Does any work actually ever get done here?

Its not about the usage by the users, its their posibilities on our site we have to limit. For example we had to disable Historical Data (stored profiles of ppl with avatar, nickname, their status and their friends list) for Google crawler was killing the server by going thru each instance of them. Now that we have steam login we can maybe add that to steam logged in users again.

Team of talented coders... where did they come from? I know quite a few talented coders, problem is, they are OVERBURDENED with a shitton of work that they have to do IRL. So where you get a complete TEAM from, I do not know. Its easy saying to add such, but you gotta find ppl who want to actually do some on it. Still, even with a Battallion of coders, the ONLY thing to WORK thru all these reports.... is by working thru them... you can code w/e you like, but those reports still have to be looked at.

As I said, the Return on Investment is pretty slim on any tool to be developed at this stage. And the problem is, if the tool does do ALL the questioning and such with the victim, it must be updated near daily for new situations that where not covered yet. And even then, each report will have to be worked thru by a mod and when ready for review by a admin. Still have to work thru those reports.

"new" site? you propose to redo the whole shebang, a very large amount of work for near the same result? what would be "new" to that then? some changes? Mattie has been busy the last couple years to make the site more robust and easier to expand etc. Yes, maybe some optimization could be done, but that can be done in the code itself. I know Mattie does revisit code to make it better/more optimized etc, but restarting from ground up again to code the site is a total waste of time.

You also didn't notice that the main site and the Xenforo forum aren't even on the same server, Mattie has been hosting the forum on his own server since we started using a forum (thnx again Mattie).

The flexibility we have with the forums is near impossible to catch with a fully fledged pre-programmed report site. Ppl can tell their story and include any needed. Its just that most are too ignorant to add all needed stuff, and a lot stay hanging in "Needs more info" status for they never come back to the topic to provide feedback to the questions of the mod or admin (for they missed a number of things, or provided evidence that was not acceptable etc.).

Every report will still have to manually worked thru by a admin. There is no easy go-around for that.

People think that automation works on every situation, it really does not in this case. Automation helps in some way for working faster thru reports with some of our tools, but its still eyeballs who have to read the report, view all the screenshots, and a brain that needs to validate all that vs a lot of conditions which cannot be automated.

Some see automation as the "holy grail" to everything, but in this case its more like "The Cake is a Lie"

I wont be answering on automation "suggestions" anymore, we've got near all the tools we need currently, only some "wish for" stuff that is not a priority. Its actual labor what is needed on SR to get the reports done.

I completely agree. Steamrep already offers a streamlined service. More admins=more work done, accept it now and do what needs to be done.

Exactly, that's why use of "under investigation" tag needs to be implemented. Mods read the reports, judge if they are ready to be reviewed, and if they are, a mod should be able to mark the reported user as (under investigation). The positives from such a tag addition would be monumental in scam prevention.

Honestly, I don't think it is correct to say SR offers a streamlined service. I know the SR staff works hard and we do our best to address the reports, but I don't think it is accurate to describe that process as streamlined. And I certainly don't think saying "more admins will fix everything" because pure and simple it won't. There's been changes to SR over the last few months and there will hopefully continue to be more. SteamRep can not keep the trust of the community and keep up to date with reports, without always improving.

I think there's a number of things that we can improve on, and they're not always the things you see, however, they're important nonetheless. It's just a matter of having that conversation, and making sure the SR admins hear about it.

As far as I know you can block specific content visibility to web site crawlers in many different ways. You don't need to disable it to prevent them from indexing it.

The great majority of the community owners/devs is made of coders working on their spare time. The exceptions are those that make a living of it.

The forum is where the reports/appeals are submitted and organized. It's where the communication is made between the staff and the users, and it's uptime is not even close to 99%. I can't turn my head and pretend there isn't a problem.

My suggestion is not an automated SR. It is to build a system where things are structured/organized in a different way, with the aid of a set of new tools that would optimize the time the staff spends on each report.

