Team Fortress Wiki:Archived discussions/Talk:Bazaar.tf

The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it.

How-To

Tried to make it more wiki-like and less "come use us and here's how" --Eoj Nawoh 06:49, 6 February 2013 (PST)

Deletion

I'm not convinced that this page needs to exist, since (1)It's not notable, (2)It still reads like a how-to, and (3)There's little to no useful information here. Users have had over a week to change this, but since nobody has, I'm assuming that point 1 applies here.

I'll give this page another day or two, and then delete it. -- LordKelvin 08:33, 17 February 2013 (PST)

Why is bazaar.tf "not notable" enough to be on the wiki

The new baazaar.tf page seems to have been deleted for lack of notability, even though bazaar.tf has a userbase similar to tf2tp.com, has many features no other trading site listed on this wiki has and is getting constant updates. I don't understand why this medium sized website doesn't have the right to be on this wiki, but other similar sized websites such as: scrap.tf, tf2tp.com, and tf2auctions.com. Furthermore, why should a page loose its right to exist just because it was poorly written at one point? If this were the case the wiki wouldn't cover 90% of all content. The fancy spellbook wiki page has existed for 5 days so far, and yet it still is missing critical information such as the fact that you can get a page from the halloween milestone achievement, and that said achievement seems to be the only way of obtaining Tumidum pages. If the entire TF2 community, in which every active member should know about the new spellbook, can't even fill in the basic information in 5 days, how come the bazaar community is dismissed as "not notable" when they don't produce a polished page in about 10 days, especially when the page is way in the back of the wiki and few people in the community had any way of knowing of its existence? Edit: I would like to add a link to the about page of the website, showing active users, total users, etc., just to make sure everyone knows that this website isn't just some tiny website desperate for views: http://bazaar.tf/about Gimmechocolate (talk) 22:27, 3 November 2013 (PST)

That's what was decided by the staff when it was discussed and again when the page was recreated. There are issues with its notability because none of the staff who participated in the discussion had heard of it save a few scattered posts and the author has a history of throwing tantrums on the wiki and other attitude problems until he was eventually blocked. Furthermore the site is shady and has links to people who have been accused of (but not proven to be) partaking in market manipulation and there's evidence of the site being forced on various forums and this wiki will not be a part of that advertisement. The website has also been accused of taking code and resources without proper attribution. To answer your question about how this was deleted again so quickly: past abuse of the community sites pages for advertising has resulted in it being kept a close eye on by staff and editors alike. If you think that other community sites don't deserve a page either, feel free to mark it as such as well. Finally, usage statistics aren't relevant here. Especially when provided by the same website they're claimed to be taken from. -- Lagg 22:40, 3 November 2013 (PST)

Really, Lagg? Since this was being discussed on our forums I decided to drop by. I don't really care about if we have a Wiki page, but what I do care about baseless slander and hypocrisy.

Firstly, I am not blocked from the Wiki which is how I'm here. I'm only banned from the IRC for making one of your brethren upset entirely outside of the IRC and Wiki itself something, something, bad for the community.

Let's see:

>the site is shady

Why.

>has links to people who have been accused of (but not proven to be) partaking in market manipulation

This applies to every trading site ever. We don't condone it, either.

>there's evidence of the site being forced on various forums

Please enlighten me.

>The website has also been accused of taking code and resources without proper attribution

Perchance you are the one accusing in all of this?

If you're still going to fall back on notability without looking like a massive hypocrite, then go ahead and delete OPTF2 because that's even deader in the water than my project. Although I'm sure you'll tell me that it warrants an article for some obscure reason because it's open source or something. --Fiskie ^{Talk :: Contribs} 23:28, 3 November 2013 (PST)

I'd like to take this opportunity to warn you against making ad hominems in this discussion, particularly because of previous issues regarding your behavior in the past. I'm willing to listen to arguments regarding whether or not this deserves an article on the Wiki, but I won't tolerate any more of the same type of behavior that caused your previous departure. -- LordKelvin 23:41, 3 November 2013 (PST)

