Rule about banning for trading with scammers, my friend has to say something about it

He doesnt wanna post it since he doesnt wanna join here, so I'm posting it for him, this is his message:

''As someone who hasn't traded in a very long time, I’ve recently come back to tf2 and seen the trading community, and I can honestly say I’m disappointed in its decline. Smaller traders are scrambling around while the higher tier traders chat amongst themselves. Yes, this is how it was back when I originally played, but the difference is there was a large number of smaller traders and those in between the 2 stages. From what I have seen, the number of smaller traders has greatly declined and new traders coming in have also greatly declined. I believe the current steamrep policy to be part of this issue. Yes, the service is incredibly helpful and yes, the service helps new traders. However, the trading with scammers policy is blocking off new or unaware traders from starting their journey. Say I’m a completely new trader, I bought a few keys and I’m starting to trade. I see someone who wants to sell me a hat for a low price, I check backpack.tf and it says that it's worth more, so I take the deal. I begin trying to sell the hat but have no luck. I wonder why nobody wants to buy the hat from me so I lower the price to a small amount over what I bought it for but still less than the backpack.tf price, yet nobody wants it. I get fed up with trying because nobody wants to buy it and I dump it on the steam market and leave. What happened there that the new player wouldn't have known is that the person they bought it from was a scammer and that they got punished on steamrep for doing it because he looks like scammer alt. Nobody wanted to buy it because they would get the ban themselves. See the issue here? Unless a new trader somehow already knows about steamrep, they're at the will of scammers to be banned themselves. This "educational" ban requires the user to know about and visit steamrep and happen to check their own reputation. This, in my eyes, is a double standard, seeing as sharking can get a scammer banned. EG: someone says something is worth 10 keys when it's worth 15 and convinces the person it's worth that much so they trade. The scammer is then banned. Why? Because the user did not check backpack.tf, be it for laziness, negligence or the fact they didn't know about it, and yet the new trader is still punished for not checking steamrep specifically. I've seen a few traders have this happen to them and it's made me lose faith in the system.
My suggested solution? A slap on the wrist and a warning, BEFORE a ban. Have the user be added by a mod or even a bot, who tells them about what they've done, who they traded with to make this happen and what would happen if they do it again. Then tell the trader about steamrep and make it clear to them so they can't feign ignorance again. Something along the lines of the following:

"Hey there, I’m an automated bot from the steamrep forums! It has come to our attention you recently traded with scammer's name. This person has been marked as banned on the steamrep forums as a scammer. Normally, people who trade with these people get a ban as well as they're giving them profit, but we let people off with a warning on their first time! If you have any further questions, just type in steamrep into your search engines and go to the support forums!" (Or wherever you'd want them to go). It'd help more traders stay in the business and educate them properly, both on scammers and about steamrep, instead of expecting them to already know about steamrep.

Of course, I’ve not had personal experience with steamrep so I can't comment too well on it personally, but I’ve seen enough of my friends have this happen to them to make it a concern of mine.



Thanks for reading and thanks for your time.



- Kai''

SteamRep no longer bans for trading with scammers as of 2016, this has nothing to do with SR
https://forums.steamrep.com/threads/steamrep-policy-changes-for-2016.119548/

Also, SteamRep doesn't ban for sharking

then i meant outpost and backpack.tf bans

Bp does ban for trading with scammers but I believe they only do that with people doing it repeatedly/people who are obviously aware of bp and other trading sites
Any case this still has nothing to do with SteamRep, communities have their own rules and they can ban whoever they want
You should bring this up to them for more details