I notice fraud and con cases still happening at a very high rate despite lots of work done to curb such thing.

I am not sure if someone suggested this before but I have not come across such suggestion in previous anti conmen dicussion. Perhaps it has already been discussed among mods. Anyway, my suggestion is that the trading section only allow certain member with higher priority to post and view.

Maybe only those with registration of 3 months and above AND with post count more than 100 can go to trading section.

This is so that those who register specifically to con will have to spend some time before they can start their con scheme.

Those who get blacklisted due to trading issues will also need to wait to gather up those requirement before they can do their thing again.

At least this way, conmen will need to work a little harder to be able to start posting in trading section.

This way, we also avoid getting people who only register account here to do trading. There are lots of members with less than 10 post count who does nothing but trade here. This board started out as a tech forum and I think it should continue in this path. Trading is just a side thread which should not become a major thing for this forum. As discussed before, this forum have limited resources to become a trading website. There are too much rules to implement to have a proper trading website such as ebay or lelong. If Se7en and co. want to continue developing a trading section, then better to make a proper trading sub website. Or else fraud cases and irresponsible trades will keep on piling up.

Anyway, just my suggestion. Everyone feel free to comment.

some forumers, albeit ther very few posts, have actually been a good trader

you have to bear in mind, posting a reply in garage sale won't contribute to your post counts

There are many good trader in garage sales also has post counts of "0" because they only active in there..
Other than that.. I can spam everywhere to get 100 posts..
Not fair for new members though.. If got this 3 months rules.. THey won't bother joining since have to wait 3 months only can sell their item..

Whenever there's a social problem in our forum, the "post count/join date" band-aid is always prescribed to fix it. Does it really?

The con cases here are well-documented, as we have our dispute resolution corner (ditto to those who got conned but didn't open one there). Can you pick out some recent ones and show how this band-aid would've helped prevent them from happening?

This post has been edited by wKkaY: Sep 12 2006, 06:58 PM

I support this suggestion.

It's like putting padlocks on our doors and gates of our homes to help prevent thefts. It's not full proof, but it will definitely make it harder for crime to commence.

Well, I'd like to give a suggestion. Maybe some sort of WTS and WTB tag/options can be implemented at the "create/open a new open" page. Easier for them, and perhaps to those who usually forgot to put the tag can be avoided.

On the other hand, wkkay is right, post count doesn't really matter. Anyway, Mr. threadstarter got his point, we just wanted to avoid the conmen/blacklisted/irresponsible forumers to create a new nickname just for the sake of conning again. Date of joining is good thing, still everything that has been implemented has it flaws.

This post has been edited by c9: Sep 12 2006, 08:12 PM

I didn't say it doesn't matter

The simple 5 tips that one should always follow.

1) Do your research on the item.
2) COD if not sure/ feel not trusty.
3) PM the people on his tradelist to verify.
4) Check the Blacklist and Minor Offender List
5) Don't pay full amount until confirmation/getting the item.

I believe if everyone follow this simple 5 tips, probability of getting conned is very low.

These are the simple rules of trading online actually (maybe not the blacklist part which is existent here).
But people are blinded by greed and don't bother with doing their homework.
However, that is how to avoid getting conned.

Abubin's advice would also help out the sales section here by stopping less useless conman sales from coming up and more genuine ones to appear, thus lessening the burden of users here and also we don't have to weed through all the conman-style threads.

What do you mean by 'very high rate'? Most disputes are about FFK-ing and some other minor incidences which aren't fraud.

I don't deny that there is fraud, but its certainly not to the extent that requires us to take such measures which would detriment so many others. In actual fact, most if not all frauds can be prevented if people heeded the tips we provided (listed in the post above mine).

I'm sure you would have noticed that Lowyat.net is first and foremost, a tech enthusiast discussion forum, not a trading site. If you want to sell your stuff, there's always the trading sites.

Just figured out something.

I'm not sure whether this can be done or implement but I give a shot with have I have in my mind right now.

