Hello, CS community. My name is Chris and I’m representing the mod team over at r/dota2trade, the original Dota item trading community, here on Reddit. I am also one of the senior/original mods on r/TF2trade. tl;dr – SteamRep is shutting down and trade communities will have no way to vet new incoming users starting January 1st, 2025. We need a new solution ASAP. Problem Statement Our partner community and anti-fraud #, SteamRep, has announced its closure at the end of 2024. We and other trade communities both here and off of Reddit relied on the operation of this entirely volunteer-run community to keep our users as safe as we could from scammers and fraudsters. If you don’t know what SteamRep is or why this is significant, let me explain: SteamRep acted as the most trusted source of reputation tracking after the original TF2 trading community (on SourceOP forums) closed. The way that it works was relatively simple, but high-effort for its volunteer staff. Users could search for any Steam profile, and SteamRep would show a page with as many public details about that profile as could be mined, including their known aliases, current friends list, inventory, and, most importantly, their reputation status. Using an evidence-based rubric, Steam users could report scammers/fraudsters to the SteamRep forums, where the report would be reviewed by a moderator. Mods (and later community admins like myself) could visit the profile page of a particular Steam user and attach a variety of different tags, ranging from "Community Admin" (green check), "Caution" (yellow check), or "SCAMMER" (red check). Usually, a tag was tied to a particular community, so scammers discovered and reported from Reddit would get a "Banned by Reddit" affix attached to their SCAMMER tag. In order to effectively moderate our communities here on Reddit and provide the safest space for traders, we partnered with some community members who built homebrew API hooks and bots to check incoming join requests on our subreddits against the SteamRep #. If the user was a marked scammer, they were auto-rejected and banned. If they were clean, the bots would attach their Steam profile as flair for ID verification purposes. Remember that SteamRep was in no way endorsed by Valve (understandably). Valve did not have the resources to police trade ethics after the introduction of P2P trading, so it fell on passionate volunteer community members like us and those on SteamRep. SteamRep has decided they have had a good run, and no longer have the time/resources to continue operations. We salute them and thank everyone involved in their mission. Just spitballing here, but the work I have done to save people from fraud, either directly or indirectly, probably amounts in the low 7-figures across the 15 years we've been doing this. Multiply that by the dozens of other community admins within SteamRep and across its affiliate communities and you have some absolutely incredible impact. As ballers, we do it for the love of the game. Given that, SteamRep is shutting down and refusing to allow any other organizations to continue operating or archiving the # in their stead, and Moderators do not want (or have the bandwidth) to go back to the old days of manually vetting, approving, and flairing new users, and Moderators do not have the ability to produce a new programmatic solution on our own, we are asking for your help. How do we solve this problem? Right now, Reddit API changes allow 100 queries per minute per OAuth client ID, which we believe to be within the operable range for a programmatic tool such as the ones we used previously. We need a new way to track reputation scores which do not rely on the existing SteamRep # (unless they somehow change course and grant us access – cough cough). We are open to all ideas, however radical. History of Steam trading on Reddit (read on if you like context and a lot of history) 2009-2011 (The TF2 era) r/tf2trade was created on the 11th of August, 2009, just two days after item trading was first introduced in beta. During this period, most trades were conducted live during regular game lobbies. Soon after, trade servers – custom game lobbies designed to facilitate trading between players – were established. r/tf2trade soon gained a significant following as the virtual economy started to blossom. Unfortunately, the influx of new users also brought bad actors. Mods on r/tf2trade (myself included) were soon inundated with scam reports and users begging for help. During this time, the most we could do was publish safe trading guides which outlined common scams and what to look out for, as well as manually respond to scam reports by users in the community. It was a hugely laborious task which took a lot of time. This was on top of our regular moderator duties like spam control, disciplinary action, scaled growth plans, etc. Alongside r/tf2trade, the SourceOP community was a place traders gathered. Reputation threads were most commonly hosted here, allowing users to establish a trade history in order to build trust within the community. Typically, +rep was posted on a user’s thread when a grey market (cash for virtual goods) trade took place successfully (i.e., no scam or funny business), so each successive +rep from other users was worth more and more. Threads hosted here had value because the original poster could not remove -rep, unlike on a player’s Steam profile wall. 2012 (r/dota2trade is born) In May of 2012, r/dota2trade opens up. I took experience gained as an admin on r/tf2trade and the old Unusual Hat Club server community and applied those lessons to the new Dota 2 community. r/dota2trade faced many of the same problems that r/tf2trade had experienced, but on a much shorter timescale, as it took about a month to go from 0 users to 2500, then another month to hit 5000 and on and on. I had to recruit new moderators from the community, many of whom are still involved to this day. 2012 (SteamRep opens its doors) Also in 2012, and born of the TF2 trading community, came SteamRep. SteamRep was created as a community-neutral anti-fraud service, meaning it stood on its own and wasn’t affiliated with any existing community. However, SR allowed trade communities across different websites, servers, and Steam games to partner with them and get listed as a trusted community. SteamRep’s scammer # relied on user reports, much like on Reddit. SR also hosted a list of trusted community members who could act as middlemen/brokers for grey market/cash trades. Many r/tf2trade, r/dota2trade, and r/globaloffensivetrade mods appeared on that list over the years. 2013 (r/globaloffensivetrade, and SteamRep integration into Reddit) In August of 2013, r/globaloffensivetrade is opened Soon after, a coalition had formed between the trade subreddits and we began tackling the scammer problem programmatically. A very helpful user built a bot and hosted a web page, which acted as the new gateway to posting on Reddit trade subs. It worked like this: User joins community but finds that posting is “restricted” to approved members only User clicks a link on the subreddit to get approval and their Steam profile assigned as flair User is directed to a web page where they log in using the Steam API and Reddit API, which linked the two accounts A bot performs the mod action of approving the user and granting their Steam profile flair The addition of this bot removed a massive number of manual mod actions, allowing us to focus more on other aspects of moderation and community events (Secret Santa events, raffles/giveaways, community guideline revisions, etc) 2014-2022 (Smooth sailing for the most part) This version of the Steam flair bot persisted for some time until the original host could no longer maintain it. Eventually a new bot/host surfaced from the community, simplifying the process somewhat while still retaining the original functionality This is an excellent addition to the tools mods used to keep users as safe as possible, rejecting scammers who were targeting reddit users (or at least adding a large obstacle to make it a huge inconvenience). The subreddits largely went on autopilot during this period. 2023 (Reddit introduces changes to API) Sometime in 2023, shortly after launching the new bot/onboarding experience, the host of this bot suddenly went offline and became unreachable. As a result, new users to r/dota2trade became unable to join. The mod team was forced to revert to a manual process, cross-referencing user profiles on SteamRep to ensure that they were not a known bad actor 2024 to present day (SteamRep announces its closure) In June of this year, SteamRep made the announcement that it was closing its doors at the end of 2024. They list the reason to be that the “reputation” methodology they had been employing to keep community members safe was no longer effective against modern scammers/thieves, and the toll of being a volunteer-run organization had finally caught up to its admins. The r/tf2trade, r/dota2trade, and r/globaloffensivetrade mods met to discuss how to approach this news, which brings us up to the present. Closing Statement The mods of not only r/dota2trade but all partnered subreddits are passionate about maintaining a safe, inclusive environment for all members, both existing and future. However, we need help. If you have used any of our trade communities in the past, please take a moment to consider how we can partner to solve this complex issue together. No idea is a bad idea and we’re grateful for any help offered. Thanks for reading and we’ll be in the comments discussing things with you all. # #/musical_hog # .
