I spend a lot of time in the D2 trading forums, and consistently, on all realms and cores, and without wishing to name and shame too greatly (you will excuse me as I must provide examples), I see this sort of thing every single day:



Dozens of users who, every day, within minutes, early bump their topics with 'up', 'cmon', or an indignant 'OMG NO ONE!?'. To remind or acquaint those not familiar, the bump rule in these forums is four hours, and yet many will bump their topic in minutes. Worse still, they will get away with this action virtually every time. Even if one reports every early bump they see, these threads are very rarely closed, and action taken against a user for this is virtually unheard of. Take a look at the thread in question. As you can see, several days after my report, the thread remains open. One might say that these threads are inactive, and would not need to be closed. If so, kindly explain this, or worse, something like this - all open at the time of this post. The vast majority of these early bumped threads remain open indefinitely, and the creator happily bumps the thread for days to come thereafter. Even if one is to report every single post in the thread - something I have attempted in the past, as an experiment - no moderator arrives, no action is taken. When PMing threads directly to moderators in bulk, we are told to use the report function, which seems to do little as evidenced.

Why is this important? The oft-repeated line here, that 'just because you cannot see action being taken, does not mean there is not action being taken' does not hold water. By breaking the site rules, a trader is able to gain an unfair trade advantage with more viewership, and as a result, disadvantages those who respect the rules by pushing their threads down faster. This is a problem. My suggestion is simply to make the jobs of both moderators and traders easier, and to have an auto-lock system and or an automatic temporary suspension assignment system (lasting, say, 15 minutes, the same as flaming) for early bumping - that is, two back-to-back posts by the same user in under 4 hours. A system such as this should not be difficult to implement, and is not abusable as far as I can see. The auto-lock is to prevent the early bump being used to the trader's advantage, and the suspension is to then discourage PM trades which would come as a result (PM trades are considered unsafe by JSP among other things, and may facilitate or beget scamming). We already have a cooldown system for thread creation after a thread has been closed - this would work in tandem with it.

Certainly, my suggestion will not prevent fake offers as bumps from people who are admittedly selling the same inventory of items together, or reposts of the same ISO over and over and over and over again so as to circumvent the early bump rule, but I hope with time myself and others can devise ways of combatting these trends also; it is a start, and a potential solution to a major problem at present in this forum. Thank you for reading, all constructive feedback is appreciated and will be responded to.

Wouldn't it be better to simply make it impossible for any user to post in his own thread twice in a row before either four hours have passed or someone else posted in it?

The way I understand it, the issue is with early-bumped threads coming back to page one prematurely, which causes threads that actually belong there to be pushed out of it. The moment a user bumps his thread, the damage is done, and locking the thread/suspending the user won't fix it.

Common sense would dictate that instead of trying to devise ways of punishing users for breaking the rules more efficiently, we should focus on preventing them from breaking the rules in the first place.

This post was edited by Stration on Jun 10 2014 10:58pm

I had considered what you propose, but it is to my understanding that this is much harder to actually code in terms of this site's user permission system and hierarchy. We are all 'users', and all have the same permissions; to disallow someone from posting in a thread at any point would require the creator of the thread to be, temporarily, part of a user permission group disallowed from posting (I think). This may seem roundabout, and of course prevention is better than the cure, but this is realistically much easier to code into the site. And, heavens, there may well be some other way to do it: I do not code professionally, and could be wrong, and this suggestion is as much to allow for simple debate of the subject. However, if it were so easy to do, I am sure it would already be in place (why would it not be)?

This post was edited by Madotsuki on Jun 10 2014 11:01pm

Threads are automatically closed after the second early bump. Too much to read here, seems pointless.

So one is okay but two are not? Where is the sense in that?

Just report and move on. A trade moderator will get to it as fast as possible. Hell will freeze over before njaguar updates this site!

I hate to say it so bluntly, but reporting and moving on is the only thing to do right now. Yeah, sure, some type of auto suspension feature would be nice for people trying to bump their topics.

I would propose this as for your picture you showed.

The system checks if their is a double post by the same poster within the time limit for bumps (4 hours) and if true -> Auto Suspend for xx minutes. That could realistically be very possible and effective so you have nice ideas, but njaguar or whoever has control of this site needs the time to code them. And if they don't think they are a big issue, they won't add them in.

In any event, your ideas are nice.

I made a topic about a suggestion and it got closed. They will say that they will listen, but it might be their persona, so stay positive all the time no matter what ANY moderator tells you.

This post was edited by HighschoolTurd on Jun 10 2014 11:30pm

Thank you for your kind words, then.

I will continue to bump this until the issue is addressed, either through the implementation of either or both of my suggestions, something more along the lines of what Stration mentioned (if it is possible), the rules are changed, or until this thread is unfairly closed, whereby the status of quo of 'an early bump for every non-back-to-back post is acceptable despite what the rules say' remains.

There are plenty of unhappy active traders who agree that this is a real problem and so I think it is important that this thread exists.

e/



Actually, today I also found out that there is no automatic closure for early bumping more than once consecutively - see HERE. Thread remains open as of this edit.

Bump

This post was edited by Madotsuki on Jun 13 2014 06:43am

No need. No.

Someone takes jsp a little to serious

Auto locking is incredibly hard to code. There is simply way too many scenarios. Things like up, and stuff like that are easy but what happens if a user updates his list(ie sells a bunch of items then updates the amounts). I would rather see him update this once rather than having 10 people post looking for a sold item(that way the topic is bumped once and not 10 times).


Auto suspension is the same. Due to the diversity of posts you can't make a 100% accurate closure system and if we add a suspension to those closures there are going to be people suspended who follow the rules.

This might not bother you a ton but what if a new user joins the site, carefully reads the rules, follows them, and then gets suspended. For a new user they might say screw this and stop using the site. Obviously we want our user base to continually expand.

Feel free to pm me if you want to discuss more.

E/


Looks closed to me

This post was edited by Kagura on Jun 13 2014 07:14am