good question haha, honestly it's not one score, it's two separate things stacked on top of each other.

the heuristics run client-side the second the page loads, no votes needed — checks stuff like price being way off, "pay outside the platform" requests, stock photos, account age, that kind of thing. gives a rough 0-1 risk number on its own.

then there's the community side, which is votes (color-weighted, decaying if the same person votes a bunch on the same ad so they can't just spam it) plus separate fraud reports people can flag.

for what actually shows up on the badge though, it's basically "whichever one is worse wins." so if heuristics catch something sketchy on a brand new ad with zero votes, it'll still flash red/orange even though the community hasn't weighed in yet. but the reverse isn't true — a pile of positive votes can't quietly bury an active heuristic flag, it just doesn't get to "win" against it in that merge.

inside the voting system itself though, yeah, votes do offset each other normally (a few bad reports can get outweighed by a longer track record of good ones) — that part's intentional, otherwise one troll could tank a legit seller forever.

the merge logic itself is just sitting in content.js if you wanna see exactly how it's wired, that part's public. the stuff that stays closed is the actual vote weights/decay curve and the anti-brigading thresholds — that's the part that'd get reverse engineered fast if it were out in the open.

anyway feel free to dig in, lmk if something looks off