Add-on New trader rating system being developed

Stuart Wright

Stuart Wright

Well-known member
Having spoken with Slavik, he is unhappy with the state of the current Xentrader system, but doesn't plan to update it until Xenforo 2 is out, which is too far away for us. He is ok with us taking the addon forward and our thanks to Slavik for both the Xentrader addon and giving us permission to continue the work.
So we're creating a new trader ratings system which @Chris Deeming will code for us from scratch.

We have a very busy classifieds community at AVForums with moderators dedicated to dealing with our very strict, but relatively safe trading environment. They have a lot of experience and we are working together to create a trader ratings system which does everything we need.

The core functionality is to allow two members to exchange trader ratings, positive, neutral or negative.
We at AVForums will require both parties to have posted in a thread in a trading forum, and one of them must have started the thread.
We will insist that feedback is honest.We hand out stiff infractions (warnings, of course going forward with XF) to people who give retaliatory negative feedback.
We will also be looking at the total trader rating being influenced more by trading misbehaviour.

If you have something to add to the discussion, please comment here.
 
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Something that springs to mind - I haven't thought it through fully, so bear with me :D - would it be worth looking at the possibility of integrating it with RM items in some way... even if it's just a sidebar link to trader ratings. Sorry that's so vague, I'm not sure how useful it is!

Maybe, having a tab for items that are purchasable with a list of trader ratings available for that particular item in the RM.
 
Do you mean paying for resources with trader ratings? Or awarding a different number of trader rating points dependent upon what items have been purchased?
Trader ratings are used to indicate the trustworthiness of members, and it is worth discussing how the rating should be affected by trading.
A member who has successfully bought a single Blu-ray on twenty occasions would have the same trader rating as someone who has successfully sold twenty cars. I would suggest that the responsibility of successfully selling one car is a better reflection of a person's trustworthiness than having bought 20 Blu-rays.
But then no system is perfect, and people are used to the ebay method of counting feedback.
 
Any reason you aren't looking at this addon :

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/xencentral-trading-system.448/

It does everything you stated in the first post + more. I've had some custom work done by the developers for my site to do with the trading system (a trade manager page, a feedback reminder system, and automatic feedback after x days) and it works great.

We've had over 60000 feedback given on the system and it works well.

Happy to give you more info or some screen shots of the backend if interested. I've already spoken with the developers and they will be updating for Xenforo 1.2.
 
Thanks. No I wrongly assumed Xentrader was the only trader rating feedback system. I will look at this mod.
Just need to check whether we can force one of the traders exchanging ratings started the thread.
Would you be interested in sharing the custom work you had done?

I've posted a question in the discussion thread. Let's see if they respond quickly enough with the right answers.
 
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graham_w said:
Any reason you aren't looking at this addon
Click to expand...
Didn't even know it existed, probably because the last update was over a year ago and the price drove people away. Looks a lot more polished but I wonder what are the benefits of using that over the Slavik's.

The custom work you mentioned looks very useful. Is it now a standard part of the solution or just developed for you? With those things in place the price would be justified for me.

Did you migrate from XenTrader or iTrader? Is the Xentrader importer built in?
 
Renegade said:
Didn't even know it existed, probably because the last update was over a year ago and the price drove people away. Looks a lot more polished but I wonder what are the benefits of using that over the Slavik's.

The custom work you mentioned looks very useful. Is it now a standard part of the solution or just developed for you? With those things in place the price would be justified for me.

Did you migrate from XenTrader or iTrader? Is the Xentrader importer built in?
Click to expand...

The benefits were that at the stage I migrated over I don't think Slavik was involved and there were errors and issues and I couldn't wait for weeks/months for a fix that might come. With a paid solution, I had any errors resolved quickly and a large number of suggestions i've made have been included in the core product.

The custom work I had done is not part of the core and I will not be releasing it.

I imported from xentrader using an importer supplied by Xencentral. Not sure if it's part of the package but before I purchased the licence I enquired about it. They said they would make one within a week and they delivered. I'm sure it's available to anyone who wants/needs it.
 
Stuart Wright said:
Do you mean paying for resources with trader ratings? Or awarding a different number of trader rating points dependent upon what items have been purchased?
Trader ratings are used to indicate the trustworthiness of members, and it is worth discussing how the rating should be affected by trading.
A member who has successfully bought a single Blu-ray on twenty occasions would have the same trader rating as someone who has successfully sold twenty cars. I would suggest that the responsibility of successfully selling one car is a better reflection of a person's trustworthiness than having bought 20 Blu-rays.
But then no system is perfect, and people are used to the ebay method of counting feedback.
Click to expand...
No :) Using here as an example... you have a group of addon developers who sell their products. There is, obviously, the support thread linked to the resource but unless you read the entire thread you don't get a good idea of how the actual sale went. Was delivery of it prompt, did it take a while, where they happy with it etc etc etc. If there was a specific trader tab where a rating could be seen at a glance, then people don't have to dig into the support thread for information on how the sale went.

As I said it was just something that popped into my mind when I first saw the thread.. I didn't put a lot of thought into it :)
 
Azhria Lilu said:
There is, obviously, the support thread linked to the resource but unless you read the entire thread you don't get a good idea of how the actual sale went. Was delivery of it prompt, did it take a while, where they happy with it etc etc etc.
Click to expand...
We were once going in for a custom rating system but scrapped the idea. What you have said is precisely what we wanted to address. With a binary rating system it is either positive or negative and we never come to know how the deal actually went as nobody likes to close on a bitter note.

