BBB and SL

We already had this functionality sans the feedback/rebuttal which people just used their profile About box to explain away their negatives.

And whats the purpose of rating someone neutral?

Briana Dawson

Sorry, thought you meant Big Beanie Birds!

Seriously though, I would like to see this, myself. Even with lil' plaques. I've had the occassional problems with people.... alas.

The simple neg ratings were too simple and easy to abuse. Having feedback/rebuttal is very important. So is (ideas stolen from eBay):

* differentiating all ratings vs. ratings from unique users
* calculating the overall rating for a user (unique positive minus unique negative)
* always showing the overall rating as link to the user's rating profile
* time-stamping the ratings
* showing who did the rating (with a quick like their rating profile)
* sort ratings
* filter ratings (i.e., show only negatives)
* show feedback left for other people

eBay also lists the item number sold as link to the auction if it hasn't been purged yet. This makes me consider that perhaps SL should have a "transaction" rating along with maybe others. You can only provide a transaction rating if you actually bought or sold something with that user. The name of item could then also be part of the feedback.

All of this give buyers and sellers valuable information about who to buy from and sell to.



For example, when a transaction gets botched and it takes twice as long as it should have to get your item. But, you get it eventually and the seller did a reasonable job to fix it. Basically, for when you can't bring yourself to rate the user positively, but they don't necessarily deserve a neg rating. The neutral provides a middle ground where a possible pattern can be established ("the seller is ok at best, not a bad person, but there are better out there".

HP

This doesnt make sense. When a transaction 'gets botched', it's on LL's side, not the client side. The most a person can do is take that persons word as truth and give them the item they supposedly never received but paid for.

I still see 'neutral' as a useless rating.

Great, I'll vote some newbie NEUTRAL because I don't know them so well? When you can't bring yourself to positive rate or negative rate, you DONT rate.

Briana Dawson

I was thinking Ebay as well, Euterpe and wondering if it would work in SL. Good answer!

I'm not sure how that could have happened since RATE never actually got out of the planning stages. The design of RATE as a voluntary seal program that was nothing more than positive reinforcement would have made it difficult (if not impossible) for it to be used to strongarm anyone. It was specifically designed to prevent that sort of abuse.

Hmmm, the example I gave was probably better suited for eBay than SL. However, a "botched" transaction wouldn't necessarily be LL's fault depending on how it was botched. What if a seller set up their vendor wrong? You paid for something, but it gave you the wrong thing. That would be botched but not LL's fault.

Depending on the timing, responsiveness, attitude, and anything else that's important, you might not want to give them a positive because, well, things just didn't go nearly as smoothly as they should have. At the same, you might not want to give them a negative because, well, they tried and it did eventually work out in the end.

The neutral rating lets you put the word out about what happened without being forced to give them an undeserved positive or negative. Other people reading the ratings/feedback can then decide for themselves if this was big deal or not. A pattern of behaviour might be established such that a seller gets a reputation for screwing up while setting up their vendors, but at least they're decent about correcting the situation. This may or may not affect someone's decision to buy off of them.

To me, as a buyer, I would be very interested to read other's comments about a seller, good, bad, AND neutral. I would also be very interested to read how the seller responded.

HP

I started slbbb.com as a place for consumers to come to to post a public complaint against an SL company or person. If that company or person chooses to respond, they can contact me in-game to verifty their identity so they can speak "officially" on the slbbb.com forums -- this because anyone could easily come and register themselves as "Anshe Chung" or "Chip Midnight" for example.

I would like to have automated signups like sldrama.com has, but I don't have the technical expertise to set something like that up.

Anyway, at slbbb.com, the parties can choose to take their resolution discussion off the forum and then the original person who posted the complaint can follow-up with a resolution, or they can do it all openly.

My role, and staff of SLBBB (later), is to simply make sure people are who they say they are. Manually verifying identification in-world with their forum account by sending a passphrase to their forum account through PM, etc.

If someone cannot complete the verification, i.e. someone registers as someone and starts posting, I contact them in-game and they cannot verify the passphrase, then that account on the forum, and all posts by it, would be deleted.

It's a lot of work, but I think its necessary to be done correctly. I'd like to automate the verification process. But the forums at SLBBB will always be moderated to the point that complaints and resolutions are always in the right forums. One suggestion on the SLBBB forums was to have a seperate sub-forum opened for each company, as complaints come in, and then when you want to check out a company before buying from them you could just go to their subforum and see how they respond to past customers.

SLBBB is in its infancy, and I have no doubt that if it takes off, or any consumer-protection service takes off, it will be GOMd eventually, because the reason these types of services need to be set up in the first place is because Linden Labs isn't stepping up to the plate and protecting its "citizens," which should be a no-brainer for them.