Community,
It's come to our attention that there is a potentially problematic market added in the Super List. See thread for more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/4hcldx/do_not_sign_up_or_use_bitbay/
- 15 days ago, BitBay messaged us saying they wanted to be considered for listing in the Super List. They made their required introductory post 15 days.
- 4 days ago (or 11 days after their introductory post), they messaged us again stating that they have waited the required number of days and requested to be listed. We require a 7 day wait period to give the community a chance to check the market out.
- 4 days ago I added BitBay to the Super List.
- Today, the warning about BitBay was made.
Presently, I have removed BitBay from the Market Super List. We will further investigate the accusations and allow BitBay a chance to respond to the criticisms. BUt obviously there was enough concern that we removed them in the interim.
I believe what has come out of this is a need to revamp and retool our validation process. At a minimum, we need better accountability as to when a market is considered "validated" - things such as who performed the checks, what they did, etc. But even that term is severely overloaded in our context.
I can assure you that there was nothing unethical or any action that would be considered executed in "bad faith" towards this community by myself or anyone else on the mod team. I'd step down in a heartbeat if I had done anything like that towards the community. We are still looking to see what we could do better because at the end of the day, this sub is present to protect the community at large.
One thing that does come up from time to time is what it means to be on the Super List. The Super List is not a recommendation/endorsement of any form. There are some minimum requirements to be listed. We rely on the community to help one another and to spot problems. I do appreciate /u/Satoshi- for publicizing the problem and making us aware of it. Again, we believe in relying on the community to help squeeze out problematic vendors, markets, tumblers, whatever.
That being said, I believe its time that we revisit the Super List requirements and do a better job in governing the process. Looking at the modmail for this specific market listing request, it was obvious that we could have done a better job. The requirements were believed to have been met at the time, but I don't believe any of us dug in deep enough. They had the requisite number of vendors (at least appeared to), there were no complaints of withdrawal issues from the community, and they seemed to have the required uptime.
So what does this mean?
- The Super List is currently frozen. No new additions until further notice.
- The Super List might go away completely. It has been a source of headache, accusations, etc. So maybe its time to get rid of it completely.
- If the Super List remains, we will tighten the requirements and make it very difficult to make the list. Because let's face it, any new market can "behave" for a week, make everything work just fine, then get listed and be problematic.
- If the Super List remains, we will have a more transparent process. Maybe it'll be a wiki that documents who checked the market, what they did, etc etc. And this will be made publicly available as well.
Feel free to ask any questions. I apologize to the community for this slip. We will do a better job in the future.
~Econ
EDIT: To better illustrate how this usually happens, I'll outline the modmail. Now, its become obvious that this way is not good and we need to change it. So basically it goes like this:
- Market mentions they want to do an announcement.
- Post on sub made
- Mod(s) check out the site
- 7 day waiting period
- Market pings us that they've waited the 7 days.
- Someone will reply back asking if any of hte o ther mods have objections to the market being added.
- If no objections are raised, market is added.
After this incident, I've realized this is bad practice. It needs to be more proactive rather than passive. Even a "YES" from each of the mods is better than a passive "any objections" - b/c we don't know if the message was even actually read/received. This will change in the future.
Don't get rid of the superlist. It's a valuable resource and if it wasn't, bitbay wouldn't of happened.
Just become more proactive with market adding/checking.
Being a representative of Apple market, I can say for sure that we are ready n willing to jump thru any hoop put before us in order to prove our market and ourself.
Seriously, a good market will lunge at the chance to prove their legitimacy and while I understand everyone being all butt hurt about the mods not keeping them safe from a scamming market link on the superlist, I'm thinking that maybe we should all be thinking of hoops for new markets to jump thru instead of blankly complaining.
Personally, I believe econs original suggestion of a forced deposit/withdrawal instead of a passive complaint is a strong way to enforce superlist legitimacy straight off the bat.
To be honest, I am kinda proud this community outed a scammer so quick and without having to dig too much. There's hope for the future.
But yeah, tl;dr...less talk, more action.
=)