We were planning to keep a multi-point rating system.
  • They would rate each other on a scale of 5 for communication quality and packaging/payment/shipment. The overall rating would be a weighted average of this.
  • They will also enter the number of days it took to make payment (seller) and receive goods (buyer).
So the rating against a trader will show as - Rating: 98.7% in 2.4 Days

Of course this can be debated and improved.
 
@Stuart Wright please don't speak for me. Especially when its not correct. It's not the first time you've done it, and it's very annoying.

To fix some incorrect information in this thread.

1) I never mentioned XenForo 2, this is something you've inferred from a typo (yes typing with this on my hand is quite difficult)

2) I gave @Chris Deeming permission to update the addon to your requirements, if you've decided to create a new system alltogether thats fine (though as to why you would need my blessing to do that I dont know?), you seem to be infering that you/chris have taken over the xentrader project, which, is not what has happened.

3) The issues with xentrader 2.0 will be sorted in 3.0, which, will be a complete re-write of the addon, though again if Chris is writing a new system from scratch I may retire xentrader if the new system works as it needs to, im happy to work with chris if he wants my input.
 
Just babbling here about ratings...

you could always use price brackets as multipliers and make something like...

$(X - 2X) = into average once
$(2X - 3X) = into average twice
$(3x - 4X) = into average three times

so as items become more expensive it starts acting like multiple low budget items added into the average


/end babble
 
Slavik said:
@Stuart Wright please don't speak for me. Especially when its not correct. It's not the first time you've done it, and it's very annoying.

To fix some incorrect information in this thread.

1) I never mentioned XenForo 2, this is something you've inferred from a typo (yes typing with this on my hand is quite difficult)

2) I gave @Chris Deeming permission to update the addon to your requirements, if you've decided to create a new system alltogether thats fine (though as to why you would need my blessing to do that I dont know?), you seem to be infering that you/chris have taken over the xentrader project, which, is not what has happened.

3) The issues with xentrader 2.0 will be sorted in 3.0, which, will be a complete re-write of the addon, though again if Chris is writing a new system from scratch I may retire xentrader if the new system works as it needs to, im happy to work with chris if he wants my input.
Click to expand...
Sorry Slavik, for clarification, you sent me a message saying
nothing would be done until 2.0
Click to expand...
Now I'm sorry if your typing is impaired, but I can hardly be held responsible for your mistake when sending me a message. What else am I going to 'infer' from that message? If you had typed 3.0, I would have read that you meant version 3 of Xentrader. But you wrote 2.0, which can only mean version 2 of Xenforo.
It doesn't really matter though 'cos either way there is no schedule for moving forward with it, and I can't assume it's going to be ready before September.

In asking for your blessing to proceed with Xentrader, I was trying to be courteous by ensuring I wasn't going to do anything which you might not appreciate. And I ended up annoying you.
I was usually the least diplomatic person in the room. I shall revert to type and not ask, just do in future.
 
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I have no issue with anything you wish to do or undertake, and appreciate you did ask, however, as i've said, I don't like people speaking for me as that can lead to bad situations and missinformation as per this thread (eg, imagine if I posted "mike says xenforo 1.2 next week" and then it never turns up, what sort of backlash or problems it may cause).
 
Somewhat flawed analogy since your scenario doesn't make a reference to any good reason for posting a '1.2 next week' message and also historically that kind of statement would be against Xenforo announcement policy and also a huge deal for the community.
In contrast I had a good reason for explaining why we might undertake a new trader rating system. I didn't want to offend you or appear to slight you by discussing a new addon which would be in competition with your addon Xentrader. That's why I posted the reason. There is also no precedent for making such a statement on the forums, so I wasn't aware I was breaking any kind of unwritten code. And also it's also not so much of a big deal.
Apologies for misunderstanding you.
The point is that you aren't planning on doing any development in Xentrader any time soon though, right?
 
Stuart Wright said:
The point is that you aren't planning on doing any development in Xentrader any time soon though, right?
Click to expand...

Apart from to fix the outstanding bugs and ensure it works with 1.2, there wont be any new features put in i dont imagine.
 
graham_w said:
Any reason you aren't looking at this addon :

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/xencentral-trading-system.448/

It does everything you stated in the first post + more. I've had some custom work done by the developers for my site to do with the trading system (a trade manager page, a feedback reminder system, and automatic feedback after x days) and it works great.

We've had over 60000 feedback given on the system and it works well.

Happy to give you more info or some screen shots of the backend if interested. I've already spoken with the developers and they will be updating for Xenforo 1.2.
Click to expand...


First time I see this addon....
 
Hi @Stuart Wright Can I ask you a question? Is a new trader rating system being developed? Is Chris working on XenTrader to improve it with your suggestions? Or have you decided to go with XenCentral?
 
QenTox said:
Hi @Stuart Wright Can I ask you a question? Is a new trader rating system being developed? Is Chris working on XenTrader to improve it with your suggestions? Or have you decided to go with XenCentral?
Click to expand...
We're not developing a new trader rating system for two reasons. First, Xentrader does almost everything that we need it to and second, we're so busy working on other addons that we're out of time.
 
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