Ask a SteamRep admin

[ЩĄ Horse]

I happen to be working my real job and taking a few minutes to reply to this AMA - otherwise I'd be doing reports but I have several right now in my Q that I'm handling which takes time. Waiting on someone to reply with correct evidence and whatever does take up more time. We have to sort thru a bunch of junk reports to...people arguing about prices for items and so on.

[Дебра]

I have a simple question to ask. What is SteamRep's stance on people immediately trading for an item that was traded from a known scammer, and the user was not yet marked for trading with said scammer?

 

By this i mean:

Known Scammer (as in marked for awhile) >trades expensive item to> User1 (who has not been marked yet) >trades said item before marking to> User2 (who has had eyes on the prize the entire time)

 

Neutron has done this before using someone who already was about to get marked as essentially middleman for a scorching crones dome from a scammer and never got punished.

http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/5999-76561198061374527-neutron-sc.html

 

PP7 has done similar for a burning TC

http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/8939-76561198013192860-pp7.html

 

Neither received any punishment so it seems fine.

[NICK THE THIRD]

This isn't about steamrep itself but...

I can't seem to upload videos in mp4 format when I attempted to do a report. I then just gave up... Yeah, gee thanks.

[apollothelion]

Don't think that's really the problem.

 

http://forums.steamrep.com/forums/staffapps/- they just hardly get any qualified applicants

 

I know they have asked some qualified applicants to apply, but most of the time these applicants turn them down because they have their hands full as admins of other communities. The other reason is that a lot of these community admins don't want to be doing secretarial work as mods for many months before being promoted to admin. When someone has been an admin on a community for years and has had a ton of experience on handling reports, they certainly don't feel like spending their time doing secretarial work.

 

Also, they ARE hiring mods, but it takes time to train people with limited experience to an admin level position where decisions can carry a lot of weight.

 

If admins on other communities have experience on handling reports, then why don't they get a trial admin. 

 

Just shoving everyone as a mod isn't really helpful.

 

People who have the experience should be pushed forward faster. And can speed up the learning process by doing ' shadowing'...

 

I think that they should be actively approaching people, and not just wait for applications, because at this rate the level of dying seems out of hand.

[polar]

I think its time they start LOOKING actively for people.

 

I know for a fact that multiple solid candidates have been asked to apply in private. But as I said above, a lot of the community admins who have experience in handling reports have their hands full in their own communities and don't have the time to add SR to their plate on top of everything else they have IRL. People who have less experience require a longer time to train as mods before their promotion to admin. It's a tough balance. You have to hire people you can trust for something like this.

[Lava]

What happened to the Moe and Phantoml0rd reports that were forwarded to steamrep (from FoG)? Were they ever handled?

 

Also, why is it that steamrep is doing nothing about the CS:GO betting sites? None of them ban scammers, and I'm pretty sure cAre bets on one of them all the time. Is it not the responsibility of a website owner to make sure his bots aren't trading with marked accounts? Why is a website owner whose bots are trading with scammers above the law? Bots are alts any way you look at them.

 

One final question, on a more personal note, do you feel steamrep benefits the community? I don't want your professional answer, just tell me what you think.

 

 

 

On a second note, I do respect what you guys do, and I think you all do want to help the community, but lately more than ever I've found myself questioning the decisions steamrep admins make, 

 

See above post on specific cases.

 

The CSGO crowd is a very large portion of the trading community, even larger than TF2. We're doing what we can, and over time the CSGO crowd is slowly warming up to the idea of SteamRep, but simply outright banning website owners for a community larger than TF2 and DOTA combined, then expecting them to ban scammers, isn't really practical. It's not a problem with an easy solution. Eventually, websites that trade with scammers often wind up trade banned when scammers launder stolen goods, and as we've heard from multiple high profile bot owners, Valve more or less expects them to "take measures" in their bots to ensure trades for scammed items don't happen if they want to keep their website operational. This may have contributed to an increase in fraud prevention.

 

The trading with scammers rule is not intended to entrap people, and in order to actually receive a (sustainable) tag, you have to have made the trade knowingly. With the CSGO community, many of the traders are either unaware of or uninterested in acknowledging us. It may change in time, but the policy is mostly unenforceable there right now. Some high profile traders and website owners are still banned, and we don't carve out special exceptions for celebrities - cAre and Samalex are examples of this - but for trades with scammers, relying on csgo.exchange as evidence, and expecting every trader in a community that generally doesn't care about trading fraud until that first time they trade a $900 knife to an account created 2 months ago because it had a bigger number than them in CSGO Lounge and a higher Steam level (less money invested than the knife itself) isn't really going to help.

 

Ultimately, our goal is to educate and raise awareness in the Steam trading community to prevent fraud. Banning most or all the CSGO website owners for "not listening to us" isn't going to get us anywhere.

 

I think we do provide a service to the community. I wish we provided more, but we can only provide so much. They say you only value something when it's gone, so let's imagine a trading community without SteamRep. The only indication of someone's trustworthiness is that warning in a Steam trade that this person might be a scammer, which as most of you know is completely automated and usually results from some angry kid spamming reports on your profile. That 3 year old account is just as likely to be a scammer as the 3 month old account. Scammers who wind up trade banned have an array of hundreds of alt accounts, so when one gets trade banned they drop it and move on. You could check reputation threads, but they're not necessarily conclusive. You see several pages of successful trades? Could be fakerep. See a couple reports of scamming? Could be that kid who didn't get the bargain he wanted on a knife/unusual, retaliating against someone or possibly blackmailing (we get a fairly modest amount of people pulling that with SR). In practice, people will sit on Steam levels, profile +rep comments (or CSGORep, which has a lot of the same issues as profile +rep), and CSGO Lounge reputation numbers to indicate if someone is trustworthy; as many CSGO traders do now instead of checking for pending reports on SteamRep, and that's why we have such an influx of CSGO scam reports, most of them obvious alts of the same handful of career scammers.

 

Other sites have tried to do what we do, most failed and shut down after a few months. Rep.tf (which I personally like, so long as used correctly) is still around but only reports bans from other communities without remark to the reason, and following them as a rule to decide if someone is trust worthy can leave people alienated for a single case of micspam or for an admin not liking them as most traders don't take time to look at any details. Traderep.org also exists - I don't know a whole lot about them, but I understand they more or less mirror a bunch of other communities' bans (similar to how we do with partners) with a simplified "trusted or not trusted" status, except with a much lower bar to entry. Ultimately, I think they provide valuable resources in their own right, but I do not feel they can "replace" SteamRep, and what SteamRep built up over the years is still a valuable and irreplaceable asset to the community.

