A Personal Account of the Forum's Status and Abilities

I would like to greet the SteamRep staff and the community here that may or may not still exist. This is in no way an expedition attempt, this is my personal account of SteamRep's capability to respond to the vast number of reports and appeals that flood it every single day. I understand the staff go through an impossible task, volunteering to help as many as possible, but it's simply not enough, this is a direct copy paste from my Steam profile description. You may tick this off as staff disrespect, or close the thread immediately, burn it to the ground and close my ever present appeal thread on the spot. That's fine. This is my statement and if it gets read than I've done what I set out to do.

A couple years back I was hijacked for being foolish with my account details in a successful phishing attempt. Associates of mine made moves on SteamRep of all places for help, that was a mistake. For safety reasons they marked me as a SR Scammer so I would be flagged for the steam trading community. This is an issue, as most trading sites and servers take steam rep's word for an account and deny access to those marked as scammers. I have never made a single dishonest trade in my life, even so far as to be scammed a few times. I made my appeal post to the SteamRep appeal process on July 30th 2014, with full evidence of steam support tickets and complete explanation. I was sure to be thorough, proffesional, and polite.

My post has been looked at by staff twice, at first I was placed in the wrong forum section, I sent explanations to admins I belonged in "Account Hijacking" but recieved no response. I remained patient until January 2nd of 2015 where I bumped my thread to force an admin reaction. I was finally put in the right section, but recieved a copy paste message about how I should not bump my appeal thread from SilentReaper, a SteamRep staff member. Since then I have recieved no response, and as far as I know my appeal thread has gone dark. Every day new appeals and reports come into steamrep and as detailed by SilentReaper's forum signature, SteamRep is not equipped to handle the sheer volume of these posts. This is SilentReaper's forum signature:

"SteamRep has around 25000 reports and 900 appeals open at the moment (as of May 2015), and less then a dozen active VOLUNTEER admins with their own work etc. Don't expect your report/appeal to be handled soon™"

From my experience looking at SteamRep appeal threads everyone there is treated as a criminal, even those in cases similar to mine, as far as I can tell, SilentReaper himself is very snide with users, an obvious characteristic of a stressed administrator found in a forum that has bit off more than they can chew. Still though, SteamRep has the end all final say in the Steam trading community, servers autoban, websites deny full access to their trading services, and appeals are forgotten and never looked at every day.

My question to the community and to SteamRep itself is why do you have so much power when you are so obviously understaffed, perhaps you should pass the torch and remove the flags you have placed on people? Perhaps you should shut down the site or become more noticeable to the core gaming community, or communities found on Steam? What would it take for people to notice the ones you have stampeded over? I have given up on my appeal being accepted, but to anyone who reads this, do you think any of this is fair?

I was a TF2Outpost moderator for a long time. We were flooded with reports on a daily basis too, but at the end of the day we sat down and got the work done. We were all volunteers as well, and often had sickeningly high backlogs, but we always muscled through it and handled each one with the attention that it deserved, because if we failed to do our duty in that regard, we had failed the TF2 community. Steamrep is failing to do its duty if completely innocent people like you have had an obviously erroneous tag for almost a year. This is completely unacceptable. It needs to change.

Oh boy,
Here we go again...

I'm not going to be shocked if I receive a large amount of hostility for this post. I'm ready for it, I just hope at least a few people understand my position, and any others who would be behind me on this.

You do realize scamming is STEALING, stealing is a CRIME. If this were the real world, the consequences would be a lot worse. Bad argument.
Secondly insulting an administrator will only piss them off, I suggest that you shouldn't otherwise your thread will get shut down.


I'm not going to deny that SteamRep has a tonnes and tonnes of reports and appeals etc, it's a lot more work than they can handle.

But going to be completely honest here,

*Facts*
Steam has one of the largest amounts of internet traffic in the world (In the Top ten I think), Steam is also the largest internet based digital distribution of video games for PC/MAC/Linux. That being said as more games get released, more games are going to want to make more profit and utilize the Steam community market. As Steam grows more traders will appear, more traders = more scammers & scams.
*/Facts*

That being said Steam and SteamRep will have to deal with more and more scamming reports. At the current rate that SteamRep is getting reports, the staff per report ratio is not looking good.

