Ability To Disable Trade Suggestions

[Kiyomice]

Every single disadvantage mentioned so far in this thread could be completely avoided if people simply left their trade settings as they are. You wouldn't have to change it. This is simply an option for those who want to change it.

This is assuming we have very few users (raw number, not %) on CS who have deviant or otherwise underdeveloped integrity.

[...] I feel like adding a "No suggestions" feature would be like opening floodgates for opportunistic people to take advantage of others' trust [...]

I assume this is one of the disadvantages you're referring to; the only way this disadvantage can be avoided if this feature were to be implemented is if these opportunistic people simply don't know about the feature (or we convince them to not be opportunistic, even if it's just because "the admins will catch you"), so... "if people simply left their trade settings as they are" just isn't gonna happen with these users

That being said, maybe the number of users who would do this is very low. I don't know how much work the mods put into dealing with users who fall into this category. If it's not that much work, then I guess this isn't a big concern, but if it's already a lot of work, then yeah

This is a logical fallacy - disabling the ability for a user to send you a suggestion warrants no concern for users being taken advantage of. It simply means someone can't send you suggestions. Nothing more, nothing less. All else mentioned in your post is irrelevant - if someone wants to scam another user, then they can already do so, the suggestions feature is not stopping them from doing that.

But again, if you want people to send you suggestions, then simply keep your trades the way they are.
It would be silly to deny a change that would be beneficial to many users simply because it's a feature you or some others wouldn't personally use. It is not a feature that would have any impact on the amount of scamming that takes place on ChickenSmoothie. The concerns of scamming are unfounded.

[nickjr]

lol whoops I was wondering if I misunderstood something so I started typing out scenarios and it turns out I was mixing something up after all -crawls into corner-

Although I'm still worried about stuff like this happening:

User A disables trade suggestions and PMs from non-friends.

Non-friend User B sends User A a trade: "Hey, I saw in your trade thread that you're looking for this pet, but your offer group is locked. Add?"

User A accepts.

(User B sends a report, and User B is not the only person to send a report. Mods spend time on these reports and eventually punishing User A instead of on other more pressing matters. These reports and the wasted time are 100% avoidable if we don't allow User A to disable suggestions in the first place.)


(the other scenarios I had in mind were jumbled... this is why I don't do mental math: because everything gets mixed up if it stays in my head lol whoops)

But as I said earlier, this might not be that big of a concern. I'm not sure how many users on CS would do this, either raw numbers (quantity has a quality of its own) or %-wise. But CS is giant now, so I'm guessing the raw number is pretty high, and I don't remember the moderating team size growing at the same % rate as the userbase...

[tarkeli]

I would like to jump in here with the clarification that I am not posting as a GMOD but as a standard user -

As someone who is a frequent trader, I understand where you are coming from - suggestions can be annoying, especially if you've said in your trade rules/thread not to send them. That said, however, I cannot support this.

Outside of the risk of less than honest individuals scamming newbies or infrequent traders, one of my main reason for my lack of support would be trades involved in art payments. In my years on CS I've seen or heard of enough people get scammed out of art because the artist would not accept pet/C$/item trades as a suggestion. By not allowing suggestions, the artist could accept the trade at any time without completing the art leaving the other user with less pets/items/C$, no art, and the headache of having to submit a help ticket for resolution and if no resolution can be found, face the realization that they were swindled and ended up empty-handed.

Now you could certainly say that the other person took a risk and could always find another artist, however, once you've been scammed once, you're more careful and choose to offer things as a suggestion instead. Taking away that option from someone at-will seems dishonest, selfish, and may actually hamper trades/economy in the long-run due to the elevated risk involved. That said I understand that this example is but a fraction of what happens in greater CS trade-universe, but I think it is enough from my perspective not not support this. At least with suggestions being 'always on' there is control on both sides of the situation. If one player is able to remove that control completely, and at any time, I see a lot of potential issues arising as a consequence.

[Gloo Soda]

Outside of the risk of less than honest individuals scamming newbies or infrequent traders, one of my main reason for my lack of support would be trades involved in art payments. In my years on CS I've seen or heard of enough people get scammed out of art because the artist would not accept pet/C$/item trades as a suggestion. By not allowing suggestions, the artist could accept the trade at any time without completing the art leaving the other user with less pets/items/C$, no art, and the headache of having to submit a help ticket for resolution and if no resolution can be found, face the realization that they were swindled and ended up empty-handed.

Now you could certainly say that the other person took a risk and could always find another artist, however, once you've been scammed once, you're more careful and choose to offer things as a suggestion instead. Taking away that option from someone at-will seems dishonest, selfish, and may actually hamper trades/economy in the long-run due to the elevated risk involved. That said I understand that this example is but a fraction of what happens in greater CS trade-universe, but I think it is enough from my perspective not not support this. At least with suggestions being 'always on' there is control on both sides of the situation. If one player is able to remove that control completely, and at any time, I see a lot of potential issues arising as a consequence.