 

When SteamRep started, it was just TF2 and a little bit of game trading. Now we have DOTA2 and CSGO, each of which was slow to adopt SteamRep practices (and from what I hear SR was never really that popular with TF2). Just recently, I hear PayDay 2 is coming on board with this Steam trading thing, so that will be yet another gaming community for us to try and work with, with their own set of challenges.

 

Who are the team that choose who the moderators are? I've heard many incidences where SteamRep admins/moderators have been mean to one another and sometimes have been biased to some in their reports. 

 

Plus, this:

 

It has changed from time to time, but it's voted on in an internal admin-only board, with a comprehensive background check and assessment of both character and understanding of the Steam trading platform. When I joined, there was a single admin in charge of it (voting was always a thing). That admin resigned, for personal reasons unknown to me, at the same time as another admin, leaving most of the SteamRep leadership gone and pretty much just Mattie to hold the place together. I think Pretender tried to take on the role, but his work life has become more demanding and dominating his personal life and he hasn't been able to keep up. Clive is currently filling in the role, and he has done some pretty good work there at fast-tracking applications.

 

There is plenty of fighting and conflict between the staff, and even between partners, but we try to keep it all behind closed doors. It's possible a moderator or admin fight made its way into public at some point, but it's kind of unavoidable for those sorts of conflicts to happen. If only we all understood the magic of friendship...

 

If you have reports of admin/moderator abuse, or clear biased handling of a report, that's another story entirely. Everyone on staff is expected to recuse them from any case where they might have bias or perceivable bias. If you have any specific instances of moderators abusing their position, we want to know about it now. If you don't feel comfortable addressing it publicly, you can send me or one of the other admins a PM on the forums with a subject clearly indicating what it's about. Or you can share it here and I'll try to address it publicly.

 

 

What kind of questions are you legitimately expecting to receive?

 

-snip-

 

I'm addressing an atmosphere of misinformation, and trying to help educate the community as a whole. Not even just PR, but questions about common scam types or how to trade safely.

 

I think I'm going to skip over the rest of your comment. There are people here who have real concerns, and not just an axe to grind. If Horse or someone else from our staff wants to address you, that's fine with me, but I have honestly come to believe all you're interested in is shutting down SteamRep so you can continue to scam. Especially with so many of your inquiries into how we keep marking your alts, which by policy we do not disclose as that would help scammers evade detection and bans. Besides, last time I spent a couple hours digging and answering questions, just for you, you spit in my face. Forgive me if that comes off as abrasive or hateful, but if you gave up trading, and pretty much all of your personal life to help the community only to have someone treat you with that level of respect, you'd probably be unwilling to work with them too.

 

Steamrep has changed over the years. What was once a friendly community oriented website now has many issues (the backlog being just one). What is your plan to change this?

 

SteamRep was never a "community" per se, and we were never really that "friendly" or liked, although we did at one point have a few people who were good at public outreach - a void I'm trying to fill in this thread.

 

We are not committed to answering every single report; it's simply not possible, and growing faster than any number of staff (or Valve) could possibly hope to tackle. When you submit a report, you check a box acknowledging you understand we will not get to every report. We are committed to addressing 100% of our appeals, and it's a daunting task but we recently brought You Are The One, former head of appeals and very knowledgeable and experienced expert on appeal research and handling procedures, back onto staff. You can look at the concluded appeals for yourself to see we've made substantial strides on that front, mostly to his credit alone.

 

Back to the reports, what we hope to achieve is for an overall better educated trading community. The vast majority of those reports, if not bogus "price policing" reports, are against obvious scammer alts who have plenty of reports against them already. Many of them are the same people we banned an alt for just a few days ago, who keep taking advantage of traders who trust links sent in chat or rely on flawed "reputation" like Steam level or profile comments. Most of them are preventable. One thing I hope to accomplish with this thread is to raise general awareness so people don't fall for this stuff over and again.

[JCapps]

Neutron has done this before using someone who already was about to get marked as essentially middleman for a scorching crones dome from a scammer and never got punished.

http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/5999-76561198061374527-neutron-sc.html

 

PP7 has done similar for a burning TC

http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/8939-76561198013192860-pp7.html

 

Neither received any punishment so it seems fine.

That's what it seems like to me too, but I'd like an admin response. Thanks for the examples.

[ЩĄ Horse]

That obviously is not enough.

 

Offer more off your free time to do what you applied for properly, a single person can easily handle 100 reports in an hour or two, and seeing as you got ~8 active staff members, it shouldn't be that difficult to shrink the backlog.

 

It takes about 15minutes to read over and research each report..not only the accused but also the victim. I saw just last night we had two users reporting each other then arguing for about 20+ posts each over each report.  I have 8 hours of real job, family life, football season, hunting season.. etc... everyone is prob pretty close to the same.

[λngelღмander]

I think we do provide a service to the community. I wish we provided more, but we can only provide so much. They say you only value something when it's gone, so let's imagine a trading community without SteamRep. The only indication of someone's trustworthiness is that warning in a Steam trade that this person might be a scammer, 

I'm glad to have gotten a response, especially one as detailed as yours was, but there was one thing that I disagreed with in what you said. There are many many more ways of indicating someone's trustworthiness than steamrep. For example, you can view someone's status on other sites, which happen to be much quicker than steamrep (IE outpost, backpack.tf) for bans. Using Rep.tf, you have access to all of this information at once. Steamrep is a great service, and it is undeniable that you have a foothold in the community that would take years for any other site to begin to accrue, but that doesn't change the fact that it is so slow that it does not really help anyone at all. Users checking steamrep because they are unsure about whether to do a cash deal with someone must screen through unconfirmed reports themselves, as there are so many unanswered reports on the site. If steamrep handled all reports within a month, even, that would be fantastic and would majorly improve my opinion of the site.

 

I really do like steamrep's system, all other problems aside, it's generally user friendly and the interface is clean and legible. However, in your comment above you basically made the claim that steamrep is the only way to discern a user's trustworthiness. But here is the key flaw in that: someone can only be marked after committing a scam. And most of the time, when someone does commit a scam, they are banned on community websites for that pending report/info that was provided to them in a report, so steamrep is behind. This means that exclusively checking steamrep and not other sites would inevitably lead to someone making the wrong choices and being scammed, or trading with scammers.

 

The only way to truly put an end to, or at least bring to the lowest level possible, the amount of scams and trades with scammers that are happening, would inevitably involve some kind of interaction with Steam, as only Steam can reach every user in a way steamrep cannot.

 

Steamrep claims to be a fraud prevention site, but in reality it is more of a fraud punishment site than anything else. Any trader experienced enough to be doing trust related deals would already know what to look for in a scammer to avoid them, and a mark would probably only further cement their opinion. The people who truly need steamrep's guidance are the people who have no idea what they're doing, but those are the people who don't know about steamrep. 

