More ways to educate users about scams and scammers

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Brash

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Hey guys,

If I were to ask you right now what the biggest problem on MCM is at the moment, what would you say? Stupid trolls like myself? Shitty threads with little purpose? Not enough ranks? Well I feel like I am not alone in thinking that SCAMMING is a HUGE problem in the MCM community. Scamming takes away money from legitimate sellers and puts them into the hands of cancerous thieves. It is not only stealing money from legitimate sellers, but it is also stealing from the entire economy of MCMarket. Users that get scammed have less money to spend on other online goods, which effects everyone. Now some people may say "Why should I care if other people are getting scammed, as long as I'm not?" The reason you should care is because the entire MCM economy is losing 1 customer that may have bought something if he wasn't scammed. Now let me get into the main reason why I made this post. How to prevent scammers. Here are my ideas on the best ways to PREVENT scammers.

1. Educate them early.

I think to prevent scammers, the community/staff should focus on making more educational guides on paypal and paypal chargebacks, common scam techniques, and ways to ask for sufficient proof that the seller is who they say they are/what they are selling is actually theirs. These guides can then possibly be distributed by the MCM "Bot" when a user first joins and their can possibly be a new thread dedicated to scam prevention tutorials for new members. (Yes, I am aware that a thread like this already exist, but half of the tutorials are jokes, and no one looks at it anyways.) Educating users early on in their experience on how not to get scammed will decrease the amount scam and it will overall lead to a better and safer community.

2. Restrict access to certain actions until you have reached a certain amount of ratings/messages.

Adding restrictions to access to certain actions such as posting in the marketplace and pming people, will reduce the amount of obvious scammers on the forums without putting to much stress on staff to constantly moderate the forums. My recommendation would be possibly 10 ratings before you can pm people and 25 ratings before you can post in the marketplace.

3. Have frequent reminders throughout the marketplace to watch out for scammers.

I think just a simple reminder in the marketplace saying something as simple as "Watch out for scammers" and "do not scam" will probably reduce the amount of scam incidents by a small, but still important amount. This "message" can be provided by a sticky thread on each section of the market.

Thanks for reading this entire post if you have made it this far. Hopefully the community and staff realize that scamming is a huge problem that needs to be tackled at the source. If you have any suggestions to add, or things that you don't like about what I said, please comment your own opinions.

-GoodAdvice
 
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Mason

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I sent an email to Verringer concerning the censorship we've been seeing.
Closed scam threads shouldn't be hidden.
If a user is banned for scamming, their threads shouldn't be deleted.

Good post though.
 

Mason

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I honestly don't know why the DNDW list was removed, it helped so many people.
Lots of things have been removed that only hurts trading and selling, the ban list also being one of them.
 

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I honestly don't know why the DNDW list was removed, it helped so many people.
This list had about 10 people on it, from the day it was made to the day I removed it. We have a lot more users banned for scamming than 10.

I sent an email to Verringer concerning the censorship we've been seeing.
Closed scam threads shouldn't be hidden.
If a user is banned for scamming, their threads shouldn't be deleted.

Good post though.
Fair point, we'll have a discussion regarding this.
 
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