" Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it "
</clichéquote>
Since the reputation system is currently undergoing a lot of discussion in terms of what adjustments need to be made in order to set it on the right track, it’s only responsible that we’re keeping everyone, especially those who’ve only joined in the last four years, informed of the history behind the system that they’re voting to/not to change.
If you care to vote for what’s best for MCM, please do take the time to read.
In the beginning, there was no reputation system. Our reactions were named ratings. The "Winner" rating was named the "Vouch" rating. Your reaction totals are what our community members called "rep" and the number of reactions on your account is what everyone used to determine how "reputable" you are. It clearly wasn’t reflective, but it was good enough for a lot of people, especially the people who’d made this site their main place of business and spent their time farming reactions, and the majority didn't want that to change.
Being pre-released for an upcoming announcement, in early March 2016, nearly four years ago, a stock version of our reputation system was implemented under the name "Trade Feedback". At the time, tjrgg and Ajdin were administrating the website under Mick.
Bebosny foresaw the impending problems with making the system "deals only" and voiced his concerns to the rest of management, but the system was nonetheless implemented as a means to exclusively track feedback on trades, rather than collect opinions for gauging our users' reputation within the community.
Instantly, as predicted, it was massively abused with floods of users leaving feedback for deals that never happened and requesting the same be done for them in return. On site, in private, in 3rd party discord groups, the abuse was clear, and it made the reputation system completely meaningless. With the unspoken rule of "If I give you rep, you give me rep", the system didn’t measure how reputable anyone was, it just measured how much they begged for fake feedback.
It was an immediate disaster. Our tiny staff team was unable to verify every deal that was claimed to have happened via this system, and even though fake positive feedback may not hurt anyone in particular, it made it impossible to trust anyone. The system was worthless:
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/82497/
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/82324/
After a community vote, the Trade Feedback system was completely uninstalled from our website: https://www.mc-market.org/threads/82500/
The users who had spent all their time farming their reaction totals went back to being the most reputable on our website, and they all thrilled that the new system was gone.
It was this same day that Bebosny resigned from his position within the management team. He didn’t want to be a part of a team that didn’t listen to his warnings.
However, the announcement that the Trade Feedback system was meant to be part of was still incoming: https://www.mc-market.org/threads/85005/
"Ratings" got renamed to "Reactions". The "Vouch" rating became the "Winner" reaction, and a disagree reaction was added. Reception of the announcement was mixed, but slowly but surely those whose "Reputation" depended on what had now become the "Reaction System" became irate: https://www.mc-market.org/threads/85077/
You can decide for yourself whether or not the decisions were the best for MC-Market’s future, but its users at the time were pissed and wanted the changes to the reaction system reverted and left alone. Nonetheless, besides the removal of the disagree reaction from most of our nodes, the changes were kept.
At this time, the community was really feeling the lack of something to definitively call their reputation system, and suggestion threads to add something started being created: https://www.mc-market.org/threads/84351/
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/83020/
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/85139/
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/97095/
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/90502/
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/102969/
All of them, immediately shot down. The community was still feeling the shock of all the abuse and false negative feedback from the previous system, and knew that even if they were seldom reported, false positive feedback was far more rampant and made the system pointless.
During this time, Bebosny rejoined the staff team, and in April, he took over as the sole manager of the site.
Despite ongoing rejection from the community, the system was slowly added back, this time, under the name "Reputation System": https://www.mc-market.org/threads/112593/
And on June 28th, 2016, it was re-released: https://www.mc-market.org/threads/113091/
Besides the re-naming, the only changes were these:
- The system was for all opinions, not just deals.
- You could only give two reviews every 24 hours.
- You must be a member for 3 months to give feedback.
- More moderation
Again, users wanted the system removed, because all the old members who were considered reputable within the community seemed to be "on the same level" as users who had just joined.
Moreover, the changes that were made did not stop the abuse that was previously seen with the system’s previous implementation, and suggestion threads were immediately created to make the system "deals only":
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/174411/
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/110413/
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/171074/
Everyone had already started to forget that a deals only reputation system had already been attempted, but the abuse in that system was even worse. Worse, because feedback farmed and created for fake deals have even more weight in a deal only system and the people who are reputable in our community and using the system correctly have no way of obtaining nearly as much feedback as the people who are abusing in order to raise their totals.
Requiring feedback only be for deals doesn’t limit abuse at all. All the abusers need to do is simply claim their reason for leaving the feedback was due to a deal, and their feedback is kept. It was not uncommon for users to create alt accounts on a VPN and leave dozens of feedback on themselves for fake deals.
The real problem was needing to verify what interactions actually occurred and which interactions didn’t. Our moderation team couldn’t handle the reports on them fast enough, to ask for supporting evidence and remove any feedback where evidence couldn’t be provided.
Worse yet, only negative feedback was being reported, because it directly harmed someone. The far more massive amounts of fake positive feedback being posted and traded in the background never got reported, because the people giving it to each other benefited, and nobody could tell what was real and what wasn’t. Our moderation team therefore never got the chance to ask for evidence to support the claims, and so there the false feedback stayed, inflating the reputation system and making it into the same useless system it was in its previous version.
And that’s how the system stayed.
For two and a half years, our users farmed feedback and built up a sort of pseudo-reputation through this easily abused system, and our moderation team tripped over itself trying to catch up with it by following up with reports and asking for evidence to prove that the claims that were being made were for a legitimate interaction, deleting any feedback where evidence couldn’t be provided, and catching faked positive feedback and farmers, always failing to make a dent in the hundreds of feedback being submitted every day.
