After many months we’re very happy to be releasing a new announcement with some small and large changes.
Account Upgrade Changes & Sale
Until today it was only possible to purchase upgrades from our Account Upgrades with Stripe and cryptocurrency. We’ve partnered with a platform called FastSpring which now allows us to ensure compliance with local tax laws and to offer a larger variety of payment gateways for Account Upgrades. These new payment methods aren’t currently available in our Ads Manager (only Stripe and crypto), but we have plans to roll out full support across our site moving forward. Gifting upgrades is also only available through Stripe and crypto payments for now. A few of our new payment gateways include:
- PayPal
- Debit and Credit Cards
- Amazon Pay
- Wire Transfer
- Alipay
- iDEAL
- Giropay
To celebrate (and test!) these new payment methods we are offering 33% off all account upgrades purchased through our FastSpring checkout with the coupon code ‘APRIL’ for the next 24 hours!
The most important aspect of any transaction is indisputably the agreement. However, within a marketplace such as ours, where transactions are frequent and conducted by relatively inexperienced individuals, that most crucial step is often overlooked, skipped or left incomplete. This leads to miscommunication, misunderstandings, breakdowns of transactions, losses, and disputes. At which point, our users turn to us for assistance and resolution.
Until now, MC-Market’s Scam Resolver team has worked with an unwritten set of policies for determining which user is held responsible for an aspect of a transaction when the involved users failed to determine that for themselves. As our policies are forced to expand, putting everything into writing becomes necessary, and when doing so, it is obvious that it would be to the community’s benefit if those policies were made public.
Publicizing these expectations allows the community to be aware of what will be expected of them if they do not specify a different set of terms for their agreements with our users. It also allows everyone to provide feedback on our expectations and suggest changes if they believe the community would benefit from a different set of default terms.
Most importantly, it encourages everyone to write out their own agreements if they’re unsatisfied with the contents, specifying those details with the other party. At the very least, providing a pre-written contract makes it simple and easy for our users to understand and agree to terms that offer each of them a very significant amount of coverage and assurance from one another.
The importance of having a comprehensive written agreement isn’t limited to just MC-Market. In the case of needing to litigate in order to recover losses or settle a dispute externally, the absence of a written agreement can mean a potentially straightforward case becomes impossible, and the victim walks away with nothing but wasted time and legal debts.
We hope that this Merchant Agreement will serve as a foundation for all of the resources that we are and will be making available to our community in order to enable everyone to more easily protect themselves and each other.
Remember that this agreement only serves to fill in voids where there are holes in the agreements between our users. If there are any terms which you would not want to apply to your own transactions, we encourage you to simply specify different terms with your transacting partners. Remember also that even if you want to rely solely on the Merchant Agreement, it is still to your benefit and the benefit of those you deal with to link them to this agreement and ensure that they are also aware of and satisfied with their responsibilities.
Avoid miscommunication, misunderstandings, and ensure mutual satisfaction in every deal.
Section Removals
For over a year we have been discussing why we believe it is beneficial to remove the Investments & Loans forum. Today we are taking this step to further protect our community from illegitimate loan and investment schemes by not only removing the forum in question, but disallowing anyone to request or offer any form of investment or loan on our platform. Along with adding investment and loan services to our Forbidden Products and Services Wiki page, we have also clarified that we disallow:
- Raffles, lotteries, or any other form of gambling
- Fundraising for anything other than legally registered charities
- TikTok accounts
Throughout MCM’s history, our goal has been to provide a safe and welcoming platform for people to engage in deals but also be part of a community. With that, we have maintained a strong no-tolerance policy to any form of discrimination, whether that be racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism or otherwise hateful behavior.
Despite this standard, there continues to be those who try to blur the lines between their so called "personal opinions" and discrimination. It has become necessary to clarify to the public that the act of disclaiming "support for" or "agreement with" anyone of a particular race, gender identification, sexuality, nationality, class, etc. is in fact discrimination and will not under any circumstances be tolerated on our platform. The only thing these identities communicate is the fact that these people exist. Not supporting or not agreeing with someone solely for these identities is merely communicating lack of support or agreement with their existence.
We will continue to remove any discriminatory content as well as issue a suspension onto anyone who violates our expectations even after this explanation. For those who find content which you believe to be discriminatory, please report it, and thank you to those who have already been doing so as we continue to try and protect all of our community members and create a mutually respectful environment.