[polar]

I have two questions, though I won't hold it against you if they get skipped over in this mess (trying to hide useless posts as best I can).

 

ONE: I really liked something brought up here - http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/asking-for-an-update-edit-for-the-trading-with-scammers-rule.108726/page-2#post-303440- by SilentReaper: "This is the exact reason why there is the "3 strike" rule. And in some cases it does bite back with the traders that do a lot of trading, and we do try to compensate for that. People make mistakes, and while we're hard on the trading with scammers, we try not to mark for trading with obvious alts, unless we really have to."

 

Is this something all the SR admins / mods are on board with? Is this a message you relay to your affiliates? I feel like the rules regarding tagging people for trading with "obvious" scammers get taken very literally as hard rules. But from what SilentReaper says, at least he takes a lot into consideration with these cases. Is this just him in his opinion?

 

TWO: I'm actually curious about your policy of giving people another chance a year+ after their scam. Say a person scams or attempts to scam and later shows an effort to pay the victim back. A year later, no other pending reports of scams. How often do you see cases like this, and have you given people another chance? What about with people who traded 2-3 times with scammers, receive a full tag, and don't trade with scammers for a year? Would you downgrade tags that you handed?

[Crabislav]

What's up with LadyGyal getting away after trading with scammers REPEATEDLY? People get tagged after their second trade with scammers (or instantly if the trade value is high enough) yet she has performed multiple trades and just got a verbal warning for that like a kid at the kindergarten who spilt their milk. Either you should be treating everyone the same way or you should just stop getting people tagged as "non-trustable" for trading with someone who traded someone ... who traded a scammer. 

If your staff makes RULES for THE WHOLE COMMUNITY, then the staff itself must follow them. I'm not even telling you what to do not because "lol who's that black dot down below? why should we even care", but because you wouldn't really care anyway as SR earned itself a name back in the day and knows how to handle their stuff. The problem is that it was long ago and is no longer actual. This is my personal opinion based on my SR observation for several years. 

It takes something to live to the name, not just trying to rely on who you guys were used to be long ago when it all started. 

I have to say I still appreciate what you guys are doing (or at least trying to do) but you are just giving up. You really need to take a look at SR trading policy and hire new staff to earn yourself a name we all used to admire back in the day.

 

I'm sorry if this was stated already, just had to share my own thoughts since I wanted to long ago.

Cheers.

[Lava]

Its not hard to move a thread to the right section. Also this shows that you dont really care. I provided valid proof that your head admin indirectly traded with a scammer and all you did was close it. If you really cared you would have looked into it immediately and forwarded it on...not closed it

 

There are procedures which need to be followed. Some due to infrastructure, some for due process and integrity. Anyone submitting any kind of report in the general discussion board can expect to have it locked and moved to the archive. Doesn't matter who you're reporting, or who you are. It looks like Horse made an exception here as a token of good faith, which I probably wouldn't have done, but if you have concerns like that you're free to report them using the report form. You can't see it as non-staff, but I promise reports against tagged admins are flagged and prioritized, in case an admin goes rogue or gets hijacked.

 

True, Not even the SR head admin Mattie does, as mattie bought a $100 item from "cAre" using opskins as the middleman. They preach to us to check histories when buying (and have marked people for buying off scammers from the SCM) but when it comes to them checking it they dont bother

Proof: http://csgo.exchange/item/1334212680

 

As I said in an earlier post, csgo.exchange item history is not definitive proof. Items are often traded between multiple accounts before reaching someone's backpack. We'll see what Mattie replies with, but in the meantime I'd be inclined to believe he background checked a legitimate CSGO trader who himself traded with a scammer (or someone else who traded with a scammer), and his background search turned up no evidence that he was dealing with a scammer alt.

 

Also, if you don't mind my asking, why are you posting this from a brand new account, created today, with a private profile? Maybe you have some kind of legitimate concern, but I've made it pretty clear that we don't retaliate against that kind of thing. Not to get into the downtalk thing, but a TON of Reddit brigading took place from brand new private profile accounts, and there seems to be a lot of that going around with brand new accounts giving people a false impression of "majority view". In all of my time here, I've never seen anyone retaliated against for being critical of SteamRep.

[rafiozol]

ok, it's time to finally ask about this situation:

 

wayne traded with alts twice:

 

first for an eerie coffin that was around 60 buds when the trade happened (buds were 16 keys, so trade was ~$1500), actually no one knew about that, looks like op hid that case.

second for logo rack, being his second trade that should get him a caution.

 

fog guidelines (look for trades above $700):

 

 

 

both reports were rejected because op is already handling it (~5 months at the time of posting this)

 

to this day he has never been cautioned or marked besides being banned on op and bazaar.

[Toughsox]

Why have half the mods been inactive for months?

 

 

 

 

 

etc

 

Also can I see your privacy policy?

As for myself, it can certainly appear I have been inactive based on you looking when I am on the site, that much is true. It was pretty much a perfect storm of events for me. As I was brought on to Staff at SR, that seemed to open the flood gates of half the Mods/Admins in the TF2 community adding me wanting my help. 

 

At pretty much that same exact timr, 1st one, then a 2nd Head Staff member of Outpost left, which brought me up in the hierarchy there.  That entailed learning new things at Outpost, helping train new Staff members there, and add to that no less that half a dozen requests from SR affiliated Staff members per day asking for info about people banned at Outpost or, reports they are dealing with on other sites such as FOG .......not to mention Staff here at BP.TF which I usually speak with daily to help with people we both have issues with and there just is not enough time in the day to be in 20 places at once. Then, lets not forget that now that I do appeals, I have every friend of a friend of a friend asking me to look at this outdated appeal or report, which I do my best to handle.  Like SR, Outpost has many outdated reports that were assigned to people no longer on Staff. We collectively have been getting to each and every one of those as fast and as best as we can.  But it is in my nature to always push a report to the front of my list if someone brings it to my attention or if someone asks me to take a look. If anything, thats a fault of mine.  

 

Throw in bronchitis that sidelined me for close to a month, my family, my real job........and I STILL dedicate no less that 4-8 hours PER DAY doing anything and everything for anyone that needs help. And I do it willingly and gladly. 

 

Thus, the fact that you do not see me directly on the SR site for lengths of time may not sit well with some people, I am fairly confident that what I do spend my time on does help in the grand scheme of things.

 

I did not join SR for a title, but to do my best at keeping scammers off of TF2 to the best of my ability.  As time starts to clear and we get to the end of the pending reports /appeals on Outpost, I am positive that I can spend more time dedicated to only SR stuff. 

[polar]

ok, it's time to finally ask about this situation:

 

wayne traded with alts twice:

 

first for an eerie coffin that was around 60 buds when the trade happened (buds were 16 keys, so trade was ~$1500), actually no one knew about that, looks like op hid that case.

second for logo rack, being his second trade that should get him a caution.

