1. There is no such thing as a "pending" ban or Steam admin. Anyone threatening your account is a scammer trying to scare you. Read more.

This site should not have any where near as much power as it does

Discussion in 'SteamRep General Discussion' started by A Critic, Jun 25, 2016.

  1. A Critic

    A Critic New User

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    Steam:
    STEAM_0:0:176775522
    This post is being made on a empty account at a vain attempt at anonymity, since calling out against the system is a great way to make sure your appeal is rejected.

    Having been stuck without progress on an appeal that would take 10 minutes to read through and come to a decision on for literal years, I am tired of a misunderstanding that occurred completely destroying my reputation within the steam community. Here are some of the many things wrong with this community and site:

    1. Lack of any ability to defend your position before being banned.
    In the legal system in the real world, when someone accuses you of a crime, you have a chance to prove them wrong or defend yourself in a court of law. But apparently here, you can get banned and not even be notified until you are unable to use certain trading cites, or have people refusing to trade with you. All it would take is a single attempt to reach out to contact the defendant.
    This then leads to:

    2. Abuse of power within partner communities.
    My main account was banned by a partner community (I wont go further than this since I do not want my appeal to be rejected) and since has been unable to visit and sites or trade with others in games that are not even related to each other. For instance, if some admin in a partner community decides to ban someone as an abuse of power in a CSGO related community, steam rep then makes it so that that person, who is potentially unjustifiably banned by someone outside of steamrep, cannot even go to sites relating to TF2 trading, for instance. I'm assuming it is an automated system that makes the partner community bans appear on steamrep, meaning that any admin within any partner community has the power to COMPLETELY destroy an accounts interaction with any trade community, which is constantly abused.

    3. Speed of processing.
    I understand that this issue is not one that can be easily fixed, but it is a bit ridiculous when people have to wait months, if not years to sort out appeals. It is understandable that it takes time given the number of appeals, but people wait for so long with out even a single message, and they wonder if there appeal is being ignored. Even just a 30 word heads up message saying something along the lines of "appeal received, Initial thoughts are ..., will not likely be reviewed till ..." would help a little. But instead usually the appeal is left, and the person checks back every day or so to nothing, before getting impatient and asking for any sign of process, whereby they are then ignored further or told to stop asking or bumping.

    4. Assumptions that all users are adults.
    This site treats all accounts equally, and acts under the presumption that all users at all times are fully aware of what they are doing or what is happening. However, a extremely large percentage of the steam community are under the age of 15. Some do not fully understand the concept that virtual goods have real world value. For instance, my cousin was banned from a partner community for consistent low balling, when he was 10, because he was only trading based of the aesthetics of the items, and not their market determined value. He doesn't care since he is 10, but that is irrelevant. Do you expect kids to come to this site and be able to read all the guidelines and rules, to then be able to appeal for someone? i had a hard time navigating.

    All in all, the amount of power this website has in comparison to its sluggish and unjust system disgusts me. This post will likely be deleted, but I had to get it out of my system.
  2. Enstage

    Enstage SteamRep Admin Partner Community Donator - Tier V

    Messages:
    4,705
    Steam:
    STEAM_0:1:52569926
    1. Of course you can defend yourself, where did you get the idea that you can't? SteamRep provides set steps and policies for defending yourself (getting the report archived, etc) like here: http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/getting-unconfirmed-reports-off-your-profile.132727/ . You are allowed to go and post counter evidence and defend yourself on the report. It would be completely unfeasible and unrealistic for staff to have to add the accused of every scam report and give them a chance to defend themselves, which they have anyway. Also, SteamRep is not a "court" it is not here to punish people, SteamRep is used to warn other traders about potential risks of trading with certain individuals.

    2. Let me make it clear that 99/100 of community admins (people with green tags on SteamRep) DO NOT have the ability to apply any sort of tag to anyone. Generally a community has only one or two admins who can apply their tags. These people undergo significant review by SteamRep themselves before getting this access to prevent abuse, important to note that some partner communities don't even have staff like this, they have to apply their tags through SR staff. SteamRep has set policies on what partner communities can and cannot ban for as well, the whole thing is controlled in such a way that applying tags out of spite, or whatever, is very hard, and certainly wouldn't hold for long.

    3. Often appeals are left pending intentionally (for example because the tag is only a few days old, and removing it immediately is pointless in terms of warning the community). While I, and I'm assuming staff as well, agree that the backlog is bad, there really isn't much that can be done. Either way, from my perspective, things are being caught up on, merely a few months ago there was 40+ pages of appeals with no response to them on the main appeals node, now there is barely more than 3 individual appeals at any given time.

    4. You can't make exceptions for people based on their age, how is that supposed to work over the internet? Any big time scammer could just claim they are 10 years old and then boom...wildcard. It's basically a get out of a tag free card. Unless of course you want SR to start requesting formal identification?

    Also, I don't see why you need to post from another account, your appeal won't be rejected for simply expressing your opinions. Nor would your post ever be deleted, you've been civil in raising your issues, and you deserve an answer to your points.

    Regards.
  3. A Critic

    A Critic New User

    Messages:
    2
    Steam:
    STEAM_0:0:176775522
    I am intrigued and surprised with the civil and swift with response to my criticisms. I may have been a little over the top with my frustrations, my apologies.

    1. I was unaware that It is possible to defend oneself, which, having been banned at one point and not realizing till a full 3 years later does speak that there is still some issues here. The bigger issue here is not that one cannot defend oneself, but rather that in most cases the person in question does not have a chance to since they are most likely unaware of the situation. I might be a special case, in which case please prove me wrong, but how are people supposed to defend themselves when they are unaware that they should/can?

    2. That is good to know, I concede this point.

    3. I do understand that this is the case, but the main issue I have is that people are under the assumption that their post is being ignored, not simply in a queue to be reviewed, and hence they misunderstand and attempt to bump there posts whereby upon their are told it is against the rules. Some way to make them aware that that isn't the case could be implemented.

    4. That is true, however it is still an issue. Not necessarily for steam rep, but more for the steam community as a whole.

    The main reason I did this from another account is that I did not want to risk anything with this post, I understand that the site has principles and that it tends to follow them, but I was unsure of how the criticism would be taken and decided just to be cautious.
  4. You Are The One

    You Are The One SteamRep Admin

    Messages:
    110
    Steam:
    STEAM_0:1:41038663
    Quick responses to your points, (keep reading after, the rest is relevant to you)

    0. http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/general-discussion-faq.132723/ #8
    1. Not true, accused reply in reports all the time, very very common, no clue where you came up with this one.
    2. SR DOES look into all claims of users banned by partner comms for abuse either posting on SR or contacting admins directly. If we choose to do nothing, that is an indication that the tag was within policy and we defer back to the tagging community.
    3. Only a few admins are qualified to do appeals on SR, (har har har, get more staff) due to attrition, we lose staff as fast as we can add staff, its a filter up effect to be an appeal admin, so very hard over time to get new admins.
    4. The SSA outlines how old you must be to use the steam service. When I think cretin users are under 13 (COPPA), I ask and if so, refrain from asking specific questions. Beyond that, SR policy prohibits me from saying more and must refer users to contact ofpf.org.

    About defunct community tags as it relates to you specifically:
    • We are actively in the process of wiping out defunct community cautions, very very few are being converted/inherited to SR tags based on surviving evidence and severity.
    • Once we are done with the defunct cautions, we will (as a stopgap measure) downgrade to caution any user who has a pending "banned by" appeal for a defunct community (pending any being converted/inherited to SR tags based on surviving evidence and severity) (any users who take advantage of this immediate relief will then be subject to below)
    • We have a long term plan for defunct community bans, will be an automated system, unable to comment further on this tho.
    -Head SR Appeal Admin.
  5. SilentReaper(SR)

    SilentReaper(SR) Retired Staff

    Messages:
    11,991
    SteamRep Admin:
    STEAM_0:0:89705646
    Having criticism with reason would not have any negative effect on your appeal whatsoever. We value criticism here, and I can say we are aware of them all, and we do try to improve on those area's, but almost all of them are very hard to improve upon without mayor staff growth that we're already trying to do for years. Staff leaves as fast as they come unfortunately, and only a very small few are still here from the beginning.

    We do want criticism, for we want the ideas to come on how to solve them. Very few do, but changes do sometimes come from these. Prime example is the Trading with Scammers rule... Criticized back in December 2014 for being outdated for the values of the mentioned items in it where dropped significantly etc, due other issues also rising via partner communities. We therefore had to end enforcing it. Appeals for users that where banned for this will be granted (with some rules on this still applying, see our topic on it).

    Most of times however there is some perceived misconception regarding those, and we use the topic to explain how and sometimes even why we deal in such a way.

    /edit: As to address your title for this topic. We earned the trust over the years of all those sites that use our API to check for account's trust status. Valve has required also in the past to sites to use our API. These sites trust us to handle sanely with the reports, and they always can rise any issue with any tag on our site, and we will look into it and provide feedback to them, either in the form of (hidden or non-public) evidence, reasoning, or even a review if needed to check if the tag is valid. They don't do often, but there have been, and I can say that almost all cases in such where upheld after scrutiny.

    If we would drop our game and do a bad job at what we do, the trust would drop very rapidly that those sites have in us, and our work would become pointless. This is also the underlaying reason of why we WANT critique here, to be able to address any issue that might be raised, maybe even change or adjust our rules, and be able to handle such that comes forward with changes in the community etc.
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2016
  6. Enstage

    Enstage SteamRep Admin Partner Community Donator - Tier V

    Messages:
    4,705
    Steam:
    STEAM_0:1:52569926
    1. People don't have to pay attention to SR, its not SR's job to force them to pay attention (aka, check for pending reports so they can defend themselves). If people wish to defend themselves, then they can check their SteamRep profile regularly for pending reports. One of your points is the time it takes for appeals, you forget there is a much worse backlog on reports (with no guarantee that reports will even be answered), and introducing a system where all accused users are contacted and asked to defend themselves would be a gigantic step in the wrong direction for the backlog.

    3. Outlined in general terms here, for the public: http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/appeal-tips.66354/#post-365910

    4. You should probably go and take this up with Valve then.
    Roudydogg1 likes this.