I'll answer in order. 1) It's shady for the reasons given directly after that statement. 2) That may be so but yours is the one I was contacted directly about. If you think you're being judged unfairly, put a delete marker on other trading sites citing that reason, because I don't want anything on this wiki documenting such a website. 3) 4chan (as LordKelvin said) and clearly this wiki given what the page initially looked like and the fact that you seemed to just materialize here shortly after this discussion started. On top of the fact that you or someone there finds it necessary to create a thread about it. 4) I'm not, but given your history I'm not willing to open more people up to your harassment. So believe what you must. (Edit: and just so this is clear, that "it didn't happen on this website, so it doesn't matter!" nonsense is part of why people are wary of you and your connection to this project) 5) Given that I'm the maintainer and actively doing just that, along with it having existed since shortly after TF2 did and spawned a project that is heavily used by this very wiki and hundreds of people according to pypi I'd have to disagree with that statement. But I digress, if you think it shouldn't be there feel free to put a deletion marker on it and it'll be given the same attention this page was. -- Lagg 23:59, 3 November 2013 (PST)

Linking price manipulation groups to one website (mine) is just confirmational bias at work. We don't condone it and I have never seen any Bazaar-exclusive price manipulation. If we saw it then we'd act upon it and hand out consequences. But we have never seen this happen.

4chan is where this project started and where it was originally funded. That's why it was "forced", per se, because the site owners (me and Accell) frequented there well before we even met and developed it, so we were basing the site around the community's ideals. Regardless I've stopped going to the general threads for over half a year now because they've declined in quality. Accell still goes there on occasion.

Clearly you only just want to spread FUD if you are going to spread accusations like I'm stealing code or promoting price manipulation especially if you don't have a single fact to back it up. I don't really care about this wiki anymore since I don't even play the game, but just stop with the slander and assumptions, yes? --Fiskie ^{Talk :: Contribs} 04:12, 4 November 2013 (PST)

I'm confused, you're saying you don't condone it and have never seen it. But just prior claimed that every trading site does it. Which is it because at this point I care less about this one project and more about the possibility that there are more instances of it and we're giving them pages to link to themselves on. If you don't want to put a delete marker there yourself you can mail any given staff member. Anyway, as for spreading FUD. Did I not explicitly say the accusations were unproven? Even considering that though, I'm inclined to trust the word of those who have helped report things before and have never given any reason for me to doubt them over the possibility of them lying (to what end?) and keeping a page up that already has issues with notability. Or ignoring this fact and going with your alternative theory, that it's just me accusing you, what reason would I possibly have to do that? Why would I risk my integrity and reputation to smear a project I don't even care about otherwise unless there was a specific reason to do so? You're really grasping at straws here, particularly if you have the gall to claim slander when your harassment of a reader was right out there in the open on a logged IRC channel along with your nigh-sociopathic justifications for it. Give me a break. -- Lagg 04:38, 4 November 2013 (PST)

When I said "we've never seen it" I mean "we've never seen Bazaar-exclusive price manipulation efforts" which was very heavily implied. I never said it's the trading sites that do it, either. Let me make this clearer: it's not the fault of any trading site, but the actions of individual users who have no solid affiliation. And if the accusations are unproven, stop parroting them like they're facts (oh we don't want to be linked to so and so because they do x, etc). I'm more concerned as to why people need to report non-existant internal affair issues about us to you in the first place, but I don't think I want to know. Just stop holding a grudge, yeah? --Fiskie ^{Talk :: Contribs} 05:27, 4 November 2013 (PST)

I can understand that unaffiliated people are doing such things and have no doubt that it happens. But the issue here is that you were pretty much named explicitly (to quote: "the bazaar.tf admins", am I wrong in assuming you are in that group?). As for "parroting", please don't try to weaken the accusations as if they were merely taken as fact immediately when seen. I refer back to my previous statement saying that I don't have any reason to doubt the word of these people particularly when they have helped before. Finally, this is not about a grudge (again, why would I or any related party have one? To what end would that serve?). This wiki is powered by the readers and editors. They care about the content of these pages as much as we do and honestly probably get just as annoyed when it's tarnished as the next guy. This is not by any means the first time or last time I've been contacted privately once a questionable article has went up. Whether because these people didn't want an account for personal reasons or were just lazy. This is a decision that was made months ago already and remade yesterday for purely pragmatic reasons. Notability is strained, connections questionable, site legitimacy challenged. These 3 things are strengthened by your own history, like it or not. -- Lagg 06:06, 4 November 2013 (PST)

If I was part of a report for price manipulation then I know it's bullshit. And please, stop pretending you don't have a vendetta - you're using these accusations as a reason to keep the article from view even though they are unconfirmed or invalid, and that's what the problem is here. Sure, notability is arguable, but from a neutral point of view we're still a popular trade site, even if it's not Outpost-level popular. Questionable connections is invalid as proven by this page - people can just make wild claims based on their own personal bias. As for site legitimacy, I'm not really sure what this is supposed to imply since we provide everything we promise to.