 

fog guidelines (look for trades above $700):

 

 

 

Any proof on the coffin that he traded with an alt? Or that the alt was obvious? It's duped. To this day, I still haven't seen any proof of exactly who he received it from.

 

I also handled the bp.tf report on the rack. iirc, the user was not marked at the time of the sale and did not meet our criteria of "obvious alt," especially on a trade of that value. So Wayne doesn't even have a warning ban from us, much less a caution or ban tag.

[Lava]

That's not me. You realize how easy it is to create a steam account with the name 'Debra' in it? It is pretty clear from his typing style that it isn't me.

 

Right, I'm sorry. It was your "neighbor", who just happened to 100% support you when creating a brand new account from the same computer/household, and posting in our forums from that same computer/household only minutes apart from you, with the same name as you, in your friends list, with a private Steam profile. We don't monitor the webcam on your laptop, so maybe it could have conceivably been a neighbor who you're close friends with and felt sorry for all the "persecution" against Debra, and can only go so far in differentiating alt accounts in cases like that, but in your case it looks like a fairly obvious alt, and it definitely shares the same hostile, axe-grinding attitude as you.

 

One of the reasons I don't do as many reports (or appeals) as other staff is because I put a lot of time and undivided attention into the cases I work on. It really saddens me when someone innocent gets marked, and that's one of the reasons I joined staff here and then volunteered as an appeals admin. There are cases where I may spend several times what a single admin invests in a single report, and make sure there is definitive and irrefutable proof someone scammed or is a scammer alt. Having seen the evidence, if I were reviewing a case of this alt, and I hadn't recused myself from the case for being one of the only people on the internet to legitimately piss me off, I would have linked the 2 profiles and applied a tag myself.

 

In the interest of addressing people with real concerns rather than an agenda like yours, I'm going to focus on other people's posts here from now on.

 

It takes about 15minutes to read over and research each report..not only the accused but also the victim. I saw just last night we had two users reporting each other then arguing for about 20+ posts each over each report.  I have 8 hours of real job, family life, football season, hunting season.. etc... everyone is prob pretty close to the same.

 

15 minutes will do it for some posts, but some cases, often the ones I get brought into, can take hours. Hours or sometimes days on a single report, out of thousands. Count the number of admins, compare it against the number of reports, factor time spent on individual reports, then factor in real-world commitments (many of us work 40+ hours per week, have health/family issues going on, etc.) and it becomes very obvious why a backlog exists. If you have good solution for it, we're all ears. "Hire more staff" is a priority, and Clive has been doing a great job; we've even lowered the requirements for applications to be considered, but just saying "hire more staff so you can catch up with the backlog" isn't really constructive. 

 

If we hired someone who ended up being a scammer alt, or maybe had no clue what they were doing, then made them into an admin and they marked some innocent people, the community would (rightfully) fly into a rage. A scammer tag will destroy someone's career, and there is tremendous trust invested in our staff to make the right decision both procedurally and with integrity. Hiring new staff, for this position, where you only meet their "persona" on the internet, is exceptionally difficult.

 

I'm glad to have gotten a response, especially one as detailed as yours was, but there was one thing that I disagreed with in what you said. There are many many more ways of indicating someone's trustworthiness than steamrep. For example, you can view someone's status on other sites, which happen to be much quicker than steamrep (IE outpost, backpack.tf) for bans. Using Rep.tf, you have access to all of this information at once. Steamrep is a great service, and it is undeniable that you have a foothold in the community that would take years for any other site to begin to accrue, but that doesn't change the fact that it is so slow that it does not really help anyone at all. Users checking steamrep because they are unsure about whether to do a cash deal with someone must screen through unconfirmed reports themselves, as there are so many unanswered reports on the site. If steamrep handled all reports within a month, even, that would be fantastic and would majorly improve my opinion of the site.

 

I really do like steamrep's system, all other problems aside, it's generally user friendly and the interface is clean and legible. However, in your comment above you basically made the claim that steamrep is the only way to discern a user's trustworthiness. But here is the key flaw in that: someone can only be marked after committing a scam. And most of the time, when someone does commit a scam, they are banned on community websites for that pending report/info that was provided to them in a report, so steamrep is behind. This means that exclusively checking steamrep and not other sites would inevitably lead to someone making the wrong choices and being scammed, or trading with scammers.

 

The only way to truly put an end to, or at least bring to the lowest level possible, the amount of scams and trades with scammers that are happening, would inevitably involve some kind of interaction with Steam, as only Steam can reach every user in a way steamrep cannot.

 

Steamrep claims to be a fraud prevention site, but in reality it is more of a fraud punishment site than anything else. Any trader experienced enough to be doing trust related deals would already know what to look for in a scammer to avoid them, and a mark would probably only further cement their opinion. The people who truly need steamrep's guidance are the people who have no idea what they're doing, but those are the people who don't know about steamrep. 

 

Maybe I was a little unclear. I don't expect people to rely on SteamRep as the exclusive source for determining whether someone can be trusted. You should always check multiple sources, and that's one reason I love rep.tf.

 

What I meant was SteamRep itself provides an irreplaceable piece of that process. Few if any other sources put that same consistent level of investigation and fact-checking into determining whether someone is a scammer.

 

Yes, we are intended to be a fraud prevention site. In practice, we often get stuck on the punishment aspect, but I really don't see it that way, and that's not how it's intended. All the time, I have people harassing me about "punishment" and "justice" but the purpose of a scammer tag isn't intended to be punitive so much as to act like a warning label. If it were about punishment, tags would be temporary, but if someone has scammed there is very little chance that will be removed from their reputation, which leads me into the next comment...

 

I have two questions, though I won't hold it against you if they get skipped over in this mess (trying to hide useless posts as best I can).

 

ONE: I really liked something brought up here - http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/asking-for-an-update-edit-for-the-trading-with-scammers-rule.108726/page-2#post-303440- by SilentReaper: "This is the exact reason why there is the "3 strike" rule. And in some cases it does bite back with the traders that do a lot of trading, and we do try to compensate for that. People make mistakes, and while we're hard on the trading with scammers, we try not to mark for trading with obvious alts, unless we really have to."

 

Is this something all the SR admins / mods are on board with? Is this a message you relay to your affiliates? I feel like the rules regarding tagging people for trading with "obvious" scammers get taken very literally as hard rules. But from what SilentReaper says, at least he takes a lot into consideration with these cases. Is this just him in his opinion?

 

TWO: I'm actually curious about your policy of giving people another chance a year+ after their scam. Say a person scams or attempts to scam and later shows an effort to pay the victim back. A year later, no other pending reports of scams. How often do you see cases like this, and have you given people another chance? What about with people who traded 2-3 times with scammers, receive a full tag, and don't trade with scammers for a year? Would you downgrade tags that you handed?

