Shiny Substitute

With the introduction of Scheduled Raffles, it’s now easier and more convenient for users to plan their raffles accordingly. With this in mind, a handful of users have suggested collaborations, such as scheduling a raffle every hour, on the hour. However, there are many potential problems that can arise from this feature, including mis-scheduling raffles. My proposal is to allow a toggleable option in the user setting page to allow an override of their current timezone. This doesn’t necessarily have to encompass every timezone; UTC seems to be a commonly accepted “standard” time within the site, so one could simply choose whether to display their own timezone, or UTC time. Perhaps both at the same time, if restrictions permit. If anything, it would certainly make collaborating with other users to schedule raffles all the easier.

Thank you Gaia, for ninjaing me about banned users. That besides, the reason regular users have a choice in the first place is because it's a carryover from when a certain "click here" rule was in place. Rather than remove the gray "non rule reader" option from the site, the devs decided it would be less of a hassle to give everyone the option between gray and blue user colors. Now, while that doesn't exclude the possibility of adding red as a color that can be chosen, it does continue to diminish certain benefits that Premium users and above have already paid for. I doubt anyone's going to be extremely cross that they paid $50 to be "red" users only to see that it's now a selectable option to common users, mind you.

As much as I would like to thank specific users for clever emote additions and finding high-res versions of older emotes, I don't think that this is really necessary or practical. Aside from the obvious factor of users suggesting emotes for personal reasons, emotes in general are fairly often rotated out, if not outright ignored. Plus, I feel like it wouldn't be all that fair to users who have pitched emotes and had them rejected to not receive a badge. Plus, there's the fact that some emotes were added "under the table", so to speak, and that alone raises a bunch of questions. If nothing else, determining who'd get a badge and who wouldn't would in itself be a total mess. Of course, that's just my thoughts on it.

Hypothetical scenario: someone with a lot of keys/metal/items on hand decides to "buy up" the entirety of a bot's inventory. This someone is also an escrow account. Due to how escrow works, neither this person nor the bot have these items on hand, thus rendering the bot useless for trading due to having an insufficient inventory. This person can then cancel the trades and reinstate them whenever they wish, and keep the bot out of commission until someone intervenes. This is not, to my knowledge, the official reason why Scrap.TF refuses to trade with escrow accounts, however it's a pretty good deterrent to allowing escrow accounts to trade with the bots. It's too ripe to abuse, and all it takes is one asshole ruining it for everyone else.

Hello, Recently I’ve noticed that when I attempt to edit my User Profile, whenever I insert any type of automatic formatting (such as making the text bold or a hyperlink), the space(s) immediately following the formatting will drop off, resulting in this: https://shiny.feen.us/xyhhu5.png So far, I have tested this with most forms of formatting, though this seems to be mostly an issue with automatic formatting (putting in the formatting code does not actually create this problem, but in my tests it’s still affected by it when other forms of formatting are present). I have also not tested this on other parts of the site, though I assume that the results should be the same across the entirety of the site. Thank you for your time.

:tyrant: = Horray for emote resizes! Now I have a bit more flexibility with emote ideas :v

As we all should know by now, saying "tip" in a raffle disables tips for that particular raffle. However, a number of users have reached a certain threshold for tips that they wish to receive, whether it be a significant number or they feel they've received too many. True, one could say "tip" in every raffle they make, but what if one forgets to do this? I propose an option to disable tips on all raffles that a user creates, whether it's something a user can toggle on their own profile, or something that requires an admin or similar to enable or disable (so as to prevent abuse).

Obligatory Geisha Mann drop. Just imagine there's Scorching Flames on there.

This is what happens when you have two currencies, with one that's more easily obtained than the other. The one that's more plentiful has a tendency to devalue compared to the other. It's almost like governments get into a snit when this happens in real life! They tried that with the "Save the Keys 2.33" movement or somesuch thing like that. Didn't work out too well.

Would Old School RuneScape count? I mean, they've drifted away from the point and click formula a tad in the current game, but if I remember correctly OSRuneScape is still very much point and click oriented. Bonus points for also being an MMO.