I've been watching these forums for months and every time anyone suggests something good or bad, the standard response is SR is understaffed and hiring new people would fix most if not all the problems. But that's a cycle that will never end: SR can't handle the load -> community complains -> SR claims it needs more staff -> applicants are not good enough -> start over. I realize that SR is trying to hire more people to help, but as an outsider I've been watching a chair dance for quite some time now: some come, some leave; no new chairs are really being added.

At the end I guess my approach is more aggressive than others': If I can't fix it one way I'll find another way. I just can't stand sitting and staring at the same problem for months.

There may be there are a few things steamrep needs to improve on, but I don't think they get rid of the issue that you still have lots of reports that will simple never be solved, and saying that rather than gaining man power you should work more on the system is one of 3 things, procrastination of the situation, the fact you might possible think the situation will resolve by itself which it won't, or you think having more admins will slow down the communication between admins and the staff will become harder to manage. Being blunt you have to deal with it. You guys have raised this organisation and I think you as admins have the duty to not procrastinate the situation. It is your responsibility.

You don't need a dedicated team of experts to make a ticketing site.

http://puu.sh/6cTNe.png
http://puu.sh/6cTGv.png
http://puu.sh/6cTJA.png
http://puu.sh/6cTKP.png
http://puu.sh/6cTLJ.png

You really, really don't need a team of talented coders to do it. Let's reiterate through all the community sites which offer more than the trivial features SR provides and were originally produced by no more than 2 people:

• backpack.tf - Bradpitt
• Scrap.tf - Geel and Jesse
• TF2Outpost - Sneeza
• Trade.tf - Swag
• Bazaar.tf - Accell and myself
• pan.tf - chaosk
• TF2R - Miz and Reag
• TF2TP - Graham bros.
• scrapbank.me - Waylaid
• numerous Dota-related sites

All of them. All these sites offer more than a ticketing service and user history logging. The features SR has (or needs) are trivial and all of the above have implemented something like it in some way. They didn't even have to try.

The common mistake around here is assuming whoever wants to redevelop the site must also get involved with daily administrative duties for some reason. I just can't get my head around this reasoning.

Picture this: You're a plumber and someone needs you to fix a leak. You go over to their house and you are immediately asked by the homeowner to handle his finances. You are not allowed to fix the leak unless you process all these tax forms and calculate the budget for the next fiscal year. You have two choices: walk out because the guy is clueless and wants you to do things you didn't sign on for, or you begrudgingly do what the man asked you and fix a leak while signing annual tax returns. The man will also scowl at you this entire time and put additional large stacks of forms on the table while you're working on the hundreds of pages that are already there.

This is what developing for SR would be like.

I offered several times to remake the held-together-with-sticky-tape backend for SR but they went ignored. Then it turned out it was because one person in particular felt I was untrustworthy. That same person, however, also has trust issues with a certain security expert in this same thread.

Well, it's definitely not my fault - I choose my friends wisely and I have no problems trusting people. Those who I gave server access helped fix problems or helped improve our infrastructure (e.g. Buddhapest, who finally moved us to Git and I'd like to give him a thank you gift later on).

As for that certain security expert - he's hacked apart Valve's infrastructure so much and has had many chances to benefit from doing so. But he doesn't - he contacts the devs to make sure they are aware of the exploit with a small demo, even if it empties Robin's backpack in the process.

My offer of revitalising SR for nothing in return was withdrawn a long time ago. It is clear to me that SR seniors are going to never find a competent developer to work for them and it all boils down to trust issues.

Trust issues, and that anyone who develops on the site must also handle thousands of scam reports for god knows why. There is no reasoning with the people running SR currently and they won't accept that throwing more admins at it won't solve the problem.

Enjoy Xenforo.

This is the dumbest thing I've ever read, hands down. No one should have the authority to "police" an entire community. The only people that have the real knowledge and power to actually moderate their own users is Valve, and Valve only. SR in its current state acting like a police is simply killing the TF2 trading community (go ahead and argue that SR is not intended to be so, but the fact that a single user can decide if another peer can or cannot trade with thousands of people is mind-boggling).