 

I'll answer #2 first. The purpose of a scammer tag is not to punish the scammer, or to scare other prospective scammers away from following in their footsteps, it's to warn the community that this person has engaged in fraud, and is not safe to trade with. Generally speaking, if someone committed fraud, they are not given a second chance, no matter how much time has passed; however, each case is different, and handled on an individual basis. With rare exceptions, appeals are not granted for "serious" offenses (including PayPal or successful impersonation scams), or cases where multiple offenses occurred. Cases of misunderstandings, either provable or enough to give benefit of doubt or plausible deniability (e.g. unusual was provably already renamed and appellant didn't know it was fake) are usually granted. Cases like fakerep, paypal/bank issues resulting in accidental chargebacks, or impersonation without intent to scam can be granted depending on how the appeal goes. The last thing we want though, is for someone to appeal on a change of heart, get untagged, then have someone scammed because they thought after we granted the appeal the person was safe to trade with.

 

Trade-with-scammer appeals, if no other offenses and if it was accidental or they didn't know, are usually granted. "Change of heart" appeals are among the most difficult and time consuming cases to work with, because not only do we have to fact-check and cross-reference everything that gets said, but we have to assess character. Last one I did, I spent every night for about a week interviewing the appellant, people involved with the appellant, and consulting with other admins, from the time I got home from work until I went to sleep and rushed back to work again in the morning. Note, his offense was more than trading with scammers, but actually brokering for them with the intent of helping them ban evade, and the admins I interviewed were split down the middle on their assessment. I'd recommend reviewing the appeal tips if you haven't already; it's actually almost verbatim how we handle things and while an intimidating wall of text it will give you a very solid idea on what to expect from almost any appeal.

 

Back to #1, this is something all the SteamRep staff are aware of. There have been internal discussions about partners tagging for it, and possibly being too strict. Partner SCA's have been talked to, even with the threat of removed partnership or revoked access to backend database, but often times the partner tags are pretty black and white cases. Generally speaking, partners do tend to be more strict, and SR itself rarely issues tags for trades with scammers. If you do wind up tagged for a trade with a scammer, I would strongly recommend appealing to that partner in good faith, as such appeals are very commonly granted.

 

What's up with LadyGyal getting away after trading with scammers REPEATEDLY? People get tagged after their second trade with scammers (or instantly if the trade value is high enough) yet she has performed multiple trades and just got a verbal warning for that like a kid at the kindergarten who spilt their milk. Either you should be treating everyone the same way or you should just stop getting people tagged as "non-trustable" for trading with someone who traded someone ... who traded a scammer. 

If your staff makes RULES for THE WHOLE COMMUNITY, then the staff itself must follow them. I'm not even telling you what to do not because "lol who's that black dot down below? why should we even care", but because you wouldn't really care anyway as SR earned itself a name back in the day and knows how to handle their stuff. The problem is that it was long ago and is no longer actual. This is my personal opinion based on my SR observation over at several years. 

It takes something to live to the name, not just trying to rely on who you guys are used to be long ago when it all started. 

I have to say I still appreciate what you guys are doing (or at least trying to do) but you are just giving up. You really need to take a look at SR trading policy and hire new staff to earn yourself a name we all used to admire back in the day.

 

I'm sorry if this was stated already, just had to share my own thoughts since I wanted to long ago.

Cheers.

 

I was not involved in the case, but from what I understand LadyGyal made an honest mistake; possibly multiple (related?) trades before being reported, and admitted to it. This is actually a good example of how such cases are treated, or supposed to be treated. The rule is not intended to entrap people, and their intentions are given weight in the decision. The case appears to have not been touched for an extended time period, but an internal discussion was started very shortly after the report was posted, within about a day IIRC. Everyone can make a mistake, and a tag should not be applied for a single first offense. LadyGyal took responsibility for their actions, cooperated fully with SR admins, provided item history, and each trade was investigated. LadyGyal had no previous documented offenses, and was given a warning per SteamRep's policy on the FAQ page.

 

I myself would never tag someone as a scammer for a first offense in this rule.

 

I have to say I still appreciate what you guys are doing (or at least trying to do) but you are just giving up. You really need to take a look at SR trading policy and hire new staff to earn yourself a name we all used to admire back in the day.

 

Not so much that we're giving up, but admins are growing old, getting dragged into other commitments, running other communities of their own, and becoming less active, in a position of trust that's really difficult to establish over the internet. Admins leave or become inactive, but we don't have the commitment from the community to fill the void they leave behind.

 

There is a little bit of a morale issue though, with an apparent lack of appreciation from the community, and the unrealistic expectation that we handle every report we receive, and quickly - which realistically speaking can never happen. That and the constant Reddit brigades tear some of us apart as well, and then the systematic ban evasion (and people who still trade with obvious alts before getting scammed) and spamming garbage everywhere with sensationalized titles, leading mobs of mindless drones who don't even read "evidence" past a catchy title to hop on a "corrupt steamrep" bandwaggon (which couldn't be any further from the truth) against a group who takes integrity more seriously than anything else. It wears on all of us, and affects motivation, especially the ones who keep getting trade banned by Valve for fake reports, only to get the usual runaround from Steam Support, with a distinctive lack of appreciation for their work. But no, most of us have not given up. The morale is probably more visible in rude-looking replies to people who systematically brigade SteamRep from arrays of alts on anonymous proxies on every front they don't get banned from (hence they're usually spammed in the non-trading subreddit r/tf2).

[rafiozol]

Any proof on the coffin that he traded with an alt? Or that the alt was obvious? It's duped. To this day, I still haven't seen any proof of exactly who he received it from.

 

I also handled the bp.tf report on the rack. iirc, the user was not marked at the time of the sale and did not meet our criteria of "obvious alt," especially on a trade of that value. So Wayne doesn't even have a warning ban from us, much less a caution or ban tag.

 

trade of coffin - http://backpack.tf/profiles/76561197966756586?time=1412406000&compare=1412492400

you can see items being transfered to alt's main, choaski

second, i doubt op would display such info without confirming it

 

munch was banned on op for such a long time, i remember doing a lot of reports on people who traded with him waaaaaaaaaaaaay before his sr mark

[Lava]

For reasons touched on elseware in this thread, I will ignore any further requests to expedite investigations on trade-with-scammer reports/cases. I intended this thread as a way to help the community and establish a line of communication, transparency, and general awareness among traders. It's not intended as a way to streamline vendettas against traders who make honest mistakes. If you have such a report to make, you are free to submit it via our scam report form:

 

If you have some reason it needs to be expedited, you are free to request it be expedited through other channels (discussion board, PM admins, taking up the chain of other community admins, or whatever other means you have of getting attention), but I respectfully request you keep this thread as an open and level discussion of SteamRep, fraud, and safe trading within the Steam community. I do not wish to see this thread derail into a witch hunt where everyone looks for someone who accidentally or appears to have accidentally traded with a scammer 6 months ago.