Ads Manager Changes
As usual, we have made a few minor adjustments to our Ads Manager pricing on our stickies and featured resources to ensure a fair balance between our existing advertisers and others in the queues. We have also removed the Sidebar Square advertisement type due to a lack of interest. The changes we’ve made to featured resources prices are:
- Setups from $20/week to $15/week
- Worlds from $5/week to $3/week
- Graphics from $5/week to $3/week
- Schematics from $5/week to $10/week
- Configurations from $5/week to $10/week
- Skripts from $5/week to $3/week
- Websites from $5/week to $3/week
- Bots & Programs from $5/week to $3/week
- Other from $5/week to $3/week
Staff Changes
In the past whenever we’ve needed to expand our staff team to keep up with the rapid growth of our community we’ve released a two-week-long round of staff applications. Moving forward we have decided on a new approach of running our staff applications, which is to keep them continually open without a set period where applications are open. Eligibility to apply is based on several factors that are not public or known by anyone except our existing staff team. If you are eligible to apply there will be an ‘Apply’ button in your navigation bar and if you cannot see it then you are not eligible. We look forward to reading any new applications!
The gap between our previous announcement and this announcement has been the longest in the history of the site, and so there has also been a tonne of staff changes, including:
- Automating, Matty, Deleted User 108547, Note, Deleted User 24788, and Rj have been promoted to Chat Moderator
- Rj has been promoted to Feedback Moderator
- Ally, twinightcreep0, and Rj have been promoted to Moderator
- twinightcreep0 and Geek have been promoted to Scam Resolver
- Lotus, Kuchy, Aelin, Ally, and Energy have resigned from their positions
- XER0GRAVITY, Red, Trochek, Deleted User 24788, xdrien, aliensushi, Gilles, and Jdsgames have been demoted from their positions
New Wiki Articles
In addition to the Merchant Agreement, we’ve released four other wiki pages containing valuable information:
Confirming Identities
This wiki advises our users on the importance of confirming on-site, as well as how to ensure that conversations which take place off-site will be admissible in a scam report. As always though, MC-Market recommends dealing on-site at every possible opportunity.
Pursuing Losses
This wiki will be linked to all members who have been scammed with the hope that they will be able to pursue losses through litigation. However, the most important steps in recovering from a scam happen before the scam took place, so don’t wait until after you’ve received a loss to read this wiki.
Starting Out
This wiki will be provided to all of our new members and contains information on various resources and practices in our community and on our platform that every user should become familiar with. It also provides information on how to stay safe during deals, so even if you’re not a new user, do give it a read.
Resource Reviews
This wiki specifies our policies on acceptable use of resource reviews within our resource system. It is being introduced along with a new rule which will allow us to issue warnings on reviews being used inappropriately.
Our rules are often being updated and reworded in order to best serve the community. For this announcement, we have gone through all of our current and pending suggestions and took the input the community has made and what they would like to see reworded, resulting in the longest list of rule changes we have made in a while.
- Added rule 3.1.2 clarifying that content behind a registration wall is considered advertisement of the content's platform
- Added rule 6.7 forbidding misuse of the resource review system
- Removed rule 5.6.1 and merged its content into our Forbidden Products and Services Wiki
- Increased 1.18 from 10 to 15 warning points
- Increased 5.6 from 10 to 20 warning points
- Adjusted rule 1.5.2 to clarify when and where public criticism can take place
- Adjusted rule 1.9 to clarify how an English translation should be provided
- Adjusted rule 1.10 to Do not post content intended to mislead, lure, or startle users.
- Adjusted rule 1.11.1 to clarify staff applications are not included
- Adjusted rule 1.12 to clarify inappropriate content of all kinds are not allowed
- Adjusted rule 1.13 to add what circumstances spoilers are allowed
- Adjusted rule 3.2 to Do not attempt to contact staff members for non-shoutbox related staff responsibilities via the shoutbox. Use support tickets/reports.
- Adjusted rule 5.6 to state that forbidden products/services/activities are not allowed
- Adjusted rule 6.6 to clarify what content cannot be redistributed
- Adjusted rules containing “buy/sell” to instead use the term “offer/request/promote”
Other Changes
Other more minor changes that we’ve made are that we have:
- Added SpigotMC, Discord ID, YouTube, LinkedIn, ArtStation, Behance, Email and Portfolio to account user fields
- Added the relevant prefixes to the Giving Back forum
- Added a required identity verification field for scam reports
- Adjusted buying prefix to requesting and selling prefix to offering
- Adjusted social media links in account user fields to be more consistent
- Adjusted Domains & Websites forum to be called Domains & Established Websites
- Adjusted permissions for non-members to now be able to see the reputation of others
- Adjusted medals to now display at the bottom of the postbit
- Adjusted “Messages” in the postbit to now be “Posts” for clarity
- Removed the MCM Wiki page for being useless and irrelevant
- Removed Skype, League of Legends, Steam, Origin, Xbox Live, and PSN from account user fields
Mick
