[APPROVED] Sythe vouch's correct counting

100% support, I've brought this up before because I've had to clear up three disputes about this already. I'll see if I can streamline this.

 

Offsite vouches have seemingly become recognised on sythe now an example being chicks’s threads. This was approved by rich. So the “correct” amount is a combination of every Vouch ever collected across all forums? Idk lol

 

vouch threads are just confusing in general. It would be much easier if everyone had the customer post on the vouch thread directly which would make it crystal clear rather than having a bunch of quote boxes and the actual post being lost in your service pages.

 

When I was on staff i made an effort to discontinue that. However, if Sythe himself has allowed it, then you're fighting an uphill battle there.

 

Might be an uphill battle, but when the admin team, excluding matthew and sythe agree that it shouldn't be that way richard will let it be. On the other hand, I support this and I don't, on one hand you could have 2k vouches, and really be tired of posting them, so you could gyazo the ones you have and delete them, idk if staff would accept that as viable proof, it just keeps threads cleaner. On the other hand, some people add every single one, which is nice. So you don't want to put their work to shame by allowing people to just delete and add new ones. I will support though, probably safer and faster in the long run.

 

Unless he's changed over the past couple years, he doesn't really care what the staff/admin team think.

In either regard, support because you shouldn't be able to make a claim without proof of the claim.

 

See now - This is easy for people like @Charlotte to support because I've never publicly seen her have to suffer the pain that what your suggesting would cause(At least, in public, she may of privately).

Right now my vouch thread has between 1700-2250 on it, but my vouch thread doesn't count hundreds of threads that have been up for years or that are years old - In reality my vouch count numbers (likely, estimate) between 3000-5000 strong.

Back years ago I had an incident of saying 1500+ vouches but I only had 100 on my vouch thread, as it turns out, I actually got reported and let me just stress this;

3 staff and I had to spend 12 hours(3 DAYS) going through the archives and pulling over 120-150 threads at the time(NO EXAGGERIATION)

The staff involved literally said they would never handle/do such a case again, that's how long it took and how many tens of thousands of threads the four of us went through together.

Your suggestion is that for every gold site ever that claims vouches to only use whats on their vouch thread - Do you know the scale in which your suggesting?

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF THREADS would have to be combed through by staff everytime a report came up, the sheer volume of work is so staggering to think about just for myself let alone everyone else, Staff could literally still be looking through threads until fucking Christmas, this is such a waste of staff time for something that is such a minor issue(I doubt even 10 reports a year are made on this subject).

I shudder to even think about the amount of resources and time that would have to be dedicated to go through some of the older gold sites threads, some gold sites have hundreds of threads they've remade over the years hundreds of pages deep.

This would be a fucking NIGHTMARE, Beyond a nightmare.

I mean I literally shudder at the thought of someone like arcus or food4rs or someone who claims 10k+ vouches but only has 1,000 on their actual vouch thread, they literally have 100+ threads with probably 100 pages each, that's 10,000 pages to go through for 1 report!

This is so unfeasibly large that its almost borderline insane. Unless @Charlotte is volunteering to commit hundreds of hours going through a borderline insane level of pages to count vouches and keep track of them, I NEVER see the amount of time/resources required as being worthwhile ever. There's a reason this has never been done, its a unbelievable amount of waste of staff resources and time for something that might be an issue once a month.

NO, NO, NO SUPPORT.

 

We are aware this may be more than a headache and a half but if it is a recurring problem there's nothing wrong with implementing something from a point forward. I myself have had to go thru three separate cases of this before which is WHY implementing this would relieve stress in the FUTURE. No one is saying hunt down hundreds of threads but it can be a "from now on" thing to prevent headaches in the future. I entirely think that is totally reasonable.

Also - I get that I'm not big into the market, but I am huge into disputes as a mod/admin and I've spent many hours myself simply dealing with other members' issues - rather than using this site for my own benefit.

 

Going through a dozen reports or pages for a dispute or pardon and discussing them is a far cry from some of the cases that could occur here, we are talking about cases that without exaggerating could be 100x as large as a normal pardon or dispute, Do you have any idea how mind-numbing it is to go through literally thousands of pages and keep a count of vouches per page in a notepad and then once u finally get to the end have to add them all up then go post and conclude and discuss a report?

Just take my opinion on this one - I don't even claim vouches in thread titles/threads anymore - I can remember voice calling and going over the threads and going through the archives with 3 staff over a period of three - four days - it was borderline one of the most mental, mind numbing experiences of my life, please don't subject staff to ever having to do that or being forced to, this is such a waste of time and staff resources.

The people this is targeted towards are big traders - Guys who are trusted beyond anyone caring what their vouch count is - At the very least if your going to be a pain about this at least add a term where after the first 1,000 your allowed to claim whats off your vouch thread or something.

