Silk Road forums

I just took the forum and main site down briefly.  We are back up now though and still getting to the bottom of the withdraw issue.  Please stand by.

sorry about that.  that was a debugging message that was not supposed to leak.  there is no sensitive info in it though.

Just adding that I too can't see any of my new feedback on my vendor page, only by going to view feedback under my account.

SS

this isn't right.  looking into it now.

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The forum was down for the past few hours.  Sorry about that.  We've found and fixed the problem and should be running smoothly again.

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Quote from: Dread Pirate Roberts on August 22, 2013, 12:09 am

Maybe instead of the weight rising linearly with each factor, it can rise logarithmically.

hi hi

maybe that could work... or maybe you are over-thinking things, and improving a near masterpiece into a failure...

usually the simplest solution is the most elegant and best. the armed forces have a saying: "KISS" = keep it simple, stupid.

say what you will about them from an intellectual point of view, but when it comes down to push and shove, they sure do get things done....


i'm just lucky i havent been negatively affected by this monstrosity of a discussion system yet... it's completely ludicrous that someone i have had no interaction with can post directly on my store page without having prior completed dealings.  and i'm also lucky that the vast majority of my past customers have all been honest, happy, and loyal.

if we could turn back time on the SR site development a few weeks that would be great..... and regroup. 3 things i would rather have seen:

buyer feedback should be permanent, make it more obvious that buyers dont need to drop feedback immediately when finalizing (for those of you keeping score at home, you currently are not forced into leaving feedback when you finalize as it stands already), and simply the overly complex weighting formula.

i'd wager 5BTC the result would be much smoother than screwing with # of transactions, messing with the weights, continuing the madness of the feedback extortion threat (mostly due to aforementioned weighting problems), and introducing anonymous slander/rumors in the form of "discussions" directly on the main SR site.

xoxo
-mb

the system we have been using up to this point was much more complex, involving averages, standard deviations, log functions, and a complex web of interconnected variables... and it still had it's problems.  The KISS simple solution would be to count every rating the same and take a straight average.  Hopefully you can see that, in a fully anon environment like SR, this could be broken easily.  Weighting as I have outlined is fairly easy to comprehend and makes it substantially harder for fake feedback to have much effect and gives weight in the right places imho.

I urge everyone to have patience as we continue to flesh out this new system.  At each step I get lots of angry people acting like the current state is permanent, or they are reacting to what they think will happen, not what is actually happening, or aren't reading the discussion.  There is much more to come that will make all of this fit together nicely, including additional help for vendors to judge buyers.  I'm not trying to stifle discussion, but I think we can take the emotional edge off of it and get back to discussing ideas and having fun with that.

At the end of the day, if all of this really is a huge mistake, it will take a few hours at most to roll everything back to exactly the way it was.  I do think we are going in the right direction though.

Quote from: Cork1Screw on August 21, 2013, 06:19 pm

Quote from: sbraser on August 21, 2013, 06:10 pm

Hi guys, i haven't readen all the 18 pages of this topic, i don't have too much time to do that.
There is a problem on my account,

for example here:  https://silkroadvb5piz3r.onion.to/silkroad/item/be4526b340

i have only 5/5 feedbacks, but the stats bar shows bad stats. the 5/5 feedbacks are displayed as 1/5....
there is a bug? or something that i'm missing?
thank you

CASE IN POINT!!

DPR you need to look at this guy's profile immediately, 'cause what the system is doing to him is bullshit. His first page of feedback is all 5/5, yet somehow his AVERAGE FEEDBACK is only 1.4/5??

That makes zero sense, and this is why vendors will blacklist people who leave less than 5/5 feedback regardless of whether or not we have buyer feedback which we desperately need for other reasons.

His average feedback should not be anywhere near that low. This needs to be fixed. In addition, the bar graph is CLEARLY BROKEN.

His bar graph shows a tiny bar for 5/5s and a huge bar for 1/5s and NOTHING else...yet I have to go back three pages in his feedback to find anything less than a 5/5, and what do I find but a 2/5 and a 1/5. And do I see that reflected in the bar chart? No I do not. If I went by the bar chart, it seems this guy gets 90% 1/5 feedback and 10% 5/5 feedback and never anything else.

If you can't figure out how to implement the bars properly please just remove them until you can. Misinformation like that is just not cool.

BAD DATA is WORSE than NO DATA!!!

Decided to look into his feedback some more, and I'd like to share what I found because I think it highlights the problem very well.

I looked through ten pages of this guy's feedback. 10 entries per page, 100 total.

Of those 100: 97 were 5/5s. One was a 2/5. And two were 1/5s.

Yet his average rating is now 1.4/5.0. Does that seem fair? Does that not make it incredibly obvious why there is a culture of "leave 5/5 or you're blacklisted forever" ?

I think it does. If out of 100 transactions, 97 are 5/5s, one is a 2/5, and two are 1/5s, I would personally think his average would be 4.89/5.00.

However the weird formula that is used that no one actually knows means his rating is 1.4/5.0. Pretty big disparity.

We need to address this issue before addressing ANY OTHER PART of the feedback system imo.

I'm looking into this.  could be a bug.

Quote from: Dread Pirate Roberts on August 21, 2013, 08:41 pm

Quote from: Trappy on August 21, 2013, 08:31 pm

Please increase the number of staff working when increasing site features. It'll only be as good as its policed.

we have a full-time admin who's top priority is reviewing flagged posts.  We are committed to reviewing flags at least once per 24 hour period, but will monitor it more frequently when possible.  If it becomes too much for one person to handle, we'll bring in more people.  Please help us by flagging posts that aren't polite and on-topic.

hi hi DPR

i appreciate your replies on this matter, however i still respectfully disagree with the notion of having main site discussion at all. i think it's a bit of a stretch to force vendors to go stealth to avoid discussion (and subsequently losing the item placement in the category as well). and i maintain my original opinion that the forum is the proper location for any "discussions"

furthermore, $100 to make a comment is peanuts. i also respectfully disagree that checking discussion flags once per 24 hours is "quick enough" it really should be immediate, and since this is humanly impossible, i feel the feature should not exist in the first place.

that's my 2 satoshi, obviously you have different feelings. unfortunately, your opinion is the one that gets implemented as you are the boss, so i'm just letting the world know how i feel. hopefully the push back will persuade you to ditch it.

xoxo
-mb

if $100 isn't enough, we'll raise it.  If 24 hrs isn't enough, we'll decrease it.  If there are still major problems that can't be solved, we'll abandon it.  I've yet to hear a good argument for why the forum is a better place to discuss vendors/items/categories than directly at those places.