Ever since I was brought in as moderator roughly two years ago, absolutely nothing has changed in the way SR operates. The backlog started around that time too, and absolutely nothing was done to address it, except people saying "we will address it in time". The solutions towards clearing the backlog are right in everyone's face, yet it pains me to see people who I used to respect brought into the SR staff (pretender, black adder, helen, datastorm, etc.) simply become lazy f✿✿✿s sitting on top of their ivory towers bossing others around while BEING the cause of a decline in the popularity (in terms of positive feedback, not users) of steamrep. Probably the worst offender of all is datastorm, a person who hides behind an alt (silentreaper), pretending to be inactive but spends a lot of time responding to insults in the general discussions forum. The only person who still does anything productive is butane, and he basically carries this website on his back. Some mods sort through a lot of reports in hopes of becoming an admin to finally be able to change something, and when they do, they just quietly fade away. There are still reports being processed today from when black adder was a mod.

Every community admin brought in by actual trading communities (not joke ones like WA, TF2R, GoV, etc.) is trained to take reports and appeals EXACTLY the way SR processes them, since this is the only way to get a person tagged. I'm sure all comm admins are familiar with the community admin hidden forums in which reports were posted EXACTLY in the SR format, and evidence provided EXACTLY like regular reports are. Community admins who process a report EXACTLY like it is done on SR forums, but on their own website is identical to them just processing a random report here. What is the point of training community admins to be exactly like SR admins, but without the tools to do anything, or having their reports checked over twice? Back when I used to run AF2, 99% of our reports were either forwarded to Helen or Chaos (they both tagged without even reviewing evidence. "You'll have to deal with the appeal" was the most common reply when pressed further). tl;dr these community admins deal with exactly the same reports as SR does, but on clone websites instead. Simply bringing on board a small number of individuals would solve the problem completely. There are some sr admins that I trust less than most admins from real communities, it's not a difficult thing to accomplish. Also, people who keep suggesting more moderators as a solution, it's not one. SR moderators accomplish absolutely nothing except making doubling the manpower required to go through a single report. Mods are useless and should just be cut altogether (they accomplish nothing, I know how it is, I used to be one). Simply promote the old ones and work will actually be done. Even if you promote the ponyf✿✿✿er kid, he will still do more work in a month than every other admin combined.

The downhill way SR is heading in right now, I would rather see this place shutdown and let Valve (people who have actual authority) moderate the trading communities. This would:

• No lockdown on hats deemed clean by Valve, but dirty by SR (some burning TCs still get the user tagged even if purchased legitimately)
• Actual punishment for scammers (trade bans, account locks)
• "Automated" appeals system as explained by Derrick in that old thread
• Faster response time to scam reports (I submitted a recent one and the user got banned in less than 24h)
• Still stressing the point of the clean hats (the most important one in my opinion), this would open up the trading community to freely trade hats that were once scammed/duped but are now owned by legitimate users (as seen by Valve). Users would be able to freely trade anything with no consequences as long as the item itself was not directly scammed/hijacked, etc. (i.e. CLEAN hats owned by "scammers" would be able to enter the free market, which increases the overall number of unusuals. As well, SR has absolutely no business dictating which hats can or can't be bought even if Valve deems them clean)

I used to be one of the biggest backers of SR, but the direction in which the website is heading is just pathetic.

Your correct it doesn't take a team of elite coders. But I think since steamrep is made for reports then obviously they need more people to process the large influx of reports. I think everyone would rather a simple ticketing service and a streamlined process but the fact is that admins aren't able to cope with the amount of reports at this moment, and building a new system isn't gonna resolve 5,000 reports. More admins>streamlined process.

I did not say I agree with the fact that a third party organisation should police something that they have no right to do, in a way you could probable call steamrep an organisation of vigilantes. However I think there is a place for steamrep in the community. But if they can't handle the community, your correct they don't need or should exist. It is the hard truth.