I was on the fence about this suggestion, until now, and I agree with this.

I will say up front that you could simply refuse to do business with an artist or client who has disabled trade suggestions. And that would work just fine...for people who are familiar with the site, and are aware of the fact that there are people here that don't have good intentions when they claim to be buying or selling art.

A less savvy and/or new user is at substantially more risk if the option to turn off suggestions is present. I feel like otherwise, if the artist (or client) says outright that they refuse to do suggestions, that already raises a bit of a red flag. While obviously not always the case, even some otherwise newer players at least have the chance to start asking some questions. But with this option, I think that people would just shrug and not see anything wrong, since this could have a general connotation of not liking suggestions even in normal trading, which is common.

What I'm trying to say is that while this may seem like a useful idea up front, and may be fantastic for experienced users, it opens the door for newbies or otherwise non-savvy users to get scammed. As it stands, some users already have to make PSAs warning new players about ninja traders and scammers, and site staff already has had to make pinned threads warning about scamming in other sections of the site aside from normal trading.

It's a shame, because it's something I personally would have made use of, but I feel the risk of increased scamming activity outside of the normal trading scene outweighs that benefit.

[nickjr]

What tarkeli and FerrousFarron mentioned was also what I was thinking, except I failed to figure out a good way to explain it and the examples I tried to type were terrible.

Suggestions right now offer insurance in trades involving non-CS stuff on one side. And the same reasoning that goes for art trades can also go for offsite trades. While it's true that the initiator of a suggestion can be the one scamming (and I think that's what you were getting at with "if someone wants to scam another user, then they can already do so, the suggestions feature is not stopping them from doing that"), I think that right now we're limiting how many possible scams there can be.

Imagine if a user with suggestions disabled opens up an art shop and asks people to send them payment up front. Every scammer has a first scam, and this art shop might be this user's first scam. Maybe this user also has art of good quality.

Art takes time to do.

This user might accept a ton of payment and people might not suspect that they were scammed until after a long time goes by, during which the user might've already traded away their scammed payment. Enter stressed mods trying to catch all the loose threads this user left behind even after punishment...

Right now, customers of a new art shop can insist that they send their payment as suggestions, which means most of the scamming that occurs will be on the customers' part and it'll be easily quickly identified (e.g. canceling as soon as the art is received) (... I could be wrong since I don't do art trades but this is what I'm imagining happens since it makes sense to me)

Even if this doesn't happen often I still really do not like the idea of this happening or--even worse--happening often enough to warrant a staff member putting up a "Beware of scammers" sticky (we already apparently have a lot of dishonest or sadly oblivious users who cheat very obviously by multi-accounting on December 18... Having a lot of dishonest users cheating in a different way using site-provided features really isn't that far-fetched)

(Also, I really like being able to negotiate through trade messages instead of PMs. We have infinite trade storage--yes, you can even view trades past your first 100 pages; just find them the same way you'd find any other trade except you can't just go to the page it's on immediately. I imagine this is handy for people who PM a lot. I'd rather not have the possibility of assuming everyone's acting on good faith and deleting my oldest messages as new ones come in [remember CS's target audience; I don't think people get into the habit of saving things for their records until they're older] and whoops I am no longer able to access the proof that someone scammed me a while back because we negotiated over PMs because they had suggestions disabled)

(I also vaguely remember the ~1 month we had of the gifting feature back in 2008 before it was replaced with a full-blown trading system. Trading back then was done on honor and I vaguely recall Tess getting a headache from trades gone bad. This was when our userbase was tiny and you realistically have seen... probably literally half of the userbase around the forums. We still have a variation of that happening today with art and offsite trades as there are no site-provided features to ensure they go smoothly)

[Panther202]

I SUPPORT 100%

This is such a problem for me and I always cancel the trade without even reading what the other person said. Why read their comment if they're not going to read my rules? OR read them and break them anyways?

[Shian]

Art, offsite trading... Gonna have to say, no. This is way too easily exploitable.

In fact, there was a time where all we could do was accept and cancel. This meant you needed to just blindly trust that the other user would do what they needed to do and not just run off with your valuable pets. That's what brought the trade suggestion feature in the first place. There's no point in going backwards, especially now that there's hundreds more users to take care of.

Right now, I'm literally having to send roughly 5 suggestions per day. Person wants pets and has sent me FR gems, but in order to accept those FR gems I need a trade link from CS which means:
1. I send an unacceptable trade on CS
2. Get link to CS trade now that a trade is set up
3. Hop over to FR and paste the code in the Crossroad trade. Meanwhile, the partner sends the trade back as acceptable.
4. Accept the FR trade.
5. With the FR currency in my possession, I can now paste the completed FR trade link to the CS trade and accept the CS trade, giving away the pets.

