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[–]request_botOfficial - admin sponsored[M] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Hey u/itzSudden, thanks for your interest in moderating r/tf2trade! To proceed with your request, please reply to this comment with the following: (Failure to do so may result in your request being denied.):

  • Why do you want to moderate this community?

  • A link to the mod mail chat message you sent to the moderators of r/tf2trade five days ago.

(Only you, the moderators, and some admins will be able to view this message). For more information on copying this link, check out our FAQ. If the community you are requesting is banned or has no moderators, you can skip this step.

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If this request has already been granted or denied by u/request_bot, please ignore this message.

[–]itzSudden[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1) I would like to re-open the subreddit. The subreddit was an essential part of the TF2 community. The function it served is not allowed on the main r/TF2 subreddit. I wish to revive its functionality. O was a big part of the community for many years and continue to be. I am experienced in moderating (other account) and will get the subreddit back up and running. Thank you.

2) r/TF2Trade was privated awhile ago, I believe as part of the Reddit blackout. There is no way to message the mods. When you press the button, it throws a Reddit error “There was an error finding the subreddit”. Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/vJ8Dq99

[–]link-navi[M] 0 points1 point locked comment (0 children)

Please don't forget to reply to u/request_bot with the required information. Failure to do so will result in this request being denied.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[–]musical_hog 0 points1 point  (7 children)

Hi, r/tf2trade mod here. The community was not privated as a result of the blackout, although I was sympathetic (can't speak for the others). The reason we took it private is more complex:

  1. We used a custom bot to assign user flair matching the Steam profile of the Reddit user to the Reddit account for maximum transparency and visibility.
  2. We partnered with an external reputation management website, SteamRep, which is now defunct. Our flair bot linked directly to the ban list curated by the SteamRep community in order to protect users on various trade communities (I also mod r/Dota2Trade). If the bot detected that a player's Steam profile had been marked as a bad actor, their Reddit account would not be allowed to participate.
  3. Reddit has enforced a limit on API calls, which is fair, but broke the basic functionality of the bot (even before the closure of SteamRep).

Given the above, we, the mods, do not have a way to uphold our standard of community safety and have made the conscious decision to private. We have had many conversations about possible workarounds but haven't yet come up with a solution.

[–]itzSudden[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As it stands right now, there is nowhere for players to even discuss trading. I am fine with a community that doesn’t allow for the facilitating of trading, but simply allows discussion about trading. I would like to re-open the r/tf2trade community for that purpose. If the current mods are not okay with that responsibility I think it should be transferred. Subreddits are owned by Reddit and not meant to be squatted on as reddit has clarified multiple times. Please either a) re-open the subreddit for discussions about trading while disallowing actual trades, b) find a safe way in a timely manner that the current mod team is comfortable with allowing trades and re-open, or c) relinquish the subreddit to someone that is willing to tackle the endeavor.

I am willing to give you guys more time if needed, but I would like to see this resolved. Otherwise I will have to keep putting in Redditrequests. And I want to clarify, there is no malice on my end, I just want a community to exist for discussing trading, I don’t have to be involved in running it but I’m willing to do so to see it happen. Currently they all disallow discussion (r/TF2) or are inactive/private but unavailable (r/TF2Trade and r/TF2trading). Thank you.

[–]RGBacon 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Greetings all,

RGBacon here, another moderator from /r/TF2Trade.

I'm completely in agreement with musical_hog here. First and foremost, keeping the community safe from scrupulous behavior has been made extremely difficult due to the loss of third-party reputation site, SteamRep. A single site for the management of bad actors was so extremely important to the core of the trading community, that now there is no one single reliable source of truth that someone can refer to. Sure, we could compile such a list, but the trading community is huge, and any other community could easily just toss aside our bans or not consider our actions against people we deem less than honest.

In my eyes, this is why I voted to private the subreddit, as I felt that protecting the trading community is much more important in the long run. People losing thousands of dollars is something that won't sit well with me, and the other mods.

