[DENIED] Requiring Approval of Threads for the Anti-Scam Sections (RAS / Ban Evader)

My Suggestion:

Require thread approval for guest accounts in the report a ban evader / report a scammer sections.

Why:

Because guest accounts can abuse this (as seen yesterday, and numerous other occasions) to "dox", and harass other members on our forums. There's literally no other way to prevent it as far as I'm concerned. I saw these reports immediately the other day, and I deleted all of them, but some people still see it, and you can't stop it from happening.

Example of how this gets abused:

Staff see this:
- here
- here

This is mainly staff only, but I'd like to see what the community thinks about this, plus this area of suggestions gets more traction. I personally don't mind approving every RAS / Ban Evader thread as it literally only takes a second, and could prevent situations like this from happening in the future. Sure there are other loopholes, but this would help a lot.

P.S. - I'm unsure if this has been suggested before, so if it has, then forgive me.

 

Wouldn't this potentially lead to more scams?

I get scammed by player A, I post in RAS PLAYER A IS A SCAMMER! No staff are on though and it doesn't get approved for 4+ hours, Player A remains unbanned and keeps trading with people because nobody sees any active scam reports on him?

Seems like it has definite benefits for people who get BS reports(which happens a lot) but also could lead to a lot more scams potentially if no staff is on to approve a thread and it sits for hours and hours or no staff check @ RAS.

I don't know about other market users but before going first to someone I always check RAS just incase? Not sure if that's just me who does that though? If a report is unapproved then I cant see it and very well may continue through with trading user A because I don't know he's scamquitting as I cant see the reports.

This system would solely rely on there ALWAYS being staff online 24/7, and those staff periodically checking RAS over and over.

Personally that sounds unlikely our staff can pull that off so I'ma say no to this one.

 

I see your point, but I, and I'm pretty certain a majority, if not all staff follow those threads. I think with the current staff we have reports are handled in an extremely fast manner, but I could definitely see where you're coming from with checking to see if someone scammed, and how someone could scam quit if staff aren't on for a certain period of time (usually late late at night). Thank you for you feedback.

 

I'm just fucking with you lol, support

 

Unfortunately, I feel like this wouldn't necessarily stop these individuals. They can just create a new account on VPN and post it in a different section.

However, I can definitely see where this is coming from and if its not too hard to implement, I don't see why not. Ideally this would function much like the Dispute Forum and remove the guest post loophole.

Support

 

If the suggestion is that all guest users and only them, must require approval before posting in the RAS section. Then I am all for that as it would be an efficient measure in reducing these problems. As using guest accounts is easy to abuse due to the simplistic on their purpose.

Though if the suggestion is about All users must get approval from a moderator, I am against that due to the reasons already stated by @Divine. As it would allow people to increase their time to scam before the general public knows about the situation that is occurring. The main section I know that already requires approval from mods is the Buying/Selling of Gold sections (to check for impostors). While the nature of the two sections are different it is evident that the approval time can take a prolonged period of time to simply check if the user is trying to impersonate someone else. Thus I am under the impression that the time for these approvals will have an overall negative consequence.


Example of Prolonged Waiting Time:

Spoiler: Example

This example is just from today as well.

A few hours later...

 

Yeah this was directed more towards guest accounts as you stated (my fault for not bringing that up prior).

This used to be a thing in the past here:
Report a Scammer is now open to unregistered users

Not sure if that applied to the RAS as well at the time. I understand both scenarios like I said this suggestion has it's positives, and negatives. The main negative is that legitimate reports that take longer to get approved could lead to more members being scammed, however I believe we have an active enough staff team to cover all of that, but I understand it could be an issue during random time zones especially when little to no staff are on. Also we don't get notifications when post reports / disputes are made (they're unapproved until we look at them / approve, or resolve them), so I'm not sure if I could coincide that with this suggestion, but I'd like to see that in effect as well, so that we can react quicker to unapproved threads.

 

I haven't read any of the other comments, but in regards to this..
They may be able to create a small macro that, for example, searching for things along the lines of key words in a dox (name, age, address, etc), And if it were to detect said words or whatever it may be, put the thread on hold.

In saying that, there could easily be ways around this but it may delay some of the dox's and whatever.

 

Having Guest posts require approval before having threads posted in either seems fine to me since people who would report ban evaders/scammers wouldn't tend to do it from a guest account but rather their own account. Limiting the RAS/RAE section to require approval from everyone would cause more trouble than it would stop in the long run solely due to the reason @Divine went into detail about.

This would create a loophole though that was previously stated which would be having them making new accounts via VPN and just leaking info that way. There are a few ways to restrict new users from being able to post right away in RAS/RAE such as requiring mod approval if you have under 1 week join date/certain post count/home ip checks etc but this wouldn't really fix the problem unless it was applied directly throughout all the sub-forums. Otherwise once RAS/RAE is restricted they can just do the same exact thing in other sub-forums.

Support for requiring guests to get approval first since it doesn't really have any negatives.
No clue on what to do about the VPN new account loophole.

 

i mean either way if a staff isnt on to ban the scammer it wont matter if the report in seen/unseen because most the idiots who get scammed dont frequent the entiretly of sythe, just the section they care about. they wouldnt even see the report most likely.

 

What if a Mod decides to scamquit and disapproves/deletes all of the RAS threads against him?

 

Other mods can see deleted posts lol

 

The general public can not, which is who matters. I'm sure there would be ways to disguise one of the unapproved posts from other mods in theory if the situation were to occur, such as editing the thread title, deleting some shit and tagging it with some bullshit code "not enough evidence," with awareness of a report coming in they could do their best at the very least.

Furthermore, mods don't need this much power, there should be transparency in the RAS section. There are users who don't fill out the template properly and their threads are locked. They are not deleted however and it's still a viable reference for a trader before they make a purchase.

 

Most idiots might not, but there are certain clicks within the site that will share a report once it goes up on a known member they associate with.

If it can be applied to only guests, support. Otherwise no.

 

Bump as the issue has been occurring quite a bit lately.

 

support as I've seen this happen, just allows for anonymous doxxing

 

As stated by @QBDyce just allows people to annonymously dox so I will show my support.

 

I don't really know why this isn't already implemented in the first place, people can't pardon as guests. Why should you be able to dox someone, but not attempt a pardon wo confirmation.. seems lackluster to me at least. Pretty sure this wouldn't take @Sythe very long to do, so why not. Support.

 

If this could be applied to guest accounts only, I'd be all for it.