Quote from: justusranvier on March 15, 2013, 06:17:59 PM

How about a surety system instead of a rating system?

Could you elaborate? Alternative to ratings would be nice to hear about.

Quote from: BCB on March 15, 2013, 06:18:26 PM

You can't help those how can't help themselves.

I'm for a scammer committee. Two or three trusted member or maybe more then you have an x of y votes to apply the tag.

Some guys can be VERY aggressive. I know I jump the gun on occasion. But I think it would work pretty well. I would also put the community on notice that their trades are being policed.

We would also have to define SCAMMER.

My opinion it is a person who does not uphold their end of a deal after a period of time. The scammer thread it a place to publicly debate it and if the scammer make good the tag gets removed.

I DO NOT think welshing on a bet is scamming. So after the whole MNW debacle, even those he's an cocky arrogant asshole, I don't think he was a scammer. But the scammer tag did seem to silence him. So that was a good thing.

Just my 2c

Sounds good in theory, but we've tried something similar before and a few people got excited about it but it ultimately never went anywhere. That's here Do you think people would be willing to do that for free on an extended basis? Wouldn't want people rotating in all the time, it would get hard to find really trusted people who want to do that sooner or later. Could always require a small fee for scammer tag consideration I suppose, but that seems a little beyond the scope of what the forum should be.

I'm still in favor of just replacing the system, I'll be interested in seeing what the users think though.

Quote from: 21after2 on March 15, 2013, 06:21:35 PM

Quote from: BadBear on March 15, 2013, 02:48:48 PM

What kind of deterrent would you suggest? What do you think will stop predators like this?

You make an excellent point in your entire post: nothing will completely stop scammers 100%. But I think that the amount of scammers can be cut down considerably, or at least a good amount in relation to the little effort it would take.

I believe the same thing you do: a lot of our scammers can/will/do simply create new accounts and try again. Changing the newbie restrictions a bit would take very little effort and would make the process of getting a scam out there more difficult. It won't stop scams, but I think it would help prevent them. Scammers would likely have to go for bigger scams to make the reward worth the effort, and bigger scams would probably have fewer takers.

If it works? Less scams for a change that could probably be done in a handful of minutes, which means less work for theymos.
If it doesn't work? It still slows down the scams even if it doesn't reduce the total amount, which would also mean less (frequent) work for theymos.

To me it's less about "more scammer tags" and more about deterring the scammers. You (understandably) don't have the time to monitor every single scam topic, so the goal should be reducing the amount or frequency of the scams that cause them.

Honestly we'd rather remove the newbie restrictions, rather than make them tighter just to solve a problem that can't be solved. No matter what we do to make an account hard to get to the lending section, they'll just do it a dozen accounts at a time. Just look at the guy I was responding to. He sent 500 dollars to someone with 13 posts and a month on his account. What kind of restrictions can we place that wouldn't burden normal users too badly, yet cause someone to not want to make that kind of easy money?