Can Outpost mods do this?

[sirploko]

"learned his lesson"? I don't get why people has to wait months for a mistake on your part though. My first ban for ban evasion is supposed to let me learn a lesson when my original ban wasn't even legit. Also, the user below was marked wrongly and skial removed his mark in a day but he has to wait  for his outpost appeal since he needs to undergo a punishment for something he hasn't done in order to learn his lesson. Recently, napolean @ bazaar.tf added me to investigate some stuff, even he says that "i don't know what the outpost staff are thinking"

http://forums.backpack.tf/index.php?/topic/41594-need-help-tf2-outpost-ban-appeal/

http://i.imgur.com/LyKfZ2g.jpg

 

edit: he has been unbanned after a week though he added an admin to ask about it.

 

While the evasion part of your ban may indeed have been a mistake, there is no question about the sharking.

[fmca]

snip

 

Legitimate reasons have already been brought up that render the SR FAQ at best incomplete in what it sets out regarding "obvious" scammer alts. I could equally accuse you of not having read those reasons in this thread. Not that you (and by extension the Outpost moderating team, for which you are speaking on this thread) appears to particularly care. I'm not going to bother relisting them here when they have already been posted.

 

Again, the manner in which you applied the checklist has been shown to be debatable. Particularly regarding the newness of the steam account, etc. But I'm sure you've read that and are just wilfully glossing over it at this point.

 

We're traders. Saying we have no experience in attempting to discover if a profile is an obvious scammer alt is self-evidently incorrect, especially when the rules operate as they do in cases like this. I'm not going to dispute that further with you.

 

For this instance, the "we" would be almost all of the traders that I have seen posting on this thread. Many of whom represent backpacks in the top, say 1000-2000 according to backpack.tf's value estimates. 

 

And you're right, I have no say in these matters whatsoever. That doesn't mean I'm not going to tell you to your face when I think you're wrong. Just like I don't have to use outpost's services, you don't have to read this thread. If you cannot understand why I would want to voice my opinion about your decisions, because I cannot possibly change anything, then leave this thread and don't bother commenting again. Or if you actually want to engage with someone who uses the services your site provides, stay and listen. Again, it's called PR. I don't know many companies that actively go out of their way to tell their users and/or paying customers "we don't give a d**n about your opinion". At least, not many successful ones. Those that are successful with that attitude tend to be monopolies. Of course, outpost does not have a monopoly in the services it provides. But if the big sticking point is "one man, one vote", then I'm sure a businessman like Sneeza understands the basic requirement to provide the best service possible. If you've already asked him what he thinks about this case, what did he say? Is there transparency around that? 

 

And it's true, you could refuse service to me on Outpost right now. Except that would look vindictive, wouldn't it? I haven't broken your rules, I despise scammers and go out of my way to prevent them from trading with me. I don't even do cash trades because I'm so paranoid about being scammed or trading with a scammer. But again, you show little understanding of how PR works. If you as a mod and your moderating team could ban people left right and centre without any justification, how long do you think the site would last? I couldn't do anything about it, I'm (as you have made a strong point of mentioning) just a small fish. But word does get around concerning how a company and its representatives treats its users, and whether its treatment of them is fair and balanced or not. This case with the recent bans simply exposes something of a fault-line between how I as a trader, and others on this thread, perceive Outpost and how Outpost perceives itself in relation to the handing out of bans for dealing with "obvious" scammer alts.

 

No, I disagree with you. Context is everything, and your black and white thinking denies the presence of that context. Recognising that context does not necessarily lead to "abuse and favouritism". That's just false.

 

I didn't say you had to be ashamed. Personally I would be uncomfortable with enforcing the decision you as a person and as a team have come to, while also stating multiple times that the legitimate concerns of the traders in this thread alone are not worth anything to your company, and reinforcing the notion that Outpost simply does not care. But that's just me. I don't run your website, I simply for the time being use it. But attitudes like yours towards a user and many other users on this thread, along with my legitimate concerns about rulings regarding "obvious" scammer alts that could potentially impact me in the future will only drive me away from your site. Best to not get complacent and assume that traders can't possibly do without Outpost, wouldn't you say?

[BankingBot]

While the evasion part of your ban may indeed have been a mistake, there is no question about the sharking.

yea that mistake with no reply to my appeal for a month or so, even before the "sharking" incident, for me to learn a lesson.

 

In all politeness, my original ban for relisting is a day and being extended to perma when garry sees my appeal and decided to ban me for ban evasion since i visited outpost on an alt without conducting any trades because i couldn't see the logout button while i was banned, the contrast is bad.

[cares]

To those who claim a background check is a lot of work, it's really not. A basic background check takes about 1 minute with backpack.tf & BES, since almost all the tools are there.

 

 

I do plan on adding more background checking functionality (using Steam web apis) in the future, but this should have been more than enough to determine whether a user is legit or not.

 

Finding the user I was looking for and loading their backpack on my low-end machine, plus using the slow route with Enhanced Steam took about 40 seconds all-in-all to load and render.

[polar]

As Michael has stated, nothing else is getting added here and more and more posts are becoming personal attacks. Before locking this up, I want to make one last comment here. The whole point of a thread like this is to open discourse as a community about making our community better. This isn't bp.tf mob vs outpost staff. The problem here is that everyone is talking at each other instead of with each other. No side is really listening to the other, and that's the easiest way to shut down any kind of positive discussion. 

 

Michael is the best at what he does. It's not his fault that he is extremely good and efficient at following the guidelines handed to him. Regardless of how you feel about this case, everyone has to appreciate the amount of time he and his colleagues volunteer to a cause they believe in. 

 

Having said that, comments like "if your name is not Sneeza, your opinion is not of any interest to me" or "If your issue is with the rule, that needs to be adressed at SR" really bother me. At this point, no one trusts SR to handle anything in a reasonable amount of time. Do you really expect that if someone here makes this same thread on SR calling for an update in the rules that anything is going to get done in the next year? How long did it take for them to change their ruling on using the bill's hat as a benchmark? The administration over there is so far removed from the actual act of trading, in my opinion they have no clue what is reasonable to expect for the trader who makes 10,000 trades a year in today's trading environment. If you believe in their rules, that's one thing. But if you are following their rules for the sake of following their rules, then the whole spirit of SR, the whole reason it was made in the first place has been lost.

 

I would love community admins to step up and demand change when it needs to be made instead of just following the rules just cause the website owner says it should be this way. Heck, bring Sneeza in here and ask him if he believes in a lot of these archaic rules. Sneeza, some of these people have been with you for years! Please at least hear them out. Skaskanker made some outstanding points showing exactly why they are archaic. I talk all the time to Toughsox about whether he believes in what he's doing, and I can't tell you the number of times he has told me, "I will bring this up at the next meeting." I just wish that you showed that kind of response out here in public instead of saying things like if your name isn't Sneeza, I don't care, or go to SteamRep if you want to change things because saying those things is counterproductive to what we are all trying to do as a community.

 

 

 

 

EDIT: Just as I type this, cares publishes his/her outstanding background checking tool. Thank you for that, cares. If anyone has something they'd like to add, I'm more than happy to re-open this. It's just that the number of posts saying the same thing and the number of personal attacks has grown to the point that I felt this was about the right time to end it before things really get sour.