I check the rules quite frequently, and it just now occurred to me that there isn't a section for forum-specific rules. I would imagine that most of the rules pertaining to forums are either common sense or already included in the general rules, but there are certain things that are relevant specifically to the forums: for example, there is not really any rule about the use of status updates (more specifically, posting a public message on someone's profile) to try to get help support. I feel like if it was mentioned that this was not the proper procedure, as well as including a link to the proper forum, it would occur less often than it does. At the very least, I've tried looking for forum-specific rules, but I've come up short; in which case, I revise my suggestion to "make the rules easier to access".

This is not 4chan or Reddit, though. That being said, we already have the ability to change text color in raffles, so this seems like a pointless nod to meme culture, something that annoys Jesse, so I doubt it'll be implemented.

So at first I was going to make a raffle poking fun at Auction adverts, but as I kept writing out my points, I realized that Auctions, as a whole, are very, very flawed. Here's why I feel this way, and I hope we can have a serious discussion about this. ((EDIT 03/07/17: The way I phrased some of this made it imply that all auctions are like this, when they really aren't. A good number of people are behaving adequately when it comes to auctions, but there is still the problematic sector. This is talking about the latter of these people. Also, apologies if some phrasing is otherwise confusing, it was written at the end of the day, possibly only an hour before I fell asleep. Just poke me with whatever's confusing and I'll try to edit it.)) We have a rampant advertising problem, in which people are getting cheap, practically free advertising by annoying other users. This is the original point of the raffle that never got made, and I feel it should be my first point. People are abusing raffles for the sake of advertising. What do they give in return? Cheapskate raffles. I've seen, on more than one occasion, someone raffle something like a Winter Noisemaker while in the same breath advertising an Unusual most users can't even afford. This might be a personal problem, because I try to make raffles that are fun, or at the very least make a point. To see my raffles lumped up with what can be chalked up to penny advertisements is very discouraging. Then again, it might not be a personal problem. Jesse already made a poll about this, and while the majority thought it wasn't a problem, quite a few people disagreed. A sizable portion of the user base does not like auction adverts. And it's easy to see why, because it's a huge loophole. Auction adverts are rules lawyer-ing the site rules. Remember: it's against the rules to advertise a trade outside of the site. That means sites like TF2Outpost, Backpack.tf, bazaar.tf, can't be linked to for the purpose of selling your items. If you put your items into an auction; set it at, oh, 95% of its value; and let it run for a week though? That's fine. What happens here is that someone can advertise an "auction", when its not really an auction at all! Auctions are being used as a "standard" trading platform instead of an auction. There is no rule that says that auctions have to have a minimum or maximum value, so as I said before; put items into an auction, set the minimum bid at 95% of its bp.tf value, let it run until someone places a bid. This is admittedly my biggest problem with Auctions right now; I see way too many people using it to "sell" stuff instead of "auction" stuff. Of course, if people want to pay that much for an item, that's one thing, but I see too much of this as opposed to this. Of course, why would you even want to use Auctions, when... Auctions are essentially a worse version of standard trading. There is one benefit to automated auctions, and that is automation. Everything's done for you, to an extent. That's nice, right? Well, the problem is, there's not a real incentive to use them outside of that. You have a time limit; if you forget to pay, you get banned; you have to do a confusing site inventory setup; all sorts of minor problems that makes the whole thing seem like it's not worth it. To be frank, unless I wanted to get rid of an item quickly, I would just, y'know... put up a couple of listings on TF2Outpost and Backpack.tf. I wouldn't face an auction ban, and I also get to pick and choose offers based on my preferences. There's a lot of other, smaller problems facing Auctions, but these are pretty much my main gripes. I want to know your thoughts on the matter, whether its your own problems with auctions, your proposed solutions (remember, this is not the suggestion forum), whatever.

I'd offer to help via S.O.S. chaining, but I don't think you can catch them in the wild in Sun. :x

Shebby's been teasing a trade/idle server for a while, so if we do add this, that would make four servers that need to be watched over, even if it's a lower threshold on the last one. I like the idea, but it might be impractical at the moment.