Topic: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

Prompted by some recent discussions on trade safety and scamming, it is time to step up our game in preventing abuse, and making sure the deckbox community is a safe and friendly place smile

We now have a Report User button on user profiles, for those cases when you suspect someone is up to no good but do not want to open a ticket or a trade dispute. The message you submit will be sent to us; neither the target user nor anyone else will see it.

The current 3 categories for reports are:

  • Abuse - this is the most general one. It should be made when the user in question is rude, aggressive, lying or purposefully deceiving, or trying to take advantage of a person, situation or site bug for personal gain.

  • Scamming - Use this report type when you suspect a user is looking to scam others, or when you suspect the user is a new account of an older scammer on the website.

  • Lost Mail -  Use this report to let us know that the user has either said the mail you sent was lost or that he said he sent his cards but you did not receive anything. When someone amasses more of these reports they will be forced to always send with tracking.

Nothing will automatically happen when a report is made, we will need to read it and check the users history and connections before deciding on a course of action.

Needless to say, please do not abuse this system if you are simply annoyed by someone, it will end up working against you.


Feedback Reset

We are going to enforce neutral feedback in more cases from now on. They are supposed to signify that something was not according to plan, even though they do not decrease the trade score. They will be left on most longer disputes, and will be enforced by myself on other occasions as well (such as when someone marks a trade as a mail trade and leaves feedback when in fact it was a local trade).


Suspensions

There has been a wave of suspensions today and it will continue tomorrow as I finish some more reporting tools and statistics. User accounts that seem to be related to former scammers, or are remade accounts (to get rid of negative feedback for example) will be suspended (constantly, if they remake accounts constantly smile ). The better tooling should help with keeping everything  a bit more in line and provide better insights.

If you by any chance have been suspended but have done nothing wrong, please open a ticket by going to Help -> Support. It might be that I have made a mistake, it has been known to happen before smile


Thank you in advance for the reporting and keeping this community friendly and honest smile

Happy trading!

Last edited by sebi (2016-04-14 11:51:20)

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

2 Thumbs up from me

Profile - Haves - Wants

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

I need to learn to read better. Question was answered in post. Thanks Zyron

Last edited by valdor (2016-04-12 18:10:31)

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

valdor wrote:

Thanks Sebi., This is exactly what I as looking for and I greatly approve. As a general question, will there be some sort of punishment for someone that just sits there and reports massive number of people with no reason? I feel there needs to be to prevent abust of the system.

He did mention something along those lines, plus, he's (or someone else) reviewing these all manually I'm sure he'll notice that and be more annoyed by it than we are.

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

This is a great update, thank you for all your work on this!

Profile     Tradelist     Wishlist

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

This was a really good solution, in my opinion. And, you can tell that this was the evolution from the discussion you opened up for the community at large last month. Thanks for looking for feedback. The result is a much more matured, evolved concept.

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

Great to hear, thank you!

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

Great update Sebi!

Glad to see DB is finally taking a harsher approach to scammers!  I hope this has the desired effect were all looking for, which is to make the site better and safer.

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

These changes seem great.  Good job mods and whoever else came up up with them!

sebi wrote:

The message you submit will be sent to us, the target user or anyone else will not see it.

It might just be because it's past midnight, but I completely failed to properly parse this sentence the first time through and had to reread to the post to figure who would be notified when a user was reported.  I think a comma is too weak here.  A clearer rewrite could be

The message you submit will be sent to us; neither the target user nor anyone else will see it.

I hope I'm not coming across as pedantic!  I just think it would be nice to make clear that users will not know who is reporting them or that they have been reported so people can report others without fear of reprisal (unless they're abusing the system).

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

Thanks for keeping up with all the nonsense going on. I'm a happier seller with policies like this in place.

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

mobung wrote:

These changes seem great.  Good job mods and whoever else came up up with them!

sebi wrote:

The message you submit will be sent to us, the target user or anyone else will not see it.

It might just be because it's past midnight, but I completely failed to properly parse this sentence the first time through and had to reread to the post to figure who would be notified when a user was reported.  I think a comma is too weak here.  A clearer rewrite could be

The message you submit will be sent to us; neither the target user nor anyone else will see it.

I hope I'm not coming across as pedantic!  I just think it would be nice to make clear that users will not know who is reporting them or that they have been reported so people can report others without fear of reprisal (unless they're abusing the system).

You are quite correct about its being a comma splice (yes, "its" is correct, for anyone wondering, as it is a possessive before a gerund). Comma splices happen, however, and when they do the initial confusion you had can be widespread. I have my BA and MA in English, and I had to read the sentence twice for the same reason.

Pedantic? Yes, but as a fellow pedant and one who appreciates your having commented on it before I got around to it, I've got your back on this one. You were quite kind in how you mentioned it, too. I expect Sebi will take it in the light it was intended.

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

Fixed for clearer phrasing. Thanks guys for the better suggestion!

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

I love this site.  As usual, great update.

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Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

Great addition Sebi.

For Sale / Tradelist
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Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

Sebi keeping up hopes of a better tomorrow

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

sebi wrote:

Nothing will automatically happen when a report is made, we will need to read it and check the users history and connections before deciding on a course of action.

I'd prefer it if reporting the user opened a support case so that I have a record of it (in my "Messages") and a place to check for any responses from you, Sebi.

For example, I reported a buyer who might be scamming and I asked you to look into it before I refunded their purchase, but I didn't hear back... I had no way of confirming that your received the report (besides opening a support case for this and asking separately, which kinda defeats the purpose of the Report functionality...)

Profile | Cards for Sale

Re: Reporting suspicious users. Feedback resets. Wave of suspensions.

d72B wrote:

I'd prefer it if reporting the user opened a support case so that I have a record of it (in my "Messages") and a place to check for any responses from you, Sebi.

For example, I reported a buyer who might be scamming and I asked you to look into it before I refunded their purchase, but I didn't hear back... I had no way of confirming that your received the report (besides opening a support case for this and asking separately, which kinda defeats the purpose of the Report functionality...)

Hmm, this is true, in some cases it would be valuable to continue a conversation based on a report. I wrote it down and will get back to you on this issue after I finish a release planned for this week.