I don't think at any point it would be a good idea to just shut down a website like this or another similar community regardless of how it is ran, their work load and how it is currently running, that would be just stupid. It's a still a great resource/tool and people can refer to it or use it for many different reasons regardless of its running state.

SteamRep has soo much power in the community because of a few reasons, main reason being that it's been around for so long and been relatively successful in stopping scammers. Steamrep is also listed as a Steam tool by Steam itself that being another reason and lastly most gaming or trading communities use it as a resource and filter as to who they should let on their game servers/website.

In summary, as a user you don't have to use SteamRep, only problem is SO many trading communities, servers and websites use SteamRep as a filter as to who they should allow in. When you say it should be shut down, I don't SteamRep close will anytime remotely soon. In my opinion another bigger and better community will pop up and become more popular than SteamRep.
SteamRep would need to at least quadruple it's staff members to get the site back on pace, trouble is its hard finding trusted individuals who are willing to dedicate their time.

I'm not taking sides, I'm just trying to provide an unbiased opinion.

Also good luck with your appeal, I hope you get it accepted soon.

Addressed in reddit AMA. Not much else to add here.

You bring a lot of valid points here, some I'll admit I haven't considered. I appreciate the even response too. I would agree the work done here is important. And with this in mind maybe it should definitely stay online, not much else can be changed I assume. But something had to be said, at least in my eyes. I apologize if this sounds pretentious in anyway to anyone.

Was this announced on SteamRep itself? I must've missed it.

No problem, Mind linking me your appeal? I wouldn't mind having a read.

Yeah sure, here, http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/appeal-76561197973051809-dreadpiratefury-banned-by-sr.72427/

http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/steamrep-partners-ama-today-4-7.97074/

I believe I sent out announcements from the reddit gameswap (r/steamgameswap) and the r/GlobalOffensiveTrade groups. There were also threads on r/sgs, r/tf2trade, and r/dota2trade linking to it. Of course all of these would mean you were already involved with reddit in some way to begin with (and I know many people don't like that place).

From the bottom of my heart you have my thanks, I'll do what I can to get those profiles you requested.

Oh, looks like I'm too late for the anti-steamrep circlejerk. Guess I'll have to wait another 3 months for the next one to flair up. At this point it'd probably be easier to just put a sticky called "Common questions, complaints and answers" that points to the reddit AMA.

Oh, looks like I'm too late for the anti-steamrep circlejerk. Guess I'll have to wait another 3 months for the next one to flair up. At this point it'd probably be easier to just put a sticky called "Common questions, complaints and answers" that points to the reddit AMA.

In my head I envision the community as a bunch of babies ,small toddlers and little kids and only 2 adults. One of the kids going "he took my lollipop" then the other saying "no I didn't" then SilentReaper coming in going , "Come on now, I see the stickiness on your lips, you aren't allowed in the playroom no more". Every so often Mattie shows up like the parent that doesn't see the kids often but when he does he takes them to do all the fun places. He sees one of the kids and is like "what's wrong" Kid says, "I really didn't take the lollipop my mouth was sticky cuz i just finished my own lollipop and SilentReaper was mean and didn't listen to me" Then Mattie's all "It's ok, you can go back in the playroom just don't do anything wrong ok" Kid gives Mattie the puppy eyes while giving SilentReaper a lickytounge face when allowed back in.

Later on, Mattie leaves and all the kids act up again. SilentReaper mumbles to himself "How do I teach these kids".

I'll refer to my sig, if only ppl would read more and actually use that upper chamber... instead they try to wing it and they fail.

And I'm way past face-desk-ing or face-palming. Thats level minus 1 to 3 at most... I'm planting other people's faces in the hellS(R) of despair and hopelessness.... Oh, and the "between" those is something they call "can't fix stupid".