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.

Why is there no official method to report SteamRep Partners / Friends?

Discussion in 'SteamRep General Discussion' started by BigMac187, Apr 10, 2015.

  1. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    SteamRep Admin:
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    You received plenty of official responses, including from me. The part where I emphasized it was my personal opinion, only applied to one line. Everything else was speaking officially as a SteamRep admin. Same with @SilentReaper(SR). What more do you need?

    This thread has gone on for 8+ pages, with multiple partner admins (like it or not, their opinion is valued here) and SteamRep admins alike clearly not understanding you. Not to be insulting, but if none of them apparently understands you then maybe the problem is with your ability to clearly express yourself.

    What @You Are The One said about these procedures is correct, and they haven't changed since his resignation.

    Personally, I like a little garlic with mine. Maybe a little cinnamon if I'm having one for dessert. I honestly can't figure out what you're trying to ask here.

    You're... reporting us to Valve? For only sharing 90% of what we do and... working with Butane?
    [​IMG]


    It seems to me that, regrettably, SteamRep isn't living up to what you would like from us, so I implore you to make your own website. You can keep a database of communities and admins who conspire together with conflicts of interest, ban people they don't like, and abuse the /kill command on players; while we maintain (to the best of our ability with the staff we have) a database of people who committed fraud and represent a threat to the trading community. We can then let the community as a whole decide who to follow, by their own actions. Maybe if you're really successful with your own database, communities will band together and boycott communities with "conflict of interest" while banning their respective potty-mouthed admins. Or maybe they'll just ignore it, time will tell I guess.
  2. SilentReaper(SR)

    SilentReaper(SR) Retired Staff

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    SteamRep Admin:
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    Timezones tell you its a different time at a different place, they don't tell you how much time has passed. Point invalid. You stated yourself you would be back in a week time. You didn't state a reason or w/e.

    I'm the longest standing admin on SteamRep, all admins came after me. I'm aware of almost all policy for 95% of it I wrote, or was part of it otherwise. But even for me memory fails at times.

    No, you expect us to set rules on how they manage their site, this includes everything, including their reputation threads etc on their site. We only ask them to ban scammers to deny them access to their site in order to protect their users. Luckily, all those communities agree to this.

    I've read that conversation. You say you are ignored there, he answers you there, and near the end he indicates he has to work.

    links you gave to mattie:
    http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/4932-six-76561198062957286-a.html
    http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/4710-volt-7651198072605490-a.html
    http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/4709-neutron-ster-quittf2-76561198109087535-a.html
    http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/4653-proof-76561197967726943-a.html
    http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/4626-hakin-forgeron-76561198049522232-a.html
    http://forums.f-o-g.eu/threads/4614-zunflix-76561198160097935-a.html

    I saw you getting answerred on those by a FoG admin. I'll leave it at that.


    That is just a big misrepresentation. We do monitor the communities of what happens there. We keep an eye on the Green tagged community admins. And if issues arise we address them soon. These communities went through our vetting when accepted as partner. We stand for that any ban must be covered with evidence. That bans publicized on our site are based on evidence. Sure issues happen, but when we are made aware we will ask the related community about them and solve them. I've not seen on those communities where they where actually working against SteamRep or w/e. Most cases are just that they where misinformed or where applying things wrongly.

    With other words, you want a specific place to express "concerns" regarding friend and partner communities. Probably in the form of a specific subforum and threads per community where "concerns" are being "expressed". Such would be way too lopsided in my opinion. For only "concerns" would be "expressed" there, no matter if those are right or wrong, and there is no "balans" in what good a community does. Sure, every community makes mistakes. Even on SR there are mistaken. That is the reason why appeals are done here.

    But just making 1 big complaint topic per community that is way too unbalanced imo.

    As for the rep threads: I already said, if they don't want to host rep threads, that is THEIR decision, if they don't want to keep rep threads of banned or otherwise disliked users for w/e reason, that's fine TOO. How communities are handling rep threads is THEIR part of things. That is up to them to maybe communicate that per their site rules etc. If they change their service, it has NO bearing on SR. They can do so if they like. If they make it a bad community, where people don't like to stay, that is also their problem. We of SR will NOT interfere on such communities, it is not our role.

    We do keep an eye on the Community Admins. Any issue that comes up will automatically find the other reports/issues. And internally we do discuss issues on such communities. Sometimes it is acted upon, an example is for example that Mattie contacted the new owner of PPM about a admin he planned to put in PPM that had a SR Caution tag. This was much discussed on Reddit etc. We would not have put that out in the open. But the new owner of PPM decided to share it. That was up to him. I don't think it should have, I guess people love drama.

    "Butaine" is a highly valued admin, who was SR Head Admin, and has been SOP Admin for a very long time, longer then SteamRep exists. You portray him as a bully, but I do not agree. I've worked for years with him. If you follow the site rules, for example on SOP, you won't have a problem with him. People think they can do everything everywhere, but on SOP if they abuse or cross the rules they will cross his path. As I said in the other thread, he has a very good track record on the work he does, and if he scolds someone, I'm pretty sure its deserved.

    And "internet bullying charges" lol... for that it needs to be personal, rallying everybody known in the personal sphere (friends, family, work, school etc), and identified (real names, places, etc). Not like here a reaction on ones behavior with a nickname and nobody knowing who either party exactly is.

    You have a very strange sense of what "Conflict of Interest" actually is. I've tried already to tell you, what counts here as a conflict of interest. But insulting a user for being a obnoxious twat isn't even close to "bullying" or a "conflict of interest", I will refer to your bird over the Mississippi River.

    We could have deleted this thread or locked it or not answering on it, etc. Any related to SteamRep may be discussed. Its however very rare nowadays that a outsider brings in ideas that actually are useful to us. Rules and how things are done have been build up over time and the way things are have each their own reasons. Over time and more arguments having had about them they stand stronger and stronger, for they have proven to be the right answers to the problem.

    We do not delete reports, we do not delete appeals. At most they are moved to archive for being invalid or incomplete. All the information posted by the reporter is publicly available. (I do believe one needs to login into the forums to see the attachments). Not everything the admins write is for the public eye. The private information that came from researching the account is not to be disclosed to everybody. We often can find personal information on reported people, like Youtube channels, facebookpages, twitter, linkedin, and other sites they use, real names, home addresses, and other more technical data. Hell, I know of one case where the victim called the scammer's father to get his stuff back, he had found that out by simply searching themselves. We won't post that stuff here publicly for that's not what we're about, and that would actually count as "bullying".

    And as I also said before, we will hide evidence from public view if it contains private information, like login names on steam etc. in such a way that admins/mods can still view it, but the normal users cannot.

    I don't think mattie has ever claimed that SR was up 100% of the time. Thats impossible. Steamrep has been down for a weekend or some when we migrated to the new server. But still we had the old server running in "locked" mode so trade sites could still use our API. As for the Cautioned or banned people without notes on the profile, often those are legacy of when we didn't have the possibility to note something public on their profiles, or are oversights of forgetting to put up links, or where at their time easily findable. For instance people have been active on some communities and them doing stuff there that warranted a caution, but once the issue is over, or the community gone or w/e reason, they lose sight of such an account. These accounts can appeal, and the appeal admin will research what was the reason why they where banned, and if the appealant asks about the reason, that will most times be answerred

    pretty much what YATO said:
    1. Applicant makes a application thread.
    2. SR Admin makes a internal (admin only) thread where the application will be internally discussed and researched.
    3. Time passes by where we leave chance for all admins to respond to it, and see responses on the application thread.
    4. Once a admin thinks its been long enough, he/she will push the vote to be held. last call etc.
    5. profit.

    No. We will not give everything the admins collect in information. The reports should give you more then enough information on why a ban was applied, or not.


    A standstill community is dead anyways. If the admins aren't working on it, the people will run away. And how do you think the "community" is able to help? there are people who are busy on threads to ask for evidence that is missing in reports. The problem we encounter is that most of those are quite misinformed on what is exactly needed, and are also not very well aware of our policies. Our mods and admins take between 3 to 6 months to get up to speed while working on it. Admins give feedback on individual cases and why some has to be like that. That teaches them a lot on every occasion. This is training we cannot give to everybody, we have some internal guides, but a guide only goes so far in telling the hard lines, there are also a lot of soft lines.

    The community "helping" is often not working out well. We have seen work of some individuals who show promise and we reached out to them to get them as a mod, but most we had to give warnings, or repeated links to our policies to correct them.

    With 20000 reports open, and a small number of admins to handle them, you can understand (or not) that this is way too much to handle. We had to move over from working on oldest reports to working on the new reports what we can, and prioritize other reports that pop up for higher interest (admins, mods, big traders, etc). I've estimated some time ago, that the current number of reports was enough to keep 1 guy busy 40 hours a week for 15 years. But by that time, we would have at current rate WAY over 200.000 reports. We get 80-150 or even more reports in every day. Even with 50 report admins, we would not be able to handle them.


    I'll refer to lava's response on this. Again a very wrong image of what Valve's role is with the communities. Valve is not the owner of SR or any of the communities, the communities have their own servers to run their websites and game servers on. Those can do whatever they want on their servers/sites etc.

    I'm not going to add you. I have nothing to discuss really with you. I addressed issues you apparently have here.
  3. Ninja Otter With A Taco

    Ninja Otter With A Taco Retired Staff

    Messages:
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    Steam:
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    BTW, the last two reports were for accounts that we found to be alts of a marked scammer. We dont normally share our methods of finding these in reports. Haven't really looked into the other 3 reports much, I ever so slightly remember one of them.
    Roudydogg1 likes this.