Reputation System Suggestions

[User]

Yes, I know this is about the 100th of its kind, but this is quite clearly a big issue within the community.

I have one main argument, and that is: If you are removing reputation without proof and/or from banned members for the community's benefit, and the community nearly unanimously has stated on numerous occasions that they do not want it, it should not be required.

Reputation, currently, is being disputed and removed from hundreds if not thousands of members. There are good intentions behind it; to prevent false reputation. However, there are a few flaws with this system.

Flaw 1: If banned members provided valid proof, then the deal is valid. A member being banned is entirely unrelated to a reputation they left on a member. If they provided valid proof, and were not banned for anything that might suggest they were in the habit of creating false reputation, then the reputation should still stand. Say a member is banned for garnering too many warning points, such as Zelda. They did not scam out or create fake reputation, they just broke chat rules such as toxicity or spamming (most likely). Even if the person in question did scam out, how does that prove they would have created false reputation? There are many members of this community that are permanently banned on MC-Market, but still considered reputable and trustworthy, such as smuj. These users would have had no reason to make fake reputation.

Flaw 2: This is an incredibly long, unnecessary, and tedious process for staff. Staff are dealing with, as I said earlier, hundreds or even thousands of reputation disputes and removals at the current moment. Just one user, t-rex, has 40+ disputes and at least 16 reputation statements removed. While staff could be doing scam reports, support requests, etc, all of which the community has been begging for months for increased attention (which we have received; the backlogs have been significantly lowered, and we very much appreciate that), they appear to be focusing on, or at least giving equal share to, the reputation disputes that are widely disliked. The priorities seem to be quite misplaced, at least, in terms of the interest of the community using this site. (p.s, feedback moderation is good, I just advise against mass removal/disputing. It's more sensible, in my opinion, to deal with reputation reported as false by the receiver of the reputation.

Personally, I think both of these problems can be easily fixed. Rather than forcefully removing all reputations lacking evidence or that have been posted by a banned member, I think that adding an automatic warning/alert to reputations would be significantly better. Anyone viewing the reputation page of any member will be able to see what reputation statements lack proof, and which are posted by banned members. This can be done as simply as putting a line through the reputation posters name to indicate a ban, and showing a small thumbnail of proof next to the reputation. This would allow the members of the community to decide for themselves which users should be trusted and which should not, as we've been doing for the past few years, and give both members and staff more freedom.

If you have any objections, alternate ideas, or information/ideas to add on to this post, feel free to reply with your thoughts. I'll try my best to respond to all.

 

[Justis]

Do you know what sounds funny? They are making us provide proof of our reputation that is years old. They should only enforce the new rules on the NEW reputation. OLD reputation should only be followed by OLD reputation rules.

In the old system, if a false claims report was received we would initiate a dispute and ask for evidence in order to prove those claims to be true, however, more often than not, evidence of the claims no longer existed. That was a problem.
Our current system allows and requires the evidence be stored within the feedback, which solves that problem for all new feedback.
The old feedback still undergoes the same process it underwent before. Nothing changed there. You still need to present evidence, and in fact, we’ll ask you to add it to the feedback via the new form, so it’s not a problem again.

With the new system, if you’re unable to prove the claims, it’ll be removed.
With the old system, if you’re unable to prove the claims, it’ll be removed.

 

[Justis]

I never was getting AUTOMATIC request opened by staff with the old system. So maybe you're mixing the two right?[DOUBLEPOST=1565921972][/DOUBLEPOST]

And lets be totally honest, it's a pain for the staff and the community fucking hates it.

I’m all for wiping all of that violating feedback entirely, so that nobody’s bothered with those conversations. I know it’s a bother.
However, it would be nice if the individuals involved were given the opportunity to update it. Hence why it hasn’t all been purged yet.
If we make an announcement letting everyone know that any feedback which has not been transitioned to the new system will be wiped by the end of the year, I think that will have given everyone enough time to either update it, or populate their reputation with all the new deals that have occurred in 2019.

 

[Justis]

a) I can't even see what the deleted reputation was.
b) The reputation was posted years ago and I don't even remember what it was
c) I didn't keep track of any proof back then because the feature to add proof wasn't even implemented and I had no reason to record proof?
d) There is literally no button to dispute the deleted reputation, as it was just removed, no questions asked.

How on earth you try to justify this feature as fair with those four facts is beyond me.

The feature I was saying would be fair doesn’t exist yet. It was a suggestion for something else.
We have logs of all feedback which was deleted since May, so if you can create a support request, we can get those to you.

Perhaps we can get permissions modified so that users can view the feedback they’ve given and received even after it’s been deleted.

Again, maybe you should have done that before irreversibly deleting hundreds if not thousands of reputation.