Can you guy disabled edit for all the post in trade zone? This would prevent all the editing after conning from happens but might takes its burden on the server also

Secondly, only allowed a maximum of err say 3 time(which include starting the thread) for editing the first post? This would make the seller more harder but I believe we can somehow reduce the case.

Just a suggestion.

From what i've seen so far, most of the con cases by newbies have been through postage where buyers pay in advance
In the first place, dont we all know that it's not safe to deal in that manner with newbies?
If ppl would just follow that rule when picking deals, we wont need the post/age limit right?

I think the edit function has it uses, even in the trade zone
And IINM posts that are editted still stay recorded in the server and admins can look for them if needed (is this right?)

Limiting the edit number for the first post wouldnt be feasible
A lot of traders reserve posts and slowly edit them when first opening the thread
And for auctions sellers would need to add info such as the highest bidder and stuff constantly

I do see the lack point but I hope something that disabling their activities.

Why not we make them to enter their Name and Account Number to require them to create the thread in trade zone. This name and account number entered will be posted but are not editable. If needs editing, only the mods/trade enforces shall able to do it. Other than that, we can lock it. With this added and blocking the editing other than the 1st post, I think this should be ample enough.

I don't think they will enter wrongly their source of income details don't they?

I think if somebody did a quick stat of the number of sales being completed against those that are reported as frauds/ffk, the ratio would be around 100 to 1. Most of the attempted frauds are stamped out due to our open policy where any member is allowed to comment/critic on a sale, making it very hard for cheaters/fraudsters to trick members. We do not deny that there are minor fraud cases taking place every day, but it is more down to the naivety of the buyer rather then a fault of the system. We can build all the protection measures we want, but if the member does not take the effort to protect himself, no amount of measures will help.

We are not a trading forum (as pointed out earlier), hence we do not want to devote our resources to build more features to make trading more complicated. Shackling measures only work for some time before fraudsters figure out a loophole and exploit it. We prefer to educate the members themselves, and as a community stamp out on fraudsters.

i know we can't continue building fences around the forum for the sake of some newbies traders but the features I suggested, I believe is already available with IPB. Therefore implementing it is not that much work. If those features are not so easy to implement then forget it.

I just want to make this place a safer place for trading where it used to be quite fun when conmen are not so a plenty. Now, even those kids comeout to con because they can get away with it easily.

Plus, what I suggested only could fend off casual conmen and FFKer and irresponsible traders who got blacklisted. It is by no means to make things worst for the forum.

Like I said, it's not only for con cases. FFKers and blacklisted cases are also happening very frequently which would benefit from this higher "turnaround" time for them to redo their "thing".

If posts can be edited for 3 times maximum, it would defeat the purpose anyway of your suggestion.
As per your main suggestion of disabling post editing, IIANM it is still done in some trade sections of some local forums already.
At the trade-section of their forums, post editing is disabled and members must include all details or face immediate deletion of the thread itself and if any amendment needs/wants to be done, the member must PM the mod in charge to have it done.

But their amount of traffic is nothing compared to what we have here (like near zero usually for them and here it's like way more than that). So you can see why this can't be done here where sales threads are posted like every micro-second.

This post has been edited by sniper msia: Sep 13 2006, 12:45 AM

well, as per my earlier post, measures can be implemented, but we can't stop them, we might make things worse.

Blocking their ability to post will make them turn to other avenue's say PM's which is less transparent, and their reasoning will be that they can't wait for 3 months to be qualified to post.

Also, it will make post count become a yardstick, something which we have to date tried to maintain as a mere symbol, with no meaning whatsoever. We'll end up with more spam on post count enabled forums by these people just trying to get to 100 - which in turn ruins other parts of the forum.

The bottomline is this, you can never stop a conman - they will keep coming back with new tricks, but you can educate the masses to avoid from getting conned, which while slow is a much more effective approach.

why fear conmen?

i fear stupid buyers more.

abubin, I'm still waiting for you to apply the litmus tests on our documented con cases (as per post #4).

And no, this feature is not an IPB built-in.