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.

Announcement Major SteamRep Announcements - OFPF, Donations, and much more

Discussion in 'SteamRep General Discussion' started by Xenophobia, Nov 23, 2014.

  1. Legitti

    Legitti Donator - Tier V

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    Great addon. I just donated for Tier V
    Hitman Sparky likes this.
  2. JLBGold

    JLBGold New User

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    Thanks to the creator of the project and all people who are working and have worked on it. This website helped me a lot avoid trades with many scammers. It is very usefull for everybody, even for Valve that will receive less tickets if users are well informed.
    Congratulations for the OFPF, I hope it will lead to something even better.
    Thanks again.
    Hitman Sparky likes this.
  3. Legitti

    Legitti Donator - Tier V

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    Also it would be useful to see how much each of us have donated.
  4. Horse

    Horse Administrator SteamRep Admin

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    No, I disagree on that cause you don't need to do the "my e-peen is bigger than yours cause I donated more" nonsense. You donated to a good group, how about you just feel good about that and don't worry about what others can tell. To be honest I think just "Donator" was fine...I'd rather see the Tier's removed from display but that is my opinion.
  5. Legitti

    Legitti Donator - Tier V

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    No, i just think that would make people donate more and ultimetly would benefit the site.
  6. Overslop

    Overslop Donator - Tier V

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    Scammers are the bane of all Steam users. It's getting worse and worse and although I'm more wise to the scam attempts now, I've lost fortunes to them in the past. I fully support this new initiative and hope others do too. Hopefully with more funding report processing can be a lot quicker and less people fall victim to the vermin that plague us.
    Roudydogg1 likes this.
  7. Jonathanisaderp

    Jonathanisaderp Donator - Tier V

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    Is it possible that I donate 100 dollars over the course of a couple months? Or is it better to donate in one lump sum? Please let me know thank you!
  8. Thomas Matthias

    Thomas Matthias Retired Staff

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    See below:
    Roudydogg1 likes this.
  9. Overslop

    Overslop Donator - Tier V

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    Snce donating via the new system it says I've only been a donator for a few days whereas I had donator status for a year just prior to this. Can it be added on or is this not possible? Doesn't matter much if not but would be preferable.
    Roudydogg1 likes this.
  10. You Are The One

    You Are The One SteamRep Admin

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    The old tags were good for 1 year as stated on the old donation page. Your tag would have expired Sept 2, 2014 ($10 made Aug 29th 2013 but tag applied Sept 2) And was removed Nov 10th. Sorry but their was no concurrence between your old donation and the one made Dec 4th.
  11. Overslop

    Overslop Donator - Tier V

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    Yes, I realise it was prior but I couldn't donate more when I wanted to because it was disabled. So therefore it was not possible to retain concurrent donator status unless I made a mistake. But I have seen others with tag showing they have been donator for years so wondered if they had made a request too or something. Anyways, it doesn't really matter - just thought I would ask. :)
  12. Xenophobia

    Xenophobia Retired Staff

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    They are considered legacy donators. See on the list: http://steamrep.com/list/D
  13. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    @Overslop Most legacy donators were removed while the new system was being worked on, with a handful of exceptions. Most donators were for 1 year, but with donations disabled anyway we kind of never got around to removing them until we were just about to open up the new tiered system. We decided to keep a handful of past donators for one reason or another, including for retired staff, the very first people to donate, and especially generous donators (excess of $100 I think) that we wouldn't feel right removing. You Are The One talked about it a little here: http://forums.steamrep.com/threads/donation.53172/#post-228551
    Mattie! likes this.
  14. You Are The One

    You Are The One SteamRep Admin

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  15. Overslop

    Overslop Donator - Tier V

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    Thanks for the info guys - all understood now. :)
  16. Leon Hunter

    Leon Hunter New User

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    I'm going to be blunt. I have little confidence in this project on the grounds that integrity is essential when you're effectively banning people from vast swathes of communities who integrate their servers with the SteamRep API or otherwise impacting their trading prospects.

    You cannot have integrity, that is, confidence in the accuracy of the tagging, while there is an appeals backlog dating back over a year. Nor can you claim to be a timely and efficient scam prevention service when open-and-shut reports sit around stagnating for similar periods of time.

    These changes are good. But I feel more effort should be put into the apparent essence of what this project is about and why it is relevant in the present day. People use SteamRep simply because it's the most comprehensive scammer database out there, however I genuinely believe that sloppy processes and inattention is preventing the project from meeting its full potential. Perhaps SteamRep should evaluate whether or not tagging should become the sole responsibility of the partner communities, with SteamRep acting solely to deliver the service that partner communities then use. Players would then make reports to the partner community of their choice to investigate instead of everyone making reports directly to SteamRep. This would split the workload of tagging between partner communities (who are, arguably, the beneficiary of their involvement in SteamRep anyway) instead of creating one massive cluster-f✿✿✿ that is the SteamRep forums at present.
    Roudydogg1 likes this.
  17. Roudydogg1

    Roudydogg1 SteamRep Admin Friend Community

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    "You cannot have integrity, that is, confidence in the accuracy of the tagging, while there is an appeals backlog dating back over a year. Nor can you claim to be a timely and efficient scam prevention service when open-and-shut reports sit around stagnating for similar periods of time."

    No offense to the staff here at SR, but I could not have said that any better myself. In my educated mind, I see it like this.