' Steamrep was created to basically 'police' the trading scene.' My quote I never said they had the right to?

The feature was integrally part of the page, it did not go to another page in another /folder/ which means you cannot use robots.txt afaik.... unless you know robots.txt better then mattie, I really don't think that is a fruitfull discussion. If you're not a coder, stop talking about features which have limitations you do not know about.

Really tired of this nonsense, and almost decided to close the thread for its going nowhere. Ppl talking about stuff they don't know anything about, and propose wild guesses. While I do appreciate feedback, this thread has become nothing more then a distraction.

All hail the automation grail....

I am a coder, not a professional one (or as great as some others around) but I've been coding for over 13 years on my spare time. And I could be part of the "team" if my presence was requested.

I find it hard to believe that Zemnmez, for example, doesn't know what he's walking about.

Also, as answer... Back in the day, when trading came out end of 2010, there was several Scammer DB threads on SourceOP, the OP's and users dedicating their time one by one fell away and others took over. When the last fell away, only Diego and DataStorm where still helping people with their issues. Diego used his personal list of scammers, which he had in a website on "liveweb" or something. Diego contacted DataStorm to help him with the reports and appeals for his English was not good enough to understand the finer parts. So Diego worked with Jameless on the website while maintaining the scammer db thread on SourceOp. One day he published it, and SteamRep was born. We grew in admins, etc.

But allong with all that, all trade servers where already listing scammers in their SourceBans, forums, there was even some plain text list somewhere. Traders back in the day had to research ~ 15 communities, the most important ones being UHC, RAWR, Sourceop (back when the forums of SOP could not be searched on the site, one had to use Google), BBG, TF2-Trader, etc

SR made such extensive searching for if a trader was a scammer a lot easier for a lot of ppl. We integrated of a number of Comms in our tagging and the rest is (hopefully) known.

So, self appointed vigilantes? I don't think that is really what the issue is.

I never said that was an issue and vigilantes are always self appointed, if I don't make a point don't say that I made a certain point.

@ SilentReaper

"Back in the day, when trading came out end of 2010, there was several Scammer DB threads on SourceOP, the OP's and users dedicating their time one by one fell away and others took over. When the last fell away, only Diego and DataStorm where still helping people with their issues"

Do you see how in this case the past might appear to be a reflection of the present?

Too true

Thank Allah I thought I was the only one who thought this.

This.

I'll dissect an issue for you all here. One of the most common issues at SR that doesn't see as much light as it should.

The phish scams.

Here's how a phish scam works

1. A Hijacker creates a phishing website
2. A steam account posts a phishing link to that site in multiple places
3. That phishing site manages to catch 30 people
4. Those 30 accounts are now posting that same phishing link in more places
5. Let's be generous at this step and say that those 30 people manage to catch 5 people each. you now have 150 hijacked accounts.
6. All 150 of those accounts have lost items and attempted to scam people so they have been reported on SR.
7. The Hijack victims get their accounts back and all is well.
8. 6 months later, an admin comes across the report where they're accused of scamming because a hijacker stole their account and tags it.
9. That hijack victum now has a scammer tag so he appeals on the SR forums
10. A year later, the victim of the hijack has become so disheartened in trading that he doesn't care that he's only 6 months away from his appeal being dealt with (yes, I meant to say that it takes 18 months for your appeal to get sorted).

See the problem? It's not completely accurate as I don't have the actual numbers, I'm relying mostly on memory.

Let's say one account is stolen every 3 mins. It takes an admin around 20 mins to do a report correctly and it takes a different admin about an hour (can be much longer) to correctly do an appeal. That makes manpower the bottleneck.

Possible solutions?

• Adding more admins is always an option but the pool of candidates usually sucks. Perhaps create a training program to help mods progress and learn faster. The SR admins have a history of complaining about mods (among other things) but not actually doing anything about it.
• Better training of current staff so that things are done more efficiently. Training for mods is severely lacking at SR.
• Give current staff incentive to work. Most of what SR gets is hate threads and threats. If that's all you get, why bother doing reports if it's just going to lead to more of the same? I very rarely saw any complementary remarks from a lot of the admins towards the mods, at least not on the forums (there are private sections for such discussions).
• Give mods more powers when it comes to accepting reports. I'm not saying that all mods should be allowed to tag people but some are good enough to apply preliminary tags. In the very least there should be a better way for mods to work because right now they're glorified paper shufflers that don't actually do anything apart from removing the most obvious of dud threads.
• Streamline the reports and appeals processes so that it doesn't take so long to complete reports for admins.

I believe one of the best solutions is an incentive scheme for admins and mods. That would involve some actual monetisation of SR It's been tried poorly in the past and was dismissed by some admins. I'm not saying give admins cash rewards (though that is an option) but some reason besides the good feeling they're supposed to get for doing reports would go a huge way towards getting more done with the people you have. You also might see a rise in the quality of applicants if you committed to such a plan openly.

That hasn't really covered all the angles if I'm honest but it does give a rough idea of how to move forward. There's many other problems and many more possible solutions for those problems. Thinking outside the box and trying new things would be, in my opinion a great step in the right direction, even if you don't get it right first time, trying a different approach is better than continuing this current failing model.

There are some things that urgently need to be fixed though:

• Admins need to stop being so dismissive of feedback. One of the reasons I don't want to come back is the arrogance of a lot of the staff. It's not the right way to go about things. Just because you're good at what you do, doesn't mean you're always right.
• Mods need better and more targeted training. Not just because they do a bad job, because they do a good job for the most part, but better training results in better skills which means you can trust them with more important and responsible jobs.
• There needs to be better structure and delegation of tasks. Roles were very scattered when I was an admin, I don't know if that's changed but it should be made very clear on what is and isn't a particular admins job.
• Productivity needs to be streamlined. It takes too long to complete reports and appeals and most of the things you do aren't needed, they're mostly ceremonial and could be easily removed from the process.
• People need to actually do their jobs. Get off your ass and do the work you signed up to do, or if you don't want to do the work, don't ask for the job.
• The more senior admins need to address the concerns of those more junior. The amount of times I've seen valid concerns and discussion points brushed aside for no reason blew my mind. It's stupid to dismiss new ideas without discussing them. A fresh approach can, many times be exactly what you need. There is no single solution or best work method, only a preferred one for each admin.
• Everyone needs to get involved with the betterment of SR. That means all admins should post thoughts on potential solutions to problems, not just some, but ALL.

If I'm honest those are mainly reasons I left SR. There are other reasons but that's the bulk of it. The biggest thing stopping me from asking for my job back is the fact that there's no point. If I did 100 reports a day, I'd still be fighting a loosing battle. I'm not up for dredging through more s✿✿✿ with no end in sight. After this post, I doubt I'd get my position back if I did ask anyway since it'll be taken as an attack, not an open criticism.

Before I finish I want to address aces mention of me. I was taught that SR doesn't have to check evidence of community bans/tags since it's up to those communities to do it. So you're right, I rarely checked the evidence before tagging. Once I was put in charge of community tags at SR though, that changed very quickly. I did all the community reports the day the were posted, checking every scrap of evidence and asking for more where necessary. In the end, I ditched nearly every protocol I was given and did things my own way. Nobody complained and I actually got more positive comments from community admins than ever because I did things promptly and correctly.

Finally, you can say SR isn't the police until your lips fall off, doesn't make it true. You can say you'll get to things in time but that means f✿✿✿ all if you do it when there's s✿✿✿ everywhere. You can say you're trying your best but if your best isn't good enough then you should be doing something else that's actually productive to society.

I say all this as an ex admin who wants SR to succeed, I really do.

INB4 I get called a traitor or idiot like Schwegs did.