 

One additional note, I would like to thank the backpack.tf mods for their tireless work in monitoring this thread. I know I kind of dropped this on you without any notice, and it probably demanded a bunch of attention you weren't planning on giving to a single thread today... hope it didn't cause too much in the way of headaches.

[Genzarata]

The CSGO crowd is a very large portion of the trading community, even larger than TF2. We're doing what we can, and over time the CSGO crowd is slowly warming up to the idea of SteamRep, but simply outright banning website owners for a community larger than TF2 and DOTA combined, then expecting them to ban scammers, isn't really practical.

 

I have an issue with this part in bold. If you can't hold CS:GO traders, even if they're website owners, to the same standards you say you hold for everyone else, namely TF2 traders, then I don't see how SteamRep's proposition can be taken seriously. Either you attempt to integrate yourself into the CS:GO community and punish the owners for trading with scammers, like I hope you would do for anyone in our community, or you don't touch the CS:GO trading community at all. You can't be half-in or half-out on this and there is no win-win situation.

[Lava]

Problem is that they are pretty conservative about this . They feel like they shouldn't hire people , as long as they feel strong and united, just as they are now , forming some kind of an in-game trading mafia .

 

It's not elitism or conservatism, but trust, and there isn't a single person on staff who is opposed to hiring more people. Would you feel comfortable trusting a random person from this thread with the ability to effectively permanently ban you from every single TF2 trading website and server out there, with a handful of CSGO and DOTA sites/servers, with the press of a button? Or maybe as a mod just the ability to ban you from the SteamRep forums while their buddy writes up a fake report to frame you and he sets it in "evidence provided" until he finds an admin he can convince to accept it? A lot goes into this process, and we're making some substantial strides in new staff applications. Our track record with regard to integrity vs abuse is pretty clean, and we intend to keep it that way.

 

To be honest 'not handling backlog cause not enough staff' is a problem. If you actually want to get through the severe amount of backlog, spend like 2 weeks going through people you think would be HELPFUL for the community.

 

These AMAs will be pointless unless you hire more staff.

 

Seriously, just hire more people you think would be a benefit to the SR community.

 

Why hasn't this been done?

 

Whatever the reason is, can't be more then the fact that that is the BIGGEST issue. Maybe stop spending time on AMAs and reports, and spend some time hiring more people.

 

More people = faster report processing speed.

 

Individual user policing is not our sole modus operandi. Our bottom line is to prevent people from getting scammed, and simply chasing the same alts around as they find more and more new traders, who receive their first explanation of what SteamRep does from a scammer himself, is like bringing a squirt gun to a battlefield. We need to tackle this with community education, and I found a bunch of misinformation being spread around the backpack.tf forums, coupled with vendettas (many from marked scammers), so I felt an AMA thread was necessary. There are a lot of people in the community who wish SteamRep would reach out to the community more often, and one of the consequences of our line of work is that as we focus soley on reports/appeals on our own website, we become disconnected from the community we're trying to protect.

 

I have a simple question to ask. What is SteamRep's stance on people immediately trading for an item that was traded from a known scammer, and the user was not yet marked for trading with said scammer?

 

By this i mean:

Known Scammer (as in marked for awhile) >trades expensive item to> User1 (who has not been marked yet) >trades said item before marking to> User2 (who has had eyes on the prize the entire time)

 

As stated before, we're fairly lenient about it if it's not a repeated trend. If you (or a friend) got marked for something like that, and gave such an explanation, I feel like you'd have a reasonable chance at an appeal. "Cursed" high value items is not an intended consequence of the rule.

 

That obviously is not enough.

 

Offer more off your free time to do what you applied for properly, a single person can easily handle 100 reports in an hour or two, and seeing as you got ~8 active staff members, it shouldn't be that difficult to shrink the backlog.

 

That is downright unrealistic. A single report can take anywhere from 15 minutes to several days. I don't know how you expect someone to read and fact-check that quickly, but we have to read all those chat logs posted, the entire post, any replies, fact-check statements made (e.g. reporter/accused contradicting themselves), check claims made in thread against public and private tools to see if either side is lying, and other types of investigation. A recent report accepted took about 5 hours to handle. Just one report, and that was after the moderator handled set it to "evidence provided". I provide just about all of my free time as it is, and unless you want me to start blindly tagging people with maybe a 40-50% rate of innocent people marked, I don't know what you expect me to do.

 

I have an issue with this part in bold. If you can't hold CS:GO traders, even if they're website owners, to the same standards you say you hold for everyone else, namely TF2 traders, then I don't see how SteamRep can be taken seriously. Either you attempt to integrate yourself into the CS:GO community and punish the owners for trading with scammers, like I hope you would do for anyone in our community, or you don't touch the CS:GO trading community at all. You can't be half-in or half-out on this and there is no win-win situation.

 

I don't see it as holding them to a different standard really. We have, and continue to, mark CSGO traders who scam, even those who run high profile websites; the only variables here are the community and the trade-with-scammers rule. When it comes to the trade-with-scammers rule, SteamRep itself has always been fairly lenient about it to begin with, and reports for trades with scammers have been treated with lower priority. The rules is not intended to shut down traders who don't even know what SteamRep is, and that describes a lot of the CSGO community. I wouldn't tag a newbie trader who got their first high-value item from a scammer, and I wouldn't tag a CSGO trader who didn't know what SteamRep is when they traded for their Karambit. We are absolutely working our way into the CSGO community, but like other communities we have worked our way into through past years, this takes time. It took years for SteamRep to get to where it is now with TF2, and it will take time to reach that point with CSGO. Expecting website owners to fully cooperate with this TF2-centric-looking website from the very beginning of their design process, many of whom (and their userbase) care little for, is not going to speed that process along. Probably the same for PayDay 2 trading. I'm speaking for myself here, but actively trying to police trades with scammers among the CSGO community, and tagging bots as scammers because the website owner isn't hooking into our API, isn't going to protect anyone. Maybe someone else will scrape through all the bots on a CSGO website because Samalex isn't banned yet, but that's not something I would do, and that's not a productive use of time or resources.

[Lava]

And that is the core of my point. CS:GO trading is completely unimpeded by steamrep, during the four months that I was cautioned, I had no one ask me about my caution, or refuse to trade with me. I turn down a lot of scammer alts, but very few CS:GO scammers are marked.

