New Trader Feedback system and Trader Dispute forum

[jmachling]

You may have seen some new threads and a subforum appear related to Trader Feedback.

Affiliate Company/Trader Feedback is now dealt with for by using stickied polls in 'Trader Feedback' with four options - Outstanding, Good, Acceptable and Unacceptable.

Members will be able to vote for each company once a year so choose your option carefully as it can't be retracted. The votes will be used to attribute new 'IMOC Affiliate Company of the Year' and 'IMOC Affiliate Trader of the Year' awards to be presented at or around the time of JAE each year. The graphs these polls generate should help members get a good snapshot of each Affiliate.

The three positive options are straightforward and brief comments in addition to your vote are encouraged, however, lengthy disputes are not so to leave negative feedback, the poster must now:

1) Contact the trader in a reasonable manner in order to attempt a resolution off the forum first
2) If this has not been possible, the Original Poster (OP) starts a thread in the 'Trader Dispute' subforum with just the name of the trader and details of their complaint in the first post
3) OP informs trader via email/PM/phone to alert them within 24 hours
4) OP informs Mods/Committee by hitting 'Report' on their own post immediately
5) Only OP/trader/Mods/Admin are allowed to post on the thread- all others will be removed without question
6) Thread left to run for 7 days
7 ) At the end of 7 days (or sooner if agreement is reached) the thread is locked and 'Resolved' or 'Unresolved' is added to the thread title by a Mod/Admin
8 ) If it's 'Unresolved', the poster will be advised to leave negative feedback for the trader in their poll
9) If it's 'Resolved', there's the option for the thread to be deleted at the request of either party
10) If 'Unresolved', a link to the dispute thread is placed in the Trader's feedback thread to show how both the OP and trader attempted to resolve the situation

Essentially:

If the OP doesn't follow any one or more of the above - the thread will be deleted
If anyone other than the OP, trader concerned or a Mod/Admin posts - their posts will be deleted
If someone starts a thread about an Affiliates's goods/services anywhere other than TF - the thread will be deleted

I'll be keeping a close eye on how/if it works so any questions, just PM me.

At regular intervals, I'll check the negative feedback to make sure it tallies with the number of unresolved dispute threads for that trader. If it doesn't add up, then the poll data will be adjusted in the annual reckoning.

The system is currently locked, but will go live some time later this week.

Any questions, do please contact me directly.

[Ed]

Hi John

On the face of it this seems to be a lot better however there is a major flaw in the trader feedback system you want to implement.

If we are allowed to vote only once in a year for a particular company then any one with any sense will wait until the end of December before placing their votes for any company.

This means that for this first year we will be unable to get a good representation of how a trader performs.

A suggestion:

As we already have a feedback system, can it not be tied into this new system so that when a feedback score is left then it adds to the positive or negative vote.

I understand that it is a difficult problem to deal with especially when a lot of traders sell outside of IMOC and so will not receive feedback scores from those sales however at least it would give us an idea over the whole year how well they are doing.

From my point of view though I am not so worried about seeing a poll but more from seeing the negative feedback and the communication to resolve the matter without having to wade through all the crap that gets thrown in from the non involved. From this angle the proposed Traders Dispute section should work well and be more informative.

Cheers Ed

[jmachling]

Hi John

On the face of it this seems to be a lot better however there is a major flaw in the trader feedback system you want to implement.

If we are allowed to vote only once in a year for a particular company then any one with any sense will wait until the end of December before placing their votes for any company.

This means that for this first year we will be unable to get a good representation of how a trader performs.

A suggestion:

As we already have a feedback system, can it not be tied into this new system so that when a feedback score is left then it adds to the positive or negative vote.

I understand that it is a difficult problem to deal with especially when a lot of traders sell outside of IMOC and so will not receive feedback scores from those sales however at least it would give us an idea over the whole year how well they are doing.

From my point of view though I am not so worried about seeing a poll but more from seeing the negative feedback and the communication to resolve the matter without having to wade through all the crap that gets thrown in from the non involved. From this angle the proposed Traders Dispute section should work well and be more informative.

Cheers Ed

Thanks for your comments, Ed.

Yes, the one vote per year isn't ideal. My intention was to get something in place quickly that would function better than the current free for all and that would not require significant programming or re-structuring of the forum but would also allow a simple reversion to the previous system if it was felt the new system didn't work. This uses existing 'technology' within the forum and has (so far) been easy to implement.

Hard-linking it to the current sales feedback system would not (as it stands) be possible, however, it is an easy manual addition that I can do when reckoning up at the end of the year. Thanks for the idea - I'll make sure their annual feedback is factored into their final reckoning

To clarify, the 'Feedback Year' runs from just after JAE in August to a couple of weeks before JAE the following year - it just seemed a good time to present the awards.

[jmachling]

On reflection and after some very useful feedback, the system has changed again - sorry!

It's a compromise between the old and new system that should be more workable.

Again, any comments welcome.