Until December 16th 2018, when massive changes were made to how reputation is submitted.
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/430921/
- 100 characters required in order to submit feedback
- A form was introduced forcing users to provide more than just an opinion, but also specify the actions a user performed to earn that opinion.
- The logic used to submit an opinion based on an action needs to be logically sound and relevant to the community: https://www.mc-market.org/wiki/reputation/
- And most importantly:
Authors of feedback are required to submit evidence of their claims and accusations to the feedback that they’re authoring, when they’re authoring it.
No longer did fake/farmed feedback need to sit on people’s profiles buffing their appearance in the community until a report was hopefully (though unlikely) filed on it, and a moderator asked for evidence.
Instead, users were forced to submit that evidence immediately.
The amount of abuse instantly dropped, and so did the report count and workload on the staff team. It was now incomparably more difficult to artificially inflate your reputation in the community, unless you wanted to go about spending the time faking an entire transaction every time you want to rep4rep with someone; and if you weren’t willing to come up with fake evidence, it was obvious to everyone that the feedback violated our rules and could be reported.
However, the problem of all of the fake feedback created through the old system still remained. At this point, it was a monster of a problem too large for our small team to tackle. Nearly 100k in total reviews.
Even if our community is now protected from the system being widely abused by future members, our old members have already spent the past two and a half years racking up an amount of feedback no longer possible to acquire in the same timespan by any of our future members.
Users who have been around a while have been able to take advantage of our underdeveloped and easily abusable systems, and now stand tall as the most "reputable" in the community; and they always will, because newer members can’t compete with the head start they got by using a system with essentially no requirements in order to create a submission.
The staff team struggled to come up with ideas on how to get all of the old feedback converted over to the new format requiring evidence, so that MCM could erase all of the abuse and inflated numbers that have been massively degrading the value and reliability of the reputation system. However, all that seemed possible was to simply continue to follow up on reports as has always been done, by manually asking for evidence and deleting any where the claims had none to back them up. Give the community enough time, and eventually they’ll have converted everything they could over, and the rest could be deleted, leaving the system clean of feedback without evidence. That was the plan.
At this point in time, it’s been nearly a year since the update, and in the most recent announcement, it was finally stated that legacy-feedback would be phased out, and that any feedback still needing converting should be converted over.
However, the reaction by the majority community was so strongly opposed, that this was forcibly cancelled.
This is what a lot of community members, especially those who’ve been here the longest currently want:
- Stop checking for evidence on their feedback
- Stop deleting feedback where they can’t provide evidence
- Don’t require that the old feedback be converted over to meet the requirements of our new format
- Keep the totals of the feedback not being checked, and count it the same as feedback for the new system.
However, this would not only require allowing content on our site which violates our current rules, but would also require no longer enforcing the policies that had been in place during the entire duration of the old system in order to fight back on the abuse. Specifically, the manually checking of feedback for evidence to ensure that it wasn’t farmed/faked.
Additionally, since there’s significantly stricter requirements in the new system, including the character count, the form enforced information requirements and the evidence: Our new members’ feedback, though of a much higher quality, will not be able to come close to the totals that were able to be achieved through the old system, when feedback was much easier to give, and people were much more willing to give it, especially in the all too rampant cases where the reason for giving it was completely fabricated.
These common demands imply that we must allow all remaining farmed/faked feedback to stay, and to count in totals as equal to new feedback in the current system.
Seeing this, but also seeing why this isn’t a solution, the staff team drafted a compromise to satisfy the older members of the community who don’t want to see their totals decrease, especially for deals/interactions which were real but don’t have evidence to support it:
https://www.mc-market.org/threads/544506/
This compromise would:
- Grey out the old system’s feedback instead of delete it
- Stop accepting reports or investigating or enforcing MCM’s policies on remaining feedback.
- Allow everyone to toggle whether or not they see totals inclusive of the old system’s remaining feedback, so when new users not familiar with the old system toggle it on, they get a warning giving them a brief summary of the abuse in the old system.
- Only display feedback totals on the page where the toggle is available, so everyone knows that the toggle is available.
- Provide a warning on the feedback page of legacy feedback. Likely nobody will ever see this, since rarely do people open old feedback, unless it’s negative, but it’ll be there nonetheless.
- Send out messages to everyone who’s authored legacy feedback with links to each one, encouraging them to update it.
- Enable receivers of feedback to upload evidence for feedback they’ve received, including the old system’s feedback, so they don’t need to rely on the author to update it.
However, many members still resist even this, which does only the bare minimum to address the outstanding abuse remaining in the old system’s feedback.
I see this as as similar situation to when users didn’t want to switch from using reaction totals as "reputation" to a real reputation system, because it would start older members near the same level as newer member. It’s a very valid concern. But given the abuse that occurred with the old system, I strongly believe that allowing what has built up as a result to continue to sit here, untouched and of equal standing for the rest of MCM’s history is short sighted and is only so strongly backed because the majority of the current and respected community has benefitted from using the old system where feedback was so easy to gain, and many people don’t want to watch themselves lose their advantage over newer members.
I ask everyone to please vote for what’s right for MC-Market’s future and the community we will grow to be, not for what’s most beneficial for us personally as old members of this community.
Thank you for your time and honest consideration.