This is THE SAFEST WAY to run offsite trading.

This would literally not be possible.
In high value trades, a tiger dog is worth $200-450 in RL currency. That's nearly half a grand of money. Would you trust someone to just send you that after taking your tiger dog away? I sure as heck wouldn't.

[Brigitte Lindholm]

Support!

I really dont like suggestions because it just takes longer to say "Yes", send it back and then have them send it back again. I also ran into a problem with someone who sent a suggestion, then when I sent it back unedited saying it looked good, they replied "No" and sent it back again. I ended up canceling it because I had absolutely no idea what they wanted and it just wasted my time overall. Suggestions are discouraged or banned by a rather large amount of people, so the idea we can't turn it off or on makes no sense.

Generally what happens is they want a new pet that hasn’t been added to the archive yet, so I have to send a suggestion so they can add the wishlist locked pet to their side.

I feel like this is a problem with the way CS has their Archives set up rather than a problem with this suggestion. I ran into this issue a lot when the Staff Dogs (which could take weeks to be added after they were grown) were released this year. If one of the main functions of trading is "Wishlist Only", then not allowing a fully grown pet to be added makes absolutely no sense.

Art, offsite trading... Gonna have to say, no. This is way too easily exploitable.

This isn't about disabling Trade Suggestions overall but having the option to do so. If someone you want to trade with doesn't have suggestions open, you'd just have to tell them to open suggestions before trading. Otherwise, dont trade with them.

I feel like making them open up trading is a better way of sorting the scammers/time wasters out since they won't bother opening their Suggestions or if they refuse, you can safely assume they are trying to scam/waste your time.

[nickjr]

I feel like making them open up trading is a better way of sorting the scammers/time wasters out since they won't bother opening their Suggestions or if they refuse, you can safely assume they are trying to scam/waste your time.

If usage of this feature becomes mainstream, which I suspect it will be, then... we cannot safely assume that anyone who refuses to open up suggestions is trying to waste your time.

Back when I was a semi-active offsite trader, sometimes it took a few days to get things finalized, even when both of us were checking CS multiple times per day (and I've done trades with some people who did not check CS that often--yes, they exist and yes, they're in on the trading scene, too).

Assuming people haven't changed much in the last few years, "I don't want to open suggestions for a few days every time I want to do an offsite trade" is honestly not a suspicious reason, especially to someone who is not used to keeping their guard up when trading.

[Kiyomice]

I feel like making them open up trading is a better way of sorting the scammers/time wasters out since they won't bother opening their Suggestions or if they refuse, you can safely assume they are trying to scam/waste your time.

If usage of this feature becomes mainstream, which I suspect it will be, then... we cannot safely assume that anyone who refuses to open up suggestions is trying to waste your time.

Back when I was a semi-active offsite trader, sometimes it took a few days to get things finalized, even when both of us were checking CS multiple times per day (and I've done trades with some people who did not check CS that often--yes, they exist and yes, they're in on the trading scene, too).

Assuming people haven't changed much in the last few years, "I don't want to open suggestions for a few days every time I want to do an offsite trade" is honestly not a suspicious reason, especially to someone who is not used to keeping their guard up when trading.

Then the person in question can just wait until they want to open their suggestions. Or they can move on. Or even PM that person if they feel the need.

The concerns about scamming are 100% avoidable, all you have to do is not blindly send over a trade to someone with no pets on their side. Just like how you shouldn't be doing that anyway. Yet, people already can be scammed that way. The removal of the suggestions feature, therefor, really does not give any reason to be more concerned about increased scamming.

Every single scenario someone has listed as being a reason for concern of scamming is something that is already possible to take place.

Would the scamming methods be different? Yes. But would the scamming actually be increased? That is Extremely doubtful, and is a case of catastrophic thinking.

The only way to stop the worries of scams would be to remove the ability to trade entirely. People are gonna scam others no matter what the trade systems are like. So with that being said, why not add in this ability that would be beneficial to so many users, and solve so many problems, and save so much time? The pros are guaranteed, the cons are just "what-if" scenarios that in all likelihood will not impact the scamming rates on ChickenSmoothie.

If the concerns about scamming are really that grave, then you should be asking the admin to disable trading altogether. But you're not, because they would be silly, and the benefits of trading far outweighs the cons of potential scammers - just like this new feature, except in this case, there is no proof that it would increase the amount of scamming at all.

1 - Why should the admin disable trading for everyone, when the minority are the ones that scam?
They shouldn't.

2 - So why should people reject this new suggestion that would help so many, just because a minority might abuse it?
They shouldn't.