 

Recently, I was viewing the profile of a scammer marked over 2 years ago, and he had seven open trades on CSGOLounge (which means he'd donated, so he also traded with the bots). This begs the question, is Steamrep actually performing a beneficial function in TF2 trading? I don't really think it does, but I'll get to that later in this post.

 

I don't really think CSGO trading has suffered without steamrep. It honestly seems to me like TF2 trading has become viewed in shades of red, because of how overbearing steamrep is. It's not difficult to check for scammers now, but I think steamrep expects unreasonable knowledge of the community from newer traders. Steamrep doesn't affiliate with valve, so it is completely possible and even plausible for a person who was not involved deeply in any trading sites to have no idea it existsed, then end up banned because they didn't follow the rules. There should definitely be more accessible and visible guides to help people avoid scammers. If steamrep will have the power to mark people and get them banned from every site, then by the same token they should be proactive in making sure the rules are known. Had there been more of an attempt to inform me about scammers, and scammer alts, I would never have had a caution because I would have known what to do. 

 

I don't want to drop a bombshell here, but I've been saving this picture for a long time, and I'd love to see what a steamrep admin thought about the fact that scammers are paying Steam employees to have their accounts unlocked. Somewhat recently, Penek, a notorious scammer, told me that he paid a steam employee around 6000 dollars to have his account unbanned. It had a full community ban, as evidenced by this picture

 

The account has no community ban now, but it did in september. I saw the ban on this account over skype screenshare, it was dated to 2038 like all permanent community bans, to past the end of unix time. Basically it means permanently. After having been trade banned for two weeks before, there is no plausible reason that penek could have provided to steam support to trick them into unbanning this account. There would also be no reason for there to be a community ban that lasted less than a month, which this one did, especially after said trade ban. Unless someone can come up with a more plausible reason, I am inclined to believe penek's claims.

 

Penek is worth approximately 500,000 USD across all of his accounts. He remarked to me that he didn't care if his accounts were banned on steamrep, and that he thought it was funny, and only trade bans mattered to him. And he conquered those too. He's showed me trade histories that have high rep accounts in them. I won't name any names because nothing I say here will be accepted without proof anyway, but every account that penek showed me had instant spikes in backpack value after he claimed to have started trading with them. By simply keeping his inventory private, it is completely impossible for steamrep to have any effect at all on some scammers. It may stop others, but a considerable few know how to get around a ban.

 

He showed me a fellow scammer named Zer0, who apparently was community banned, but is now scamming again on a new account. Completely undetected.

 

My point is that SR really has little power, even with all of its powerful tools. I think people on the staff have the community's benefit in mind, but when scammers run rampant and are completely unaffected, and legitimate traders making mistakes are banned left and right, can it really say that it is helping at all? I just want to know what you all think about this. 

 

Sorry, had to come back to your post to try and answer everyone else's for a while, since yours was long. We are not affiliated with Valve or Steam Support, and we don't carry any weight with trade bans or the like. As such, we don't have any visibility over Steam Support cases, and cannot definitively say how that case(s) was handled. It's no secret that Steam Support leaves much to be desired, and that's being extremely generous. I will not confirm or deny shady practices like that within Valve without evidence. I will say that in a support environment like that it's entirely possible, and in fact any organization can have employees engaging in internal fraud like that or in various other ways, and if something like that is going on I hope it gets rooted out like I'm sure most of us here do. As for the ban length, it's fairly common not just in Steam Support but other trading websites to set permanent bans and then have the person appeal it. If the ban was lifted, it means someone at Steam Support, for whatever reason, removed it. I do know Steam Support sometimes gives second chances to scammers, if it's not credit card fraud and they actually read the ticket.

 

To your question about our "lack of power", I think that's misunderstanding our role within the community. Penek has a scammer tag, and I doubt it will go away any time soon. Unlike this suspected Valve quid pro quo, something like that would never fly around here. Our role is not to shut him down outright, but to warn the community about him. If someone checks his profile before trading, they will see him as a scammer. It would be nice to prevent him from profiting on stolen goods, but if we're plotted against a rogue Valve employee on the case, warning the community is the extent of our role.

 

No one gives a shit about scammers/trading with scammers in CS:GO. At all. Lots of people buy items of scammers, doesn't mean anything.

 

They usually care after the first time they get scammed.

 

If admins on other communities have experience on handling reports, then why don't they get a trial admin. 

 

Just shoving everyone as a mod isn't really helpful.

 

People who have the experience should be pushed forward faster. And can speed up the learning process by doing ' shadowing'...

 

I think that they should be actively approaching people, and not just wait for applications, because at this rate the level of dying seems out of hand.

 

If you or one of your friends feel you're up to it, you're welcome to apply. SteamRep moderator isn't really a permanent position, but more of a shadowing role. As a mod, you are constantly receiving feedback from admins who accept/deny reports you've processed, and after a while if your work is consistently of acceptable quality you are given access to the backend database and a green tag. There's also some shadowing and heirarchy behind the scenes among SteamRep admins too. By the way, in Horse's case, he already has access to the backend database for his own partnered community, Wicked Afterlife. He just can't edit SR tags... yet.

 

 

Before you blow this off, I'm asking a serious question and I am not intending it to sound rude, or sound like I have an attitude. Why do you almost never directly answer questions and generally are not helpful unless people detail the grain and texture of the situation down the smallest detail physical possible? For example, if I didn't provide an example in this post you would completely disregard what I said and just say something like: "Please provide an example of what you are speaking of." Not even addressing it. It just really always gave me bad vibes that you guys don't even have the balls to nip stuff in the bud when it starts rather than creating a bigger problem than what is set before you. Sometimes it's simple questions like this: ahola, on 16 Oct 2015 - 2:15 PM, said:

The answer provided by the staff member that dealt with it was this: Ð©Ä„ Horse, on 16 Oct 2015 - 3:06 PM, said:

THE QUESTION WASN'T EVEN ADRESSED OR GIVEN AN ATTEMPT TO ADRESS.

The staff member just created an issue that didn't need to be created. The staff member could have just answered the question by and stopped siutation before it continued. The staff member starting speaking about forum sections, rather than actually speaking of the content of the report. Also before it's brought up, I know another staff member detailed why, I'm just using it as an example of something that could have been solved WAY sooner.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your issue here. It looks to me, even from your quoted post, that the question was answered.

Question: Why was this post deleted so quick. Especially when your head admin indirectly cash traded with a scammer

Answer: Hello, I'm the SR Moderator that dealt with that post. It is as you can see a report that was submitted in the wrong location. We don't accept reports in the General Discussion section. If the user wishes to make a valid report with evidence to support the accusations then by all means they are welcome to do so in the Report section where we will take a look at it. Till then I CLOSED the post not deleted it and moved it to archive.

