The Rare Trading Center moderator crew does not demand compliance with the rules set out by the thread, but we do demand respect for them.
What does that mean – and what is the difference between those two notions?
Demanding compliance would be to expect everyone posting in the Rare Trading Center to both know the rules off by heart, including every change made to the (actively maintained) rare list, and to never mispost. We think this is an unreasonable attitude to have. We believe everyone is human and bound to mispost at some point; including Rare Trading Center staff.
Demanding respect is simply that we expect people not to ignore our informational PMs. ‘Don’t ignore ignore our PMs’ does not mean that we’ll get upset if you don’t respond to our PMs – while we love hearing back from people, requiring it couldn’t be further from the truth – but that if we’ve PMed you a few times about a specific form of mispost and neither heard back from you nor seen your posting behaviour change, we may start to get a bit upset.
To make that easier to grasp: If someone continually post metalfails in the Rare Trading Center and is asked to stop doing so on three separate occasions, then doesn’t get back to us about it or just responds with a toneless “okay”, we’ll get grouchy around the fourth time we have to tell that person about it. (If such behaviour persists, we’ll instate and maintain a user blacklist. And yes; the absence of one in the thread currently does say very good things about the community! :) )
What do Rare Trading Center moderators do?
We try to…
- PM everyone that misposts in the Rare Trading Center, and
- report each mispost to the section moderators.
We try very hard to make our PMs to people cordial and informative, owing to our philosophy about misposts being a thing that just happens. Very often, people get back to us, thank us for the heads-up, and edit their own posts. Sometimes, owing to timezones or otherwise, the section moderators get there first – but don’t be afraid of that, no warnings are dealt for trade misposts… and we, as moderators of the Rare Trading Center, like it that way.
Why do you report posts at all, then?
Posts are reported so they can be edited, to (hopefully) decrease the bandwagon effect. Many people check prior posts more than they check the Rare Trading Center’s first post for what’s an acceptable rare by our standards, so removing misposts (or mispost-y aspects of posts) tends to prevent further misposting.
Obviously, we like that effect. :)
When do you not PM someone? When do you not report a post?
Both are up to the thread moderator in question, but a few things tend to result in either no reporting or no PMing:
- offering a rarefail together with a corresponding rare to form a checker pair – this tends not to be reported
- offering something that was taken off the rare list less than or up to a week ago – this tends not to be reported
- having a stray entry in a large list of offers, when we know you know it shouldn’t be there, and you’re known to usually remove them – this can sometimes result in no PM being sent
