can be found here, which details what we will ban for.

 

Reporting scammer alts - we have methods for checking into accused alts, but in the interest of making our jobs a little easier it is extremely helpful if you include as much information as possible in your report. Let us know what led you to believe this user is an alt, and if you have any information that we do not have available (such as things the user said in chat) please screenshot and include it.

 

"Sharking", unbalanced trades, or taking advantage of inexperience - please see this post for details.

 

You can also report users with NSFW or offensive avatars via user reports.

 

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Evidence

Most reports will require screenshots as evidence. To put those in a report you need to upload them to an image hosting site, such as imgur, and paste the link to the screenshot(s) in the report. Please do your best to provide screenshots that completely uncropped and unedited, especially in scam reports. It is highly advised that you provide screenshots from PC rather than from mobile.

 

Getting Steam chat after your chat window has closed - Steam now saves all Steam chat from the last 14 days. You can access it by clicking HERE or going to,

Steam Support > My Account > Data Related to your Steam Account > Friend Chat Messages

 

More detail on evidence requirements can be found here.

 

If you are reporting someone for impersonation, please make an archive of their profile ID64 using archive.is or another service, and include it in the report with a screenshot.

 

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This guide will be a work in progress. Please feel free to ask or add anything and we can amend it as we go to clarify anything people are still unsure about. If you take one thing away from this, let it be that evidence is extremely important. It is always preferable to include more information and more evidence than less. We can always ignore what is irrelevant, so if you're not sure then please include it.

 

Thanks!

 

If you'd like to ask a question about something specific in private, feel free to PM any of the admins or report mods:

 

Teeny Tiny Cat 

OverduePixels

Toughsox

Sin

Zeus

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"Sharking" - some clarification and some changes

 

So, there has been a significant amount of debate about what constitutes sharking and what backpack.tf should allow based on our own definition. Our definition of sharking has historically been based on polar's opinion of what constitutes bannable sharking. Since the use of this as a definition of sharking itself has become confusing to people, I am going to remove it from the board and amend it. The term sharking will always have some level of disagreement, with different people viewing it on an axis and placing the shark point at different levels. I am doing away with the term, and am simply going to define what we will ban for, and what you can leave trust for, regardless of what you call it.

 

What is bannable?

 

This is really remaining unchanged from before, though the difference is we are not defining it as sharking, simply telling you what we will ban for. From polar's previous post...

 

"The use of deceitful tactics to coerce another user to commit a trade against their better judgment. It is akin to scams committed by con artists in the real world. The discrepancy in item value is much less important than the intent to defraud another user. We will ban users for committing this sort of fraud ONLY if there is definitive proof using screenshots of the conversation and trade agreement showing that the user in question has lied or misrepresented item values in a gratuitous way to deceive another user."

 

What can negative trust be left for?

 

We will now allow negative trust in circumstances where a user can be demonstrated to be repeatedly making hugely uneven trades with new or inexperienced traders but no concrete proof is provided of them actively deceiving or manipulating them. Preying on the inexperienced is definitely something which makes you untrustworthy in my view and the view of most of this community, and it is deserving of a warning which is the purpose of trust. Accepted reports for unbalanced trades will also result in a premium ban.

 

We WILL NOT be allowing users to leave their own trust, instead we will require this to be sent as a user report on the profile, and if the behaviour is deemed to be frequent enough to warrant a warning, moderators will leave a trust for that person. You can only report in cases where you can demonstrate evidence of REPEATED highly unbalanced trades. I am not putting a % figure on unbalanced, as mods will use their judgement when assessing cases. Our requirements with this may evolve as we assess cases or take user feedback. Any updates will be posted here.

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We have decided to allow reporting on accounts (primarily bots) using the API to delete and recreate listings to get around the bump time limits. You can now report this via the red flag on their profile as with other user reports. Please provide proof if possible to make it easier for mods to handle quickly.

 

How should proof look like?

Here is an example report: https://backpack.tf/issue/5adc797044325a5ac567997d

The proof should include screenshots of the listings with timestamps, showing that they were bumped under the 30 minute limit. 

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Although this is by no means new, just adding a note that you can report scammers to backpack.tf for steamrep marks now that we are partners. 

 

Standards of proof will need to meet SR's guidelines, which can be found here.

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User reports will now redirect to the issue tracker.

 

This is to allow us to make reports public if need be, and have two-way communication with users submitting reports. We have some issues and still have some tweaking to do, but this will be the plan going forward until we have a proper ticket system in place.

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Quick post on evidence requirements in user reports. 

 

The basic elements of proof required in a scam report is evidence of your trade agreement, evidence of the trade and/or cash transfer or lack thereof, and evidence to that links both of those to the account you are reporting.

  • Evidence of your trade agreement should be your complete conversation, uncropped. Steamrep has a handy guide on how to take full screen screenshots here. 
  • If your chat has been lost or the screenshots you took at the time are not uncropped, you can recover chat by clicking this link or going to Steam Support > My Account > Data Related to your Steam Account > Friend Chat Messages
  • When taking screenshots of chat, please do so in a browser and hover your mouse over the username of the account in at least one screen so that the URL pops up in the bottom corner as seen in this example.
  • If you need to show proof of a trade, screenshots should be taken both from the steam app and the trade history in browser. 
  • When you take a browser screenshot of the trade, hover your mouse over the username of the account as described above for chat, and press the print screen key. Then upload the uncropped image to an image hosting site.It will look like this; as you can see, it links the trade to the account you are reporting.
  • ALL screenshots submitted should be uncropped and unedited.

We do not currently have image uploading in reports, so you will need to upload all proof to an image hosting site such as imgur.com and paste the links into the report. Steamrep has a great guide on standards of proof which you may find helpful here.

 

Not all reports will require exactly the same proof, and if you're unsure of anything just submit what you can and a report moderator will work with you and ask for anything else that they need.

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Clarification/update on a couple of rules for user reports.

 

We have been getting a rather extreme amount of reports either for trading with scammers or on alleged scammer alts that include little to no evidence. One or two item histories are not sufficient to make reports of this nature.

 

  • If you are reporting someone for trading with Steamrep-tagged scammers, you need to show evidence of a two way trade.
  • If you are reporting someone for regularly trading with backpack.tf-banned scammers, scammer alts, or scammer fences, you need to include enough two-way trades to demonstrate a clear pattern.
  • If you a reporting a scammer alt, you need to clearly explain what leads you to believe this account is an alt and include any/all evidence you have gathered.

 

From now on, mods will be much harsher in closing reports of this type which do not have sufficient proof included.

 

If you are found to be repeatedly making lazy/invalid reports, you may receive a ban from the issue tracker.

 

 

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Buy Order Manipulation

 

We are no longer looking into reports for buy order manipulation, however we will still be looking into reports for fake buy orders since they are against the classifieds rules.

 

- We will no longer warn/ban users for simply boosting bot buy orders.

- We will only warn/ban users if there is clear proof their buy order was fake or they had no intention to honor their listed price (Classifieds Rule 6).

- Those banned for buy order manipulation can re-appeal.

 

We found that our previous policy was redundant and only served as additional protection for bot owners, and that isn't what we wanted. Classifieds Rule 6 also applies to bot owners and script users; if your autopricer doesn't have ideal safeguards, all this really means is that you're not keeping up with your listings yourself.

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