Thread: Cheat-Preventing / Automatic Trading Idea

I was thinking how we could make it harder for trade cheaters.



How about an automatic middle man?

It would work like this: both parties would agree on what to trade and then enter all the information that is needed for the other to get his end of the deal into a web form (account details, invite codes, etc).

If both parties enter something into their form within say 5 minutes the automatic trading is started.

Now comes the tricky part:
At first only one of the parties gets shown the information the other one has entered. He now has 15 min time to confirm by a button click that he got what he asked for or that he thinks he got cheated.
If he clicks the ok button or the 15 min are over without him clicking anything then the other one gets shown his info. And if he confirms a good deal too than everything is fine and dandy.

If one of the traders clicks the 'got cheated' button then BOTH get blocked from doing any further auto trades until a decision is made by an admin/mod which one the cheater is. The cheater would then be banned from the entire site and the honest one would be able to auto trade again as he pleases.

Now how does that prevent cheating again you ask?

Well it doesn't totally prevent it, but it makes it harder to be successful because the honest trader usually has a 0% chance as soon as he agrees on a deal with a dishonest person, but now has a 50% chance to not be burned and also get the cheater banned before he can rip off anyone at all.

And to make it even harder for cheaters you would have to have a minimum post count (100?) and be a member for a certain time (2 weeks?) to use the auto trading system at all.

So if you still want to cheat you would have to wait 2 weeks to do it and spend quite some time on the board and then you would still only get a 50% chance at succeeding. I think you would have to be a pretty pathetic human being for that to become true. You would also have to be really stupid because you could easily find someone to rip off on another board without having the problems the auto trader system would give you.


Of course someone would have to code the whole thing, but beside that hurdle what do you think about it? Could it work or didn't I think of something important?

Just not necessary, people shouldn't be stupid. If you don't want to be scammed then use a middleman. The subforum is there, the middleman is there and yet people don't use it. If you get scammed here it's because you didn't make an intelligent decision. It is inevitable that people will send first to scammers and whether this is implemented won't make too much of a difference either way.

Originally Posted by Asherpotter

Just not necessary, people shouldn't be stupid. If you don't want to be scammed then use a middleman. The subforum is there, the middleman is there and yet people don't use it. If you get scammed here it's because you didn't make an intelligent decision. It is inevitable that people will send first to scammers and whether this is implemented won't make too much of a difference either way.

You are probably right. But then again why do you think people don't use a (human) middleman. Is it really blind trust/stupidity alone? Or maybe they simply don't want to bother to get a third party involved in the trade?

Advantages a automatic trading system still would have is that it potentially would be faster and easier to trade. But that alone probably wouldn't be enough.

People are very very very lazy. You probably don't get how lazy people are. I saw a guy send a premium rapidshare account first to another guy instead of using the middleman forum which is right there, staring him in the face. All he needed to was post and Dave would have taken care of it. It's kind of funny that with all the cynicism floating around people still do things like that.

Originally Posted by Asherpotter

People are very very very lazy. You probably don't get how lazy people are. I saw a guy send a premium rapidshare account first to another guy instead of using the middleman forum which is right there, staring him in the face. All he needed to was post and Dave would have taken care of it. It's kind of funny that with all the cynicism floating around people still do things like that.

Yes funny but sad at the same time.

I put up a whole bunch of new rules, hopefully they'll help.

well ppl just shouldn't trade :) they should give invs like some of us and they wouldn't have that problem. it is not needed to trade to get good sites, i never traded and i got 3 great trackers cose ppl were generous

Trading isn't needed indeed, But some people want to get something back immediately and can't wait for something like that to happen.

Also even when they have invites, they are mostly to lazy to post them here anyway. =) Still hope more and more people will do it.

Originally Posted by hrci666

well ppl just shouldn't trade :) they should give invs like some of us and they wouldn't have that problem. it is not needed to trade to get good sites, i never traded and i got 3 great trackers cose ppl were generous

I second that. I know there is an integrity factor as far as site administration is concerned, but some of the peeps are just not mindful of what they are doing and frankly don't use the safeguards that are currently in place. It might be a good idea for some to just waller in their misery for not for not utilizing the safeguards.