ashwald: I've been thinking about scammer prevention a lot these days and I have a suggestion for an extra rule in this thread. Since Anasto first appeared many people have taken to listing their successful trades at the bottom of their posts.
What I'm proposing is to replace that with a seperate "My list of people I've successfully traded with" thread where people reserve a post and list names with links to posts where the other person is thanking them for their business and make it a requirement. So instead of what happens now, they would post a link to their place in the seperate thread where the format would be:
name - link to thank you post
name - link to thank you post
name - link to thank you post
without repeated entries to account for multiple trades with the same person. If someone wants to add eg. (x4) after a name to give others a fuller picture that's fine, but practically speaking there's no need to post more than one link for a single name.
This would make things far easier and faster for people who want to check each other's trading history on GOG before negotiating who goes first, since they won't need to waste time trying to google names one by one for every new attempted deal. Someone with zero trades would of course have to go first by default as the rules already state and scammers won't be able to bluff about their trade history.
There are people who have been trading for years and demanding they go through 600 pages in the classifieds to gather proof of successful trading would be beyond ridiculous (if they actually want to do it that's another story) so I'm thinking, as a starting point, something around the lines of 3-5 names minimum being mandatory for those who have traded a lot and beyond that the more different names they want to include the better. The lists would of course have to be updated after a new trade but that's nothing new.
What do you guys/gals think?
We can give it a shot and see how it works out.