While I'm at it, I remember your policy before, something along the lines of "if a site has ads it doesn't belong on the Wiki!" On some level I agree with that, but it goes to show that you're not just looking for legitimacy. You're looking for whatever fits your personal beliefs.

But alas, I'm done with your illuminati-tier politics. I'm not interested in if we have an article, but I'm pissed off as to the reasons why it was removed. I thought you would have gotten over this by now. --Fiskie ^{Talk :: Contribs} 07:47, 4 November 2013 (PST)

I warned you about your ad-hominems in your arguments, and I'm sad (yet not surprised) to see that you decided to completely ignore my request to keep the conversation civil. You are no longer welcome on this Wiki, and I sincerely hope that this will be the last that I'll have to deal with your behavior. -- LordKelvin 08:43, 4 November 2013 (PST)

I am pretty sure proof-less accusations or a personal dislike for the owner are not valid or objective arguments against censoring a site from the wiki. As for it being too small to be in this wiki, consider this: There are only two other well-known trade-matching services, only one auction service (which has been down since I first read the wiki article a few hours ago), and zero sites that provide automated trading with other people. There is no way that anyone can possibly argue that there are too many sites that provide the same service as bazaar.tf on this wiki. -Gimmechocolate (talk) 01:11, 4 November 2013 (PST)

Proofless is a rather strong word to use here given that there is plenty of it on this page as well as the accounts of staff and editors. As for dislike of the owner, neither I nor the rest of the staff hold a grudge against Fiskie beyond his past attitude. Make no mistake though, there is no right for a site to be put on this wiki. It's a privilege, and if it is decided by group consensus that the page shouldn't be here. It won't be, period. Censorship has nothing to do with it, it's a pragmatic choice based on existing evidence of notability (or lack thereof) and avoiding hassle in the future. Furthermore, considering the fact that I know of several sites that provide automated trading and have written and contributed to bot projects doing just that and are moderately widely deployed. I'm having trouble believing the veracity of the rest of your claims. -- Lagg 01:22, 4 November 2013 (PST)

Well, they are proofless until you post a link to some proof, like a link to the page where bazaar.tf supports price manipulation, or the code bazaar.tf stole. It really seemed like you strongly dislike Fiskie from your previous posts: "author has a history of throwing tantrums" "I'm not willing to open more people up to your harassment", I personally would not post anything worded like that if I didn't strongly dislike them, but maybe I misinterpreted your intention there. Sure there are other automated trading sites out there, but that is irrelevant to this wiki. As of when it got deleted, the wiki had 0 working auction sites and 0 bot sites listed, yet it was deleted for clutter. There is no rest of my claims, I am simply saying that you should not dismiss a website for being too shady for the wiki just because someone claims it is (Though if there is solid proof, I would like to know) and that you should not dismiss a website as not notable enough, when it is the only working website listed in two different categories and the data posted below by Ruiner confirms that it is not just some tiny site trying to lie about its size. -Gimmechocolate (talk) 15:59, 4 November 2013 (PST)

For clarification, I don't dislike Fiskie anymore than I dislike the next person who got themselves blocked for being an asshat. Does that mean that I have a personal grudge against the guy who edited links to viagra websites? No. And to claim otherwise is a sorry attempt to weaken the argument. What was stated was facts about his attitude and what got him banned. These are things that were logged in the wiki IRC channel. If we held personal vendettas against every person acting like an asshat on this wiki we'd have suffered a mass heart attack by now. That simply isn't how it works. As for proof of the site's shadiness, I have screenshots of steam PMs and mails that are damning enough to convince me. But I'm unwilling to release them and open someone up to harassment (which is not an unexpected occurrence given what has happened in the past). If I were to attempt to censor identifying information they'd merely be dismissed as edited. So it's a moot point either way. But even though I was not provided proof in the form of emails between the admins of this site saying what they're doing, it doesn't mean that I will not take the word of someone with a good record and has no stake to lie about these things. I will say this much, the people who I spoke to did not have anything that I know of that would compete with fiskie or his stuff. I myself have no projects related to Steam or TF2 that are profitable, including ads on website pages. I have no reason to want to promote any given