I highlighted and color coded the most relevant parts here, to match up different parts of the question with where Horse answered it. The user asked why the post was deleted (probably a loaded question, looking to stir up sensationalism, but I digress) and Horse replied in blue that it wasn't deleted. Horse explained why he took the action he did (locking and moving to archive), and explained that we don't accept reports in the general discussion board. It doesn't matter who reported it, or who is being reported, that's not how to report someone. Furthermore, Horse invited the poster to report the accused how anyone else would submit a report.

 

I'm sorry if I seem thick, but I think I'm missing something. What wasn't answered or addressed? To answer your general question, we can't address an issue if we don't have examples. If you have a specific question, then ask it, but we can't automatically read your mind over the internet to know what you're asking about.

[TheMightyPotato]

Why is SteamRep attempting to expand to CSGO when they cant even hold up with TF2? There are reports that go more than 2 years back! At this point, FoG is the forum of choice for traders, but inexpirienced traders dont know about it.

I believe Twilight said it may seem FoG is more equipped to handle reports, but it's only because they don't receive as many reports as steamrep does.

[Lava]

 

YOU LITERALLY JUST DID WHAT I SAID YOU GUYS DO. I was asking about why you respond LIKE YOU JUST DID. I used that as an EXAMPLE, like I clearly stated in my post. You have not answered my question and have drug it along further, also as my post said. If you still can't understand, I'll put in in layman terms. Why can't you just answer a question without inventing a way out of it?

I still don't understand. The question was answered. We can't answer a question if you don't clearly explain what your question is about. If you're using that "unanswered question" as an example, then it's not a very good example. Is there a better way Horse could have answered it? Is there a better way I could have answered your question? Can you elaborate on it? What do you mean by "inventing a way out of it"? I would usually see that as making up an excuse as to why I shouldn't answer, not giving an answer, or asking you to clarify the question. Is it because I had an answer for you? I'm making an honest attempt to answer all (or as close as I can) the questions in this thread.

 

Why is SteamRep attempting to expand to CSGO when they cant even hold up with TF2? There are reports that go more than 2 years back! At this point, FoG is the forum of choice for traders, but inexpirienced traders dont know about it.

Because it's needed. CSGO is rampant with scammers, more so than TF2 it seems. If someone scams in TF2 and/or DOTA, then gets marked, who is to say they will not scam in CSGO? Does charging back PayPal, or impersonating your best friend, to steal items from you suddenly become ok if it's for a CSGO knife? Most of the fundamental mechanics with Steam trading are the same between TF2/CSGO/DOTA and at least some of the game trading, and our responsibility is to report if someone scammed, not if they scammed only in a specific game. The game or type of items stolen is irrelevant beyond the fact that they were stolen in the first place.

 

As to reaching out to the CSGO community, there's a lot of misinformation there too, mostly in what constitutes reputation or common types of scams, but we hope to raise awareness among them to help minimize scams. Which also, by the way, would reduce the number of incoming scam reports.

 

As to the 2+ year old reports, as stated earlier in this thread, we cannot handle every report, and we make no commitment to do so. If the newest report on someone is 2+ years old, then they aren't actively scamming at this time and as such pose less of a danger than the ones who are actively scamming. That's not to say they are more trustworthy, but the person with 6 pending reports in the past week is probably doing a lot more damage than the one who scammed 2 years ago and hasn't signed into Steam for 6 months. It's not ideal, and yes some of them are probably scammers who should be tagged (and would probably have an appeal rejected), but that's why we have "unconfirmed reports" display on SteamRep profiles; instead of letting it go completely forgotten, if that person attempts to start scamming again then the would-be victim has an opportunity to see this past reported scam and make a more informed decision. Will they see it? Maybe, or maybe not, but if they're not even looking at SteamRep then there's little we could have done to prevent it in the first place.

[t0night]

what is the actual purpose of a steamrep mark?

 

i ask because there are much quicker ways to realise that someone isn't trustworthy that would activate at a lower level than a mark (-trust ratings being a great example; not requiring the same level of offense, but indicative in their own right; same goes for website bans and prominent profile features such as having low hours etc). to me, a steamrep mark is not useful as a warning not to trust someone because of how slow it is to apply. I can figure out who i can trust to trade without SR, at this point.

 

it seems to be entirely about preventing someone who has scammed from being able to trade effectively. it frequently absolutely fails in this regard as angel has shown with regard to penek, it fails utterly in csgo. if you solely trade in cs:go, and you know that most traders don't give a shit about sr marks; and more significantly you know that others have the same attitude, SR is powerless. what are you gonna do? mark someone, everyone goes, oh it's fine i'll still trade with you. you gonna mark all of them? go for it. where does it get you if they're still all trading freely and haven't actually scammed anyone?

 

in my view, to succeed in cs where valid item histories are harder to come by and general community knowledge and regard for your organisation is a tiny fraction of what you had in tf2, you're going to need to adapt hard. i think cs is too big for a collection of 20 people (or whatever the actual number of admins is) to have a significant difference; especially a positive one.

[ЩĄ Horse]

 

what is the actual purpose of a steamrep mark?

 

i ask because there are much quicker ways to realise that someone isn't trustworthy that would activate at a lower level than a mark (-trust ratings being a great example; not requiring the same level of offense, but indicative in their own right; same goes for website bans and prominent profile features such as having low hours etc). to me, a steamrep mark is not useful as a warning not to trust someone because of how slow it is to apply. I can figure out who i can trust to trade without SR, at this point.

 

it seems to be entirely about preventing someone who has scammed from being able to trade effectively. it frequently absolutely fails in this regard as angel has shown with regard to penek, it fails utterly in csgo. if you solely trade in cs:go, and you know that most traders don't give a shit about sr marks; and more significantly you know that others have the same attitude, SR is powerless. what are you gonna do? mark someone, everyone goes, oh it's fine i'll still trade with you. you gonna mark all of them? go for it. where does it get you if they're still all trading freely and haven't actually scammed anyone?

 

in my view, to succeed in cs where valid item histories are harder to come by and general community knowledge and regard for your organisation is a tiny fraction of what you had in tf2, you're going to need to adapt hard. i think cs is too big for a collection of 20 people (or whatever the actual number of admins is) to have a significant difference; especially a positive one.

 

You can tell the difference maybe.. but the mass majority of new players/traders have no idea. Any tool to get the job done better, faster and less painful is a tool I'll use even if I use multiple tools to get the job done whatever works.

 

 

SR Staff,

 

Of the people who have complained about the lack of staff, how many have applied to join the staff?

 

Here are the current apps
http://forums.steamrep.com/forums/staffapps/

 

I along with two others came on just recently, however I've been a part of SR since its creation along with my community.

 

But to I think answer the point/question - I don't think any that raised the issue thus far have applied.