Silk Road forums

The latest:

Buyers may remove a rating and/or a review from the "recent orders" link on their account pages

the price of the transaction has been obscured in the same way that buyer stats are when the review is displayed

the style has been slimmed down further

buyer weight now has the same freshness factor included in the rating and vendor weights (old transactions don't count as much toward a buyer's weight)

review sorting (freshness or weight) has been added to the item and user pages in addition to the ratings and reviews page.

Might have already said this, but freshness has been the default sort since monday.

I think this covers most of the problems that have been brought up during this phase of the overhaul.  I haven't had much time to read all of the chatter around this the past couple of days, but I'll try to keep up with this thread.

Thanks everyone for your patience this week.  Once again I am sorry for how rough this transition has been.  I didn't foresee all of the problems that came up, but I hope that the process has been relatively painless for most of you.  I think we've learned much from this experience so far and will be able to handle any changes that we need to go through in the future with ease and a light heart.  And thanks again everyone for your input!

You could even use a modified hash function that outputs an arbitrary name from a large name dictionary to make this more friendly to users that wouldn't want to see hashes in place of name-like aliases.  Each vendor page would basically give random names to a given user and keep it consistent for all reviews by said user on that vendor's page.

not a bad idea.  we already have a database of words for the captcha.  It wouldn't be hard to stick two of them together for each buyer/seller combination.

hi hi

all very good tweaks that go in the right direction....

any thoughts on the minority of reviews (1-4) being omnipresent on all pages of 5/5 feedback? any vendor with at least 1 review at any rating from 1-4 will have that paragraph on every page when a viewer pages through the 5/5 feedback... perhaps keep all of the "pages" in sync?


also, i have noticed for reviews written in the "new" system you've included back in the header the exact dollar amounts of the orders. why? i was very pleased that you saw the practicality of not clearly broadcasting exact dollar amounts for everything to the world... there were quite a few security concerns that were brought up in the other threads and i'm wondering what makes new reviews fall under different rules.


xoxo
-mb

The review groups are already sorted with 5's at the top.  I think it's fine as it is.

the exact dollar amount and quantity is only listed for new reviews.  This is not new info because anyone scraping the site before could get this info as reviews rolled in.  Now everyone has it.  Additionally, because only transactions that have a review written for them are displayed, you can't get a complete picture of a vendor's business like you used to.  In my opinion, that alone makes all of the headache of this change worth it.

It's been a kinda crazy past few days.  I really thought we had thought through the implications of the various proposed changed.  I even opened up the discussion here to talk about what we were planning and if it would be an issue.  I guess you never know until the rubber meets the road.  I think we are getting closer to where this phase of the overhaul needs to be.  Some concerns that were raised:

Reviews for specific items should be on the item's page.
They are back

The design is ugly and hard to navigate.
it has been slimmed down

the buyer stats reveal too much.
they have been rounded down to the nearest power of 10 (1+, 10+, 100+, etc) and capped at $10k (or equivalent), 100 orders, and 100 vendors, and account age has been removed completely.  Keep in mind you can still change your alias to something other than your username and are encouraged to do so.

No one is leaving written reviews.
a link now appears on the order page immediately after a review is left prompting the user to write a written review.  also, there is a link on the account page that brings up the most recent un-reviewed transaction

I'm not ready to make any changes to the new policy that ratings and reviews can't be edited.  If we do anything, I'm leaning toward allowing the buyer to delete a rating or review.

Thank you everyone for your input with all of this.  It's hard to please everyone and not everyone's desires are feasible, but I think we can find a new balance that meets most people's needs and fixes the problems we've been plagued with for so long.

After just leaving a review and seeing my username and buyer stats listed next to it.  I am horrified.  There is no way to take back what I have done, or even make it so that my username cannot be seen, let alone my buyer stats.

THIS NEEDS IMMEDIATE FIXING.

when you left a review, if your alias is the same as your username, you were shown this message in bold red:

"Your username and alias match!  If you wish to post under a different name, change your alias on your settings page."

You can still do this now and the name on your review will change within five minutes.

Quote from: Dread Pirate Roberts on August 26, 2013, 08:14 pm

Quote from: NorcoCo on August 26, 2013, 07:46 pm

Quote from: Dread Pirate Roberts on August 26, 2013, 06:50 pm

This is really good that you all are realizing that vendor transaction history has been available all along.  I'll repeat what I said in the OP.  NO NEW INFORMATION IS BEING DISPLAYED.  It's only more conveniently displayed for all to see instead of just those willing to scrape the site and track every review of every product (including LE).  This new system actually decreases your visibility because going forward not every transaction will be reviewed.

I feel like a broken record over here.  If you are upset, just re-read my post and the wiki a few times.

With all respect, I don't understand how you think there is no new information being displayed.

The quantity of each order was not displayed before. That can be the difference between a $10 order and $2000 order of the same product.

Furthermore, buyer stats were not displayed before. Buyers lose their privacy too.

It is now very easy to identify the largest buyers making them prime targets for investigation. Now the whole world knows who those guys are that are doing $150k every couple months, exactly who they are buying from, and what products they are buying.

I just don't understand why all this information needs to be so public. If you guys want to adjust feedback ranking to consider these variables - that's fine. But you don't have to publish it all so blatantly.

that is true about the quantity.  How is it easy to ID buyers?

My apologies, you are right buyers are still protected by the hidden alias. The privacy loss is targeted at the vendors only. Could you please consider hiding the exact order price? At least add in price weight brackets. Each order can show "0-10 BTC", "over 100 BTC", etc.

Other sites do this, and I feel that given SR's high-profile status it makes sense to be more careful and conservative rather than less.

ok, I'll hide the quantity/price on pre-update reviews in the next hour or so.  going forward, this info will be more obscure than previously even with the quantity and price displayed because of reasons previously stated.

regarding sorting issues, I have changed the default to sort by freshness instead of weight.

ok THAT is the last word for a few days

you were only meant to be suspended for 8 days if I recall was either a bug or human error.  This can be corrected by contacting support.  and yes it was for the vulgarity.  As clearly stated on the discussion pages, they are not a free for all and you must use a polite tone.

I think that buyers should have the option to delete a feedback outright.

Many times I have gotten a low feedback from someone who did not bother to contact me. After contacting them and making it right they often change the feedback to something better to reflect the improved experience. I will miss this.

Allowing a buyer to delete feedback also allows them to retract a good feedback if they find the product not up to snuff.

Allowing the deletion of feedback without the option to change it will improve buyer/vendor relations without creating the danger of extortion.

Just saying...

not a bad idea...