    #1 A company claims to deal with, say, A, B and C in a timely and efficent matter, and (for the purpose of SR) leaves, as you put it "open-and-shut cases" to sit around for unprofessional lengths of time. They should either train more employees (yes, training is very important!) to increase dealing with the backlog, or, to be blunt, they should simply stop advertising and performing their service. I know people will disagree with that and a lot of people may see differently, but it's really that simple. If you can't do your job then find somebody else who can. And if you can't do that (I see no reason why not), then stop offering the service!

    SR already encourages people to report to partner communities, which is positive. But clearly the issues here at SR are persistant and have gotten worse anyway. As for the not-for-profit joining - that is a wonderful idea, and a great step; what I don't seem to understand is why this has - clearly - been the main focus of this site when - clearly - there is another issue at hand which should be 'at the front burners' so to speak. I go back to my last paragraph. Sure it's hard to deal with such a large community database, and sure it takes a while to train new staff; sure it's hard to get the job done sometimes, no ones arguing that. The point at hand here is that these efforts should be top priority, above most - if not all - other things, if a community with so much potential wishes to do things like partner with not-for-profits, and re-introduce donating into the scene.

    As I said earlier, I know people will disagree with ^that, but I say again - it's literally that simple.
  18. Leon Hunter

    Leon Hunter New User

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    Pretty much that.

    It is important to note that the non-profit in question is run by the people behind SteamRep and it seems to have a rather broad scope in its mission statement. Would it be correct to assume that the staff behind SteamRep / OSPF are pivoting toward a more general position in regards to scamming? That is, do they intend to start providing scam prevention services for other platforms? (Other than Steam that is)

    If that is indeed the case then I re-iterate the necessity of focusing on solely on delivering those platforms and services instead of getting bogged down in tagging Steam scammers yourselves - let the partner communities do that instead. You will never have enough staff within SteamRep to deal with the number of reports that funnel through this website and even if you did, the administration overhead of overseeing and training those staff would absorb what little time you have left to spend on these projects. And this is before we even start talking about natural attrition of volunteer staff over time.

    However, If SteamRep / OFPF is not intending to pivot toward being a more general anti-scamming authority, then I question the need to setup a separate organisation in the first place. Perhaps some light could be shed on which scenario is more likely or accurate?
    Roudydogg1 likes this.
  19. Mattie!

    Mattie! SteamRep Admin

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    I disagree wholeheartedly-- getting SteamRep on a proper foundation was absolutely paramount. You can't build anything when you don't have a firm base to build upon. If we want the organization to serve as a nexus for fraud prevention in the gaming community, it has to establish independence and that it is not out for profit. The old SteamRep was owned by Diego and did not have a clear status (which is probably fine in his country's laws). Now that we have the ground floor to build upon, we can now focus on other initiatives. It all ties in together as a cascading strategy. The new org will make recruiting and retaining volunteers easier than before-- which is core to a plan to get SteamRep's services in much better shape. As a benefit, we also see improved partner engagement since these changes, too.

    "it's literally that simple" -- statements like that make it hard to take your points seriously. If you believe anything about this effort is simple then you're really not understanding what a massive project this is.

    Our partner communities also do not have the bandwidth to handle the volume of investigation . You vastly overestimate their resources in this area. No one has the resources to do this fully, not even Steam Support. We are working with the community to reset expectations around this, and I advise you to cease expecting someone to handle every single fraud that is reported. Everything has to be prioritized. Not every newbie scam, spycrab complaint, or small issue is going to be able to be handled, as there will never ever be enough volunteers. Valve makes millions and still has their own struggles handling the problems and requests-- no community organization or network is going to be able to handle them all, either.

    So the right way to attack these is through a mix of strategies-- we're still working on those, but there's a lot possible. We are encouraging partners to handle as much as they can. We also focus on handling reports via prioritization criteria to ensure that the worst cases are handled as soon as we can. And of course, we're working to improve staffing and tools (such as new API for partners to give them more autonomy).

    We'd love if the communities around SteamRep could handle the volume of reports-- but they do not have the volunteers to do so. We look to engage them more, but there are definitely benefits for the community if there is a common place to report scams (e.g. so people can see late-breaking reports, transparency, etc). We've discussed hybrid approaches and will consider them more, but there's no magical answer here. I think a lot of us want SteamRep and OFPF to focus much more on education and helping communities (and get out of the banning game except for cases of admin corruption, etc), but the reality is there is a lot that has to happen before anything like that can work.


    That's more of a long-term hope-- our focus in the near-term is the rampant scamming going on in gaming (Steam). In gaming, the victims are primarily kids/teens and often the people committing the crimes are also kids/teens-- those young criminals go on to escalate to even bigger fraud (PayPal account stealing, identity theft, etc). We'd like to reduce the victims and the number of criminals that come out of this kind of environment. It is a bigger problem than people probably realize.

    Note that a lot of fraud prevention techniques that apply to gaming/Steam are useful for general online scenarios, too (e.g. protecting email/PayPal, verifying people, scam attempt detection, etc). Where possible, we'll provide guidelines that help general scenarios, but gaming/Steam has enough fraud to keep us busy for a very, very long time.

    I know you don't agree with us entirely, but I know that we all agree that improvements are required -- spreading the load around will be an important part of that. It's not the final answer, but it will help.

    We really appreciate the support of those working with us. Instead of insisting that we change the way a specific person demands, I encourage those reading this to volunteer to contribute to the education side by writing guides and creating videos. Or by helping newbies with their fraud questions. For our partners, I encourage them to help us turn the tide around with new collaboration ideas and offering a hand. For those with a lot of free-time to volunteer, stay tuned for more opportunities to do so. We could use your help.
  20. You Are The One

    You Are The One SteamRep Admin

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