I had a thought about recent scam attempts here and wanted to run this by the management 
How about creating a sticky at the top of the selling forum where AF members can post when they've had a successful trade or sale with someone? Just something specific, short and sweet - no other comments allowed. It would be a feedback system that, while not being much help to new members making sales, would allow users to see that user x is okay to buy from...or not, based on feedback left for that user.
It wouldn't have helped with the recent couple of scams, but might have saved a few people from dealings with Raven"I likes 'em young"darkness.*
* A note to new users: Never to be confused with Reverend Darkness. He uses his secret powers for good, not evil.
but in order to keep folks from trashing each other and getting highly personal, this should be a moderated thread. This should allow a site administrator to ensure that 'just the facts' are posted. An alternative to this would be adding the ability for users to post feedback on any given user to that user's profile.
--DDTM
No matter what is done, it is pretty clear to me that we need some kind of feedback sysem on Applefritter. I had PM'd Tom about this the other day and I am waiting to hear back from him. I also volunteer to help out in any way that I can in this effort.
... And I like your little "note to new users"!
Having such a forum thread would allow me to post nice things about the recent transaction with OrionGraphics...
is a moderated feedback feature really practical (or even desirable) in such an open forum as this?
For example, what's to stop folks from posting positive feedback about themselves from other screennames? Or posting a bunch of negative posts about others? Sure, if someone is really egregious I suppose it'd be pretty obvious, but without the verified transaction records such as eBay uses it'll pretty difficult to bar abuse.
Also I'm concerned TO might end up catching some unwanted liability. A feedback 'feature' implies some measure of supervision, especially if 'managed'. Supervision implies responsibility . . .
Bottom line, is marketplace transaction assurance a direction AF should go, or should trading more realistically be done (as most everywhere else) at the traders' own risk? Maybe there's some way to add a warning or disclaimer or something to the existing Buy/Sell topic listings and individual posts?
dan k
...after all, AF is a forum based on exchange of knowledge and ideas - trade is just an after-thought in that context. I do think a more clearly stated disclaimer on the FS/WTB forums would keep folks more mindful of the hazzards.
I can see your point at how tracking feedback takes all of the administrators from a passive to an active mode and that adds a fair bit of overhead. I for one do not fault the AF folks or TO for the SL incident. It is all too easy to obtain multiple email addresses from one's ISP and then setup multiple users from there. Tracking this is impossible.
Perhaps a seperate forum for folks to post feedback about good and bad trade? It would be easy for the moderators to go in and edit threads as they sometimes must do anyways.
Maybe we can add something to the userprofile that makes it easier to track whom we have traded with and what our experience was. From there it is real easy for another user to do a search and comeback with blog-like entries of people's dealings with specific users.
I am just pitching ideas here.
--DDTM
Anybody want to write this?
Rather than letting anybody type anything, make them pick items from a list, or just rate them on a scale of 1-10.
Rather than just rating out of ten stars (or whatever), why not have an averaged rating available, and then have a page showing each individual rating, with comments, available to logged in members only?
Or something.