Does any work actually ever get done here?

Manually added by a subcontracted sweatshop in china by thousands of unpaid children for about a dollar a week.

da hell.. those little punks need to get back to making my boots instead...I pay more $1.50 a week

I had to take a break from the thread after Teeird's first response. Such condemning-negativity is unfair-- I am 100% convinced that every single SR volunteer has their heart in the right place. We face tough problems-- yet I know we're not the direct cause of said problems, even if we have all sorts of flaws.

We're not dead and we do a lot of work. Despite the negativity and workload we face, the community recognizes the value and still uses SR as a valuable tool. SR was never the world's largest site but it's a cornerstone of this virtual economy. We haven't stopped growing the past two years and I doubt it will stop growing abruptly.

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Spurred by suggestions in this thread and many weekends of brainstorming the last 2 months, we're continuing to try to improve SteamRep.

I'll respond to a few items in this thread briefly, and also mention other work/changes coming down the road:

• Open source: I understand the arguments/upsides for open sourcing SteamRep backend, but they aren't right for us, just as they aren't right for 99% of communities/sites whether they are for-profit or not-for-profit. It's a religious debate that is really not going to end with people changing their minds. Check again in a year, perhaps? There's room for more people making improvements on the backend and there's room for most (all?) of our shared tools to be open source.
• Decision making: For a long time, it was very difficult for any SR admin to make any decisions on ways to move forward. For years it's all been done by consensus (i.e. everyone had a veto) and this is great when small, but deadly when large. As of November, we changed that process so we can actually make big decisions, move forward, even if not everyone agrees. (This was our #1 priority to get back on track, but it's possible it was too little too late.)
• Appeals: I agree with Chaos that the biggest embarrassment we face is our appeals backlog.
  • Our appeals process is too thorough and detailed-- hearts are in the right place, but it makes it impossible to get ahead when every appeal takes 2 hours of a volunteer's after-work hours. On the other hand, it's absolutely unfair for people not to get themselves heard and we are all very worried about not giving accused people their day 'in court' with a fresh pair of eyes evaluating their case.
  • We are soon creating a self-policing maximum duration on how long an appeal can be open without getting an automatic downgrade. This is a touchy subject, but one of the hard decisions we're moving forward with early this year.
  • Because of this, we recently held a grueling prioritization review audit of the oldest appeals (~130 cases) and are ready to start making those judgements.
• Staffing: Staffing is an immense issue and as others have said we're going to attack this from multiple angles. (We're so short-staffed that hiring/reviewing staff takes people off of emergency reports/appeals/decisions, etc.)
  • We're giving more trusted community members than ever the ability to tag on SR's backend and are going to be empowering senior moderators more and more.
  • I agree 100% with Ace's post that we are at a very difficult staffing disadvantage-- we need highly competent, trustworthy, responsible, and hard-working individuals. All of which could be working high paid jobs-- we're soooo very grateful for the volunteers we have. You can understand with all the negativity and difficulty, why it's so challenging to find the right staff.
  • We're trying to tackle staffing from both ends-- find ways to reduce the work and improve effiency, while also find ways to delegate and bring on staff. This is hard, hard, but we are working at it. Many of the suggestions here (mentioned above) are underway, we just have to hope it's not too late.
  • This year SteamRep will organize into an officially-registered not-for-profit organization. This has some general benefits but further sets the stage for the direction SteamRep should go. It also makes it easier for volunteers to get recognition for their volunteer time on their resumes, etc. Perhaps we can get more young recruits/interns helping us out if we can give them recognition/experience back that will help their careers down the road. It also opens the door for accepting proper donations that can be used for more servers/contracting/etc. As a result of this change, we have to have more professionalism overall-- for example the change to BANNED instead of 'scammer' and other similar adjustments we have to make.
• Reports:
  • We recently reduced the types of investigations we handle to reduce workload and eliminate tags that are the most tragic if they do not get their appeal heard quickly
  • We recently introduced a new scam report form to reduce the amount of time mods spend reformatting posts. It can be better, it could be glorious, but we're going to settle for low hanging fruit right now.
  • Today we added an experimental feature to SR profiles that "gives a heads-up" to people when there are pending scam reports. This has a lot of upsides and downsides, but we want to try it out and see if it helps the community protect themselves while we get our backlog sorted out. As Eoj said, we welcome feedback on that and we're definitely aware it's not without concerns. It might be the lesser of evils, though.
• Partnerships: We going to rework our Partners and Friends programs to be more inviting, inclusive, and understanding to those who are trying to help fight scammers. More details on this once we've had a few staff meetings this year. SteamRep would be nothing without its member/partner communities-- we need to be more inclusive.
• Morale: It's not mentioned here, but morale is one of the biggest issues we face. No one says it directly, but the high workload, the thankless nature of working with scammers everyday, the intense scrutiny on every decision we make-- it's overwhelming and leads to massive burn-out. We're seeking ways to try to work better as a team and encourage good working relationships with our partners so we can keep volunteers excited to help as much as we can. Ideas for how to do this are quite welcome.

TLDR: So to answer the question:

Does any work actually ever get done here?

The answer is absolutely: Yes.

We have a lot of challenges but we're actively working (in our free time outside of our day lives) to make progress. We appreciate constructive feedback and (positive?) suggestions on how to improve. The loads are very high and we may never be fully able to handle them, but we'll just keep working at it with our hearts in the right place. if it turns out that's not enough, then it's not enough. But don't mistake being overwhelmed for not actually working-- there's a lot that goes on that gets hidden in the day-to-day avalanches.

It's automated, of course. We're working/adjusting the algorithm, but it should never get things like that confused. If you see glitches, though, raise them. It's an experiment to see how much more work we can create for ourselves... but really just something to help the community to continue to be protected while we try to get our ducks in a row.