[Denied] Market thread vouches are causing faulty/misleading search results.

Hey everyone, Exoticz here.

I've done business with quite some people here on Sythe, and sometimes i stumble across some things. Usually i don't bother making a thread about it, but since i'm trying to get more involved with the community and this actually has been bothering me, i figured it wouldn't hurt to make one for this instance.

I hope we are all familiar with the new Sythe bumping rule. If you're not and you're active in the market place, i'd suggest you take a look here.

The new bump rule implies that when someone sells/buys 07 or Rs3 gold to/from you, that person is now allowed to leave a vouch on your market thread, so it functions as a vouch and a "free" bump (which has to be worked for, hence the quotation marks).

This caused something interesting, which i will show you here:





As you all can see; Nothing about rsgm pops up (not even when you scroll down more, on the first and second page atleast). Now i'm not trying to get to Mustang here .. but it's quite clear that this mechanic could potentially be abused to gain more traffic for gold sales.
Devil explained to me that Mustang must have quoted a lot of vouches from rsgm on to his vouch thread, in such a large quantity, that it's the first thing that pops up when you look for "rsgm" or "rsgm sales".

What Mustang did here is not against the rules, but i would like to see if it's possible to get this mechanic removed, it just looks ugly and it's not really fair for @RSGM Sales in my opinion.

Thank you for listening to my ted talk, Andy drinks milk from a bag.


~ Exoticz

 

I am still a little confused about what exactly you are suggesting? You want to get rid of the new bumping rule or change the search results? If you need to search a specific player, as you did above, instead of using the first search section use the second that says "Posted by Member:"

And after doing more research, it was both RSGM and Mustang who have contributed many posts on Mustangs Vouch thread.

I also do not understand how it looks bad for RSGM, are you saying that new users are using the search bar typing in rsgm sales looking for gold? That would be the only way he is losing out in my opinion.

 

Firstly i'd like to reply to your last sentence: Yes, that is exactly what i am trying to say. Also, it's not about rsgm and Mustang here, this is between them (if there even is "anything between them"). I just gave my opinion and used them as an example.

I am not suggesting to remove the new bump rule, i have not talked about that once. I would not know how this could get fixed since i'm not a dev type of guy, but a solution might be possible, who knows. I personally didn't know you could search for specific members on Sythe as well, i only found out a couple weeks ago. I think many Sythe users may not know either, but i could be wrong.

What i've been trying to point out, is that when someone posts a lot on someone's threads it might lead to inaccurate search results (Mustang in this case, not one but two pages). I'm talking from personal perspective here, but if i were to join a new website and i would want to look for Alch.com for example and all that would come up is a vouch thread of someone totally different, i'd get either sketched out or have a lot of questions. The thing is also that; for now it isn't a problem, because it isn't being abused. What if someone does have the incentive of abusing this mechanic into getting themselves more traffic, knowing most (especially new) Sythe users won't know how to look for a specific member.

Besides all of the above, thank you for your feedback. I understand what you're trying to say, yet i do hope you understand me a little better now.

 

I don't see the problem here.

Quoting someone's vouch is a very reasonable thing to do on your vouch thread. Search results return recent mentions of a phrase on Sythe. So while some posts may be double-counted in search results, I don't see how this could be abused in a way that is unfair or misleading.

Note you can also select "display results as threads" (and many, many other options) in the advanced search menu to consolidate things a little bit. See Search Threads and Posts | Sell & Trade Game Items | OSRS Gold | ELO

 

That is a clear answer, thank you. Considering you're a mod with far more knowledge than me on these things, i'd say this is not going to be a problem then. :hat: