[Denied]More detail on donation timing

Like it or not, users associate donation tiers with trustworthiness, and this thread - Scam Rate vs Donation Tier - is a recent example of that. There have, however, been cases of people obtaining high donation tiers quickly and promptly using the trust associated with those ranks to scam people. There is also no way to differentiate between a user who has donated enough to achieve a tier six days ago vs. six years ago, which feels a bit unfair to those who have been part of the community for several years.

My suggestion is essentially an expanded version of what I posted on that thread:

I'm not sure of the best way to provide this information, but perhaps, when hovering over a users's donation rank, you would get a tooltip box (similar to what you get when hovering over miniranks to see their names) saying:
"Has been a $xxx donor for xxx days"
"Was previously a $yyy donor for yyy days"
"Was previously a $zzz donor for zzz days"

The goal of this is simply to provide more information to help users make informed decisions. It's not to promote older users over newer ones or to stick it to users with custom donation ranks. As a result, the number of "rows" of information in the pop-up would be user-selected, so if I only wanted to show my top two rows, only the "x" and "y" rows would appear. If I wanted to show all my rows since achieving $5 donor status, I could do that too. Users with custom donation ranks would be allowed to show the standard $100, $200, $500, etc. ranks plus a custom rank that is the total they have donated.

In terms of implementation,

Thoughts?

 

I’ll save you the trouble and let you know now that things that take money out of the website or inhibit users from donating will never pass. Vaders are a nice stream of revenue for the website whether anybody likes to admit it or not and this will just make some of them not donate which funds the website a lot less. So although it’s a good idea on paper, this suggestion is a waste of time and effort. Sythe.org needs ban evaders and scammers to survive.

 

I like this, it sad seeing how many people use the donor system to scam quit and make profit off scamming people, would be cool if something like this was to be done!

 

If anything, I feel like this would encourage donations. Users might need to donate a little sooner in advance of scam-quitting, but those donations will still come through. Normal users not intending to scam-quit will also be incentivized to donate up to higher tiers if they're between, say, $100 and $200 as there'd be nothing to show for it. I know I'm between donation tiers and am sure many others are as well.

And if this does discourage scam-quitting in the end (which is the intended goal), I'd bet that being seen as slightly more trustworthy in the eyes of people trying to find somewhere to do business outweighs the quick cash from the "donate quickly and scam" crowd, who are admittedly pretty few.

 

As i noticed big scam quits come from ppls who are donors for like half year - year so i dont think this would help. But even if it would that would just mean less vaders which means less funds for site. [even tho im supporting your suggestion]

 

which should be more of a reason to implement it? I wasn't going to support it but now i do. Please implement. Can't be hard to implement a date on the tooltip when you hover over the donator rank.

 

Support. A hover over date would be nice for people that actually try to trade safely.

 

This is a one-sentence summary of what I meant to suggest - thanks. Copied into op.

 

I support this 100%

 

Support. Seems like it would be a cool feature.

That being said I’m not sure it would prevent many scams. Seems like 95% of scam victims didn’t do proper research before the trade because they were naive. If they’re not checking UIDs, open scam reports, vouch quality, etc then they’re not going to check donation dates and correlate that in any way to trustworthiness

 

Every bit helps, right? And yeah, this isn't going to solve scams on Sythe once and for all, but it protects normal users and gives them one more badge to display proudly on their profiles. It's also a good thing if adding donation dates dissuades would-be scam-quitters from joining the site because it takes too long for their donation ranks to gain the trustworthiness needed to scam.

 

Agreed. Even if it prevents a handful of scams it would be worth it, and it doesn’t seem too hard to implement.

I like all the scam prevention suggestions, but they are attempts at fail-safes to protect would-be scam victims from their own lack of procedure/knowledge. That being said, I think this suggestion is one of the more feasible and easily visible deterrents of the ones I’ve seen.

 

Can you even give an example of just ONE person that donated $500 and scammed after 5 days? From what I've seen most donators exit scam after 6 months - 2 years so what you suggest will help them scam an even larger amount. No support

 

I don't see how adding donation timers helps people scam more. The six days vs. years thing is an example of how more information on potential business partners can be valuable.

And some cases of larger donors scamming in relatively short time periods (assuming they all donated on their join dates, which is totally not the case). I googled "$xxx donor scam sythe" and found these within about two minutes. There are likely dozens more given that many people up their donation tier before scamming.
Sticktalk is scam quitting ($2,000 donor, 2 years)
https://www.sythe.org/threads/scammed-by-donor/ ($600 donor, 1 year)
Elena sythe verified uses 500$ donor scammed me ($500 donor, 18 months)
DO NOT TRADE $300 donor and $1000 mm handler, Raze45 might be preparing to scam quit ($300 donor, 1 years)
Heartmore $200 donation chargeback ($200 donor, 4 months)
SCAMMED BY "[100$ donor] Kiyosha" ($100 donor, 11 months)

 

Advertising "1 year $500 donor badge" could assist a scammer when most scam after 1+ year not 5 days.

Did I misinterpret the first part? I agree on this; being able to view the date of when a user donated has no impact/doesn't helps them scam more

 

yeah it's becoming more common for new donors to donate through paypal and charging back after scamquitiing

 

Do you actually know, for sure, that they've donated through PayPal, and if so, have subsequently been successful in charging back?

 

Realistically there's not really a purpose for this, and with our current tools it's not possible anyway. We don't think this will change anyone's perception about donors and trust