End Ex Post Facto Enforcement in the Reputation System

[Cal]

Ex Post Facto:
with retroactive effect or force.

Rule 9.1.1

Do not make any claims within your review which you are not also providing conclusive evidence to prove

According to Justis R:

The only thing that’s changed with the update is that submitting feedback forces you to include evidence, and we’ve added a rule to make it clear that claims made in feedback needs conclusive evidence.

Paraphrasing; prior the rule being added, staff were still retroactively removing reputations when proof could not be provided.

Why Ex Post Facto Enforcement Is Illogical
The retroactive enforcement of rules expects someone who previous had no obligation to provide proof of claims in reputation posts, to provide evidence despite having no obligation to have anything to show for their claims prior to the addition of this rule.

Personally, a reputation I posted on a users profile back in 2016 was removed as I was unable to provide proof of the reputation since, in the three years since I posted the reputation, I had entirely forgotten everything relating to and about the user and our interaction 3 years ago.

Ex Post Facto Enforcement of Rules Is Unfair
Previously valid reputations, that complied with all rules and were reasonable and fair reviews of an experience are now able to be removed, with relatively little effort on behalf of the user who recieved the reputation, and instead forcing a new and unexpected burden on the user who posted the reputation who, prior to this rule, was doing everything right.

Please, Consider The Following
With the impact of the reputation system on a users profile being significantly reduced as a result of this update, a once valid reputation now holds significantly less weight, and thereby the user who is now required to do extra labor to leave a positive review is not truly incentive to go through the hassle of digging up evidence on a long forgotten transaction to validate claims made.

This will inevitably lead to a large number of valid reviews being removed from users, who will no longer have consequences for their actions on account of apathy on behalf of users with no incentive to put in the work to bring a reputation up to standards they did not have to meet at the time of posting.

How to End Ex Post Facto Enforcement
Firstly, all changes since the rule was put in place will continue as is, no old reputations are re-instated. Going forward, reputation disputes on reputations posted prior to the introduction of rules 9.1.1 are not subject to those rules. The user and staff member may request that the reputation be updated to comply with the new guidelines, however, the reputation will not be removed if it does not comply.

A potential qualifier, as there was a grey period before the rule was put in place in which it was a de-facto rule by some moderators, is to retroactively enforce the rule if the reputation was posted within 6 months of the rule being implemented. This would provide a reasonable space in which a deal can be traced back and used to provide evidence, though it would be limited in implementation.

This will, if takes the pressure off the user who did everything right prior to this rule, instead making the rule one that does not put a new and unjust pressure on users who did everything right. Thank you.

Spoiler: Personal Note

I've been on both sides of this rule now, with a few old reputations I posted being removed. I have also used this retroactive enforcement to my advantage, and though it was certainly nice from the perspective of someone benefiting, the distaste I grew from the disputes that were not worth proving was a far greater annoyance.

 

[Lotus]

The intention of 9.1.1 was to make reputation more credible by forcing users to provide evidence for any claims they make.

One of your solutions is that 9.1.1 should not be enforced in reputation disputes for old reputation. How are we, as staff members, able to conclude the dispute at all without evidence conclusively settling the dispute? Evidence is objective, but you want us to let old reputation be decided on our subjective whims?

We cannot simply trust anyone’s word on the reputation system, but we can trust the evidence backing it.

I see you find us enforcing that belief on old reputation being detrimental for positive reputation, however, what about negative reputation? All of a sudden, everyone loves rule 9.1.1 for what it is. No one complains if an old negative reputation point is removed, but disdain spreads if we equally treat positive reputation in that manner.

I’ll make a rough estimation that 95% of old reputation violate 9.1.1. Positive and negative. How about a whole purge of all old reputation?

Controversial? Yes. It does hurt honest sellers, but this approach also squelches the dishonest individuals who ran rampant in the Wild West we had before where anyone could make an accusation without any evidence.

 

[User]

The intention of 9.1.1 was to make reputation more credible by forcing users to provide evidence for any claims they make.

One of your solutions is that 9.1.1 should not be enforced in reputation disputes for old reputation. How are we, as staff members, able to conclude the dispute at all without evidence conclusively settling the dispute? Evidence is objective, but you want us to let old reputation be decided on our subjective whims?

We cannot simply trust anyone’s word on the reputation system, but we can trust the evidence backing it.

I see you find us enforcing that belief on old reputation being detrimental for positive reputation, however, what about negative reputation? All of a sudden, everyone loves rule 9.1.1 for what it is. No one complains if an old negative reputation point is removed, but disdain spreads if we equally treat positive reputation in that manner.

I’ll make a rough estimation that 95% of old reputation violate 9.1.1. Positive and negative. How about a whole purge of all old reputation?

Controversial? Yes. It does hurt honest sellers, but this approach also squelches the dishonest individuals who ran rampant in the Wild West we had before where anyone could make an accusation without any evidence.

But unless the majority of old reputation is false, which it most definitely is not, then this hurts honest sellers more than than it hurts dishonest sellers. Much more, in fact, because a dishonest seller can get a rep whenever he pleases, and they can just add fake proof to the rep, but an honest seller might need days, weeks, even months to get that reputation. Old negative reputation should also stay, as the rep can always be disputed, and if there's no proof or substantial evidence to conclude that the rep was true, can be deleted.

 

[Landon]

This is a great suggestion Calvin! I agree on all points given throughout your thread!

 

[MTG]

This is a great suggestion Calvin! I agree on all points given throughout your thread!

Quality shit posting 101

 

[Landon]

I’m gonna bump this, as Staff expect me to have proof of a transaction from literally two years ago. The reputation system is entirely fucked at this point, any reputation prior to the update is pretty much invalid, and if someone cared enough, could get it all removed, because no one will care enough to go through years of chat logs for “proof”.

 

[Louwtjie]

Tbh, if had to deal with this so many times already. I don't even bother reading the disputes.

They should just delete all rep and start fresh at this point

 

[Justis]

Users were expected to have evidence of their claims since the very start of the reputation system. It would be requested by a staff member whenever they followed up with a report to ascertain whether the claims/accusations were truthful or fantasy, because the reputation system was widely abused back then. With the unspoken rule of "If I give you feedback, you give me feedback" i.e "rep4rep", and it didn’t need to be about anything, you could just make something up.

There's nothing ex post facto about it. Feedback authors have always been expected to be able to prove the claims or accusations they’re making on a user, be it for positive feedback or negative.
We added the evidence upload feature in response to the "It’s impossible to keep records for this long" complaints, to make it easier on feedback authors to keep hold of their evidence, and we made it a rule to upload it, to ensure that feature was being used effectively.

Our new and future members don’t have the advantage of an easily abusable system that our old members had. It’s not so easy to farm feedback these days, and so currently there’s a huge positive bias in favor of users who were lucky enough to be around when all you needed was a one line claim with no character requirements in order to give and earn a point. Users these days need to upload evidence of all of their claims/accusations, to prove that it actually happened. Evidence makes claims/accusations worth something after all.

This isn’t a response to the changes described in the announcement. Just a response to the implications being made by this suggestion.

 

[Doge]

Users were expected to have evidence of their claims since the very start of the reputation system. It would be requested by a staff member whenever they followed up with a report to ascertain whether the claims/accusations were truthful or fantasy, because the reputation system was widely abused back then. With the unspoken rule of "If I give you feedback, you give me feedback" i.e "rep4rep", and it didn’t need to be about anything, you could just make something up.

There's nothing ex post facto about it. Feedback authors have always been expected to be able to prove the claims or accusations they’re making on a user, be it for positive feedback or negative.
We added the evidence upload feature in response to the "It’s impossible to keep records for this long" complaints, to make it easier on feedback authors to keep hold of their evidence, and we made it a rule to upload it, to ensure that feature was being used effectively.

Our new and future members don’t have the advantage of an easily abusable system that our old members had. It’s not so easy to farm feedback these days, and so currently there’s a huge positive bias in favor of users who were lucky enough to be around when all you needed was a one line claim with no character requirements in order to give and earn a point. Users these days need to upload evidence of all of their claims/accusations, to prove that it actually happened. Evidence makes claims/accusations worth something after all.

This isn’t a response to the changes described in the announcement. Just a response to the implications being made by this suggestion.

I'd say I could find a lot of proof for my old rep.

But the thing is, with the current system, it is impossible for me to add it to the rep which was given to me without asking the user who gave me it to do it, and most of them are inactive.

Rep mods said they are unable to do this as well.

Are we going to ever get the ability to add proof to rep which was given to us?
If so, will this be before old rep is deleted and will there be an extension of time to account for this?

 

[Justis]

I'd say I could find a lot of proof for my old rep.

But the thing is, with the current system, it is impossible for me to add it to the rep which was given to me without asking the user who gave me it to do it, and most of them are inactive.

Rep mods said they are unable to do this as well.

Are we going to ever get the ability to add proof to rep which was given to us?
If so, will this be before old rep is deleted and will there be an extension of time to account for this?

This is definitely still planned, also, any feedback which gets deleted is always able to be restored so long as it will comply with our rules. The two week grace period was provided mostly ceremonially. You’ll still be able to view your deleted feedback and get it updated, even after the two weeks have ended.

That is not the extent to which we’ve been discussing options to make things easier for our older members to migrate either. It is not our intention at all to leave our old members without options and support.

 

[styx]

tldr: just agree cause it's cal

 

[Mick]

Back about a year ago we introduced some pretty radical changes to the way that we handle reputation. We made all reputation left by banned members be marked as uncounted in your reputation totals and disabled the reporting functionality to reduce abuse and targeted. The changes that we made were certainly controversial at the time, but looking back I'm a firm believer that the changes we made back then were the best that we could have made.

Our reputation system is very far from being perfect in its current state, and we fully recognise that. Since it's introduction we've changed many policies and spent countless hours developing new custom systems, such as disputing feedback.

At the moment we aren't planning to do any more development for our site until we can migrate to XF2. We're also not going to be making any changes to our policies surrounding reputation. Our system is stable at the moment, and making a change now when we're going to be redeveloping everything shortly isn't beneficial. Perhaps once we move to XF2 and have fixed all the bugs that come with that and have more time for some new development and to consider the impact that instituting new policies will result in.

Until then, I'll move this to denied. Once we migrate to XF2 if you feel that this is still relevant please create a new suggestion thread and we can look into it once again. Thank you to everyone for your support and criticism of our systems, it is definitely the best way for us to improve.

Thank you,