There is no reason to piss away the amount of staff resources this would require when most of the people in question would likely be trusted beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I can already see the griefing reports being made against every gold site whos pissed someone off, hundreds of thousands of pages would have to be combed through - Something not even feasible.

There's a reason this has been shot down every time in the past but I'd like to hear @Sythe thoughts on the matter.

 

What I'm trying to tell you, time is already taken to do this - still. I had to deal with one of these today, which is why this is important. This is the third time. The first time I had to deal with this it took about three days as well. It wasn't fun. Granted, it's not really at the mods expense to resolve these things, whereas it's more the person in the dispute to resolve it and compile everything, then a mod can review, but I've been caught up in putting in the hours as well. Reviewing them too is a bitch.

And these three instances weren't big shops - I haven't had a problem of anyone being reported for having fake/wrong number of vouches on their thread if a shop or anything.

 

The day you start saying that anyone can make a report for this and staff will put in all the man hours to actually try to handle the report and count thousands of pages, is the day that you went to far.

Its suppose to be on the person whos vouches they are claiming - I agree with you. That's not how it is in reality - Someone with 5 threads? 10? Sure. Realistic for them to go through, maybe count 300-400 pages, it would be a huge pain but is possible.

A gold shop though? Someone like myself who now has literally over 25,000 thread pages? That's infeasible for any single person to do, I would be counting for the next month literally.

So you either have to say staff will do the work on my behalf, Staff and I will work together to do it, or I have to do it on my own.


Option #1 for staff to do it is a huge waste of resources
Option #2 is a faster way but still a massive waste of staff resources/ my time
Option #3 is infeasible, if I got reported tomorrow because I claimed 4,000 vouches somewhere but my thread only has 2,000, Its so unrealistic to go count my gold threads dating years back and my current ones that are 500 pages deep, This isn't even viable on scale to be done by 1 person.

OR you just handle it on a very limited case by case basis and you don't give everyone the ability to take 5 minutes preparing a short ass report that then takes 100 hours of staff resources and my time to resolve.

(I am using me as an example, there are traders WAY larger than me).

Yes staff resources are occasionally wasted still - Like I said a report might crop up once a month(their not common), that is a FAR CRY from the shitload you'd release by letting people know they can spend 5 minutes making a report and cause a fucking disaster of work for a gold site or staff - Which will happen and is NOT worth it.

 

Again, this could be more of a "from here on out" thing when it boils down to unrealistic expectations for situations as you have explained.

 

Support. (for a slightly different reason).

Although my gold topics also have vouches on, It's annoying when bigger merchants can simply bribe their customers with rsgp to post vouches on their topics (aka bumping them constantly). (aka Arcus).

I don't really see the point in the vouch thread section if people only record up to a certain amount, and then just not bother. When this happens, "vouches" become nothing more than a loophole to the 8 hour bump rule.

I have 1000+ feedback on powerbot, a few hundred on smaller markets, and tens of thousands of feedback on my amazon and eBay profiles. If I really wanted I could lie in my titles and be like "20,000 vouches".

 

I believe this is a great idea, makes it easier for newer users to understand how many vouches one person has
@Divine who cares what you think it's better for community.
#support

 

When a business doesn't revolve around just Sythe this rule is cutting them short.

No support.

 

Gish gallop - Wikipedia
Support, but in the case of large gold sellers it’d be hard to count every vouch when they have so many threads and vouches from different parts of the site.

 

No support. Offsite vouches are fine if they can somewhat document it.

 

Not sure what you mean by this. If they want a vouch on Sythe, it inherently 100% revolves around Sythe (even if they have a website or Discord or whatever else).

I’d say just collect them once a day. You can mass-quote with the +quote button and compile them easily. It’s not that hard, it would take a few minutes at most even for big shops.

Offsite vouches are not fine.

——
With going backwards to collect previous vouches, if shops aren’t specifically saying, “3,000 feedback” I don’t really see an issue but we would just need to include vouches thereafter. If someone is claiming 3,000 feedback and they’re a big shop, how are they so sure if they aren’t keeping exact track? At that point it’s just an assumption or an estimate based on transactions but clearly there is no way to know, otherwise they would have quoted their vouches.

I went to the gold sale section and the first thread I clicked on was one for 1,100 vouches. I click on their vouches page: the correct amount was ACTUALLY on the vouch thread. Cool, right?

I click on another thread for 4,000 vouches. I go to their vouches page. It shows 1021 in the OP (from what I’m assuming are from other threads) and an additional 640 on the actual vouch thread. That’s saying there are over 2,000 freely on other threads that were, I guess, decided to be too hard to keep track of due to busyness but if someone were to say, “hey I think they might be lying because they’re showing less than half of what they claim,” what would staff do next? Where did they get the 4,000 number from?

To avoid this, I think having vouches all quoted in the vouch thread is absolutely necessary.