Not irreversible. All feedback remains, it’s just hidden from public.

If we allow people to see the deleted feedback they’ve given and left, that resolves all of your concerns, yes?

 

[Terminated]

It’s absolutely unfair as it is now, being removed manually after we receive a report about it from a user that may just be attempting to target someone. That’s not unreasonable to consider a punishment. At that point, one user has lost feedback for a reason that many users have not, and thus they have comparably less. It’s unjust. Hence the current outrage.
However, if all banned feedback from all banned members were removed automatically for everyone, there wouldn’t be anything unfair about it. It would merely be one detail of how the system functions in consistency with its intended purpose.
I believe everyone would quickly get used to it if this were the case. Since the feedback would only ever be able to be removed one ban at a time, and bans for people who you’ve dealt with are as infrequent as they are, there would be no sense of great loss during normal activity once we’ve gotten the initial mass removal over with.

There was once a time when the majority of the community demanded MCM allow its users to do MC alt sale transactions here if they wanted. Saying yes would have pleased everyone, but we said no, and now the community is both a better place because of it, and whenever a suggestion pops up about changing that, everyone is quick to shut it down, because the majority now realize that the change and all of its subtle implications would not be good for the community.
This is not always the case. As I said in my response to Doge, more often than not what’s good for the individual is good for the community. More often than not. However, when I see a proposition which contradicts the purpose of the thing which is proposed to be changed, red flags go up. Mitigating the effects of the fact that a contradiction was introduced won’t change the fact that a contradiction was introduced. Contradictions within a system are the identifier of a mistake, a wrong choice. Regardless of the short term positivities it was hoped to preserve and maybe even successfully preserved.

Honestly stop banging on about the "intended purpose" of the system. If removing banned and feedback with no evidence was intended as a key part of the reputation system then it should have been done from the outset, or not at all. Pissing people off at a later stage because of things they cannot control is stupid.

While i agree that right now it is very targetted and removing everyones would make it fair, isnt this the exact same for if it was there? The intended purpose of the system was not adhered to for years so why now after all this time piss off the WHOLE community while trying to implement something when that something doesnt make a difference to the reputation system as it is all relative. It is just a massive dick move and an attempt to make reputation worth more than it is in my opinion and it just isnt needed.

Banned users were a member of the community when they made the reputation, therefore unless it doesnt have proof, it is completely valid. Obviously it is not ok for them to add new reputation as this is only for community members and theres not any reason for them to change their opinions on the user as members who are still a part of the community can notify people of a bad experience if it exists.

I am going to ask the question again. Why punish the whole community for something that is out of their control?

 

[User]

Justis
You say the community only wants what is best for themselves; however, if the 95% of the community also wants that, it's not a few selfish people wanting something specifically for themselves, it's a large majority requesting a somewhat simple change.

You also said "banned users are, by majority, the most observably intolerant of other people, and prior to having been banned, are among the most toxic and willing to abuse a system."
In a real justice system, if a man was arrested for, say, burglary, you wouldn't then also charge him for aggravated assault or money laundering just because he's "more likely" to commit those crimes, would you? Then why, on MCM, would you suggest that all banned members are guilty of creating fake rep?

Finally, you said "banned users... do not have the ability to update their feedback for the users they’ve interacted with, should their opinions of our users change. [T]hus, the feedback which remains, which is supposedly a reflection of their opinions of our users, ceases to serve its purpose as a reflection of their opinions."
I would agree with you if this was purely based on opinion, but reputation on the site is overwhelmingly given for business. As business is based on fact (e.g "sold me an account/service, was satisfactory to me, took X amount of time"), there should be no reason to remove these reputations. The only business-related case I can see where this would be sensible is one in which the unbanned member pulls an account from a banned member; in every case of this I've seen, though, the banned member creates an account to evade, posts the proof and claims in general discussion, and alerts the community. Even with reputation removed from them, they will still continue to do this.

Again, I do see the benefits of this system, but I think it needs to be done better (which you clearly agree on) and that even then, the community might still hate it; we'll have to wait until the changes are actually implemented, if ever.

 

[User]

forgot I made this, thanks for agreeing Hero! b u m p

 

[Mick]

At the moment I'm going through a number of suggestions, and a lot of them were created regarding the reputation updates that we published and later rescinded. We now have a system where we consider some reputation to be 'legacy' and that reputation does not count toward reputation totals, and overall I feel like now a lot of people are satisfied with this system.

There were a tonne of suggestion threads created during this time, all with very valid criticism of our updates, and I believe that the reputation system we have now is even better because of that so thank you for that.

I'll move this to denied now, along with the rest of the suggestions made on this topic at this time, thank you.