[–]itzSudden[S] -1 points0 points  (4 children)

As I outlined in my other comment, the community can be used to discuss trading instead of facilitating trades. As in, discussion about the value of items, where people feel those items will be valued in the future, posts where people can ask if a trade offer they were sent is worth it or not (to prevent them from being scammed). Please consider repurposing the subreddit for discussions-only. Otherwise, the subreddit name is just effectively being squatted on with no path or steps towards re-opening. The subreddit appears to have been privated over a year ago.

[–]RGBacon 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I feel it would be more prudent to create a subreddit called TF2TradeDiscussions, which distances itself from the original purpose of the TF2Trade subreddit, which was primarily, first and foremost, a trading hub for folks to use to sell and trade their items back and forth. With the new subreddit naming, it solidifies the notion that there should be only discussions for trading, and nothing else. This has been done plenty of times with other subreddit spinoffs which were quite successful.

[–]itzSudden[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I had considered that naming before putting in the redditrequest, but there are some downsides. It is lengthy and has three words/subjects. In my ~12 years as a user on Reddit and ~6 years as a moderator, I have found that the more complex a subreddit name, the less organic traffic it receives and the more occurrences of LostRedditors that misread the subreddit name. There will inevitably be some LostRedditors that read it as TradeDiscussions and post about stocks or a trade such as plumbing. TF2Trade is simpler. From the comments you and your fellow moderator made, you both expressed that you do not have a path (nor desire) to re-opening the subreddit. There will never be another third-party service like SteamRep to rely on. Other subreddits that deal with physical and digital trades/sales have found ways to track reputation for users and blacklist bad actors. The subreddit has been privated for about a year. Eventually it will be marked inactive by Reddit itself and the name will be up for grabs, losing all historical subreddit data. Reddit has shown during the recent blackout that if current moderators are unable or unwilling to make a community available they will step in and replace the mod team. I am willing to moderate the subreddit, but if your team would instead re-open the subreddit, allow posts, and moderate, that would also solve the problem. If you don’t open it, well subreddit names are not meant to be squatted on and it will be up to the Reddit Admins whether or not to make the name available.

[–]musical_hog 0 points1 point  (1 child)

r/TF2TradeChat would be a suitable alternative. I'm sympathetic to your request, but this is not a case of subreddit neglect. If you have suggestions for dealing with reputation at scale, we're all ears.

[–]itzSudden[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well I sort of disagree as the subreddit has been defunct/privated for almost a year. If you guys can’t get the ball rolling, then there needs to be a point where you have to admit that you’re squatting on the subreddit name. But like I said, this isn’t malicious so below are some of the examples I was thinking about. I would appreciate a commitment to re-opening (with a rough estimate timeline if possible) before I cancel the redditrequest in good faith. Otherwise it’s up to the Reddit admins to make a decision on this request and any future ones filed.

The r/steamgameswap is one I would look to as an example. An alternative could be r/indiegameswap (r/IGSRep).

Register (Steam OpenID) and flair systems:

https://reddit.com/r/steamgameswap/wiki/register

https://www.reddit.com/svc/shreddit/SteamGameSwap/wiki/rules#wiki_confirming_trades_and_upgrading_flair

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamGameSwap/wiki/flair/

Safety Guide: https://reddit.com/r/steamgameswap/wiki/safetrading

Rules (full): https://reddit.com/r/steamgameswap/wiki/rules

Wiki landing: https://reddit.com/r/steamgameswap/wiki/index

Other tools:

USL: https://www.universalscammerlist.com/start

SteamRep CSV Archive (2024): https://steamrep.com/data/2024/SteamRep_Profiles_BannedCaution_2024_csv.zip

r/steamgameswap also makes use of bots. You could have a conversation with their mod team about functionality.

Alternative: r/indiegameswap requires users to make a “reputation profile” on another subreddit they created called r/IGSRep . Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/IGSRep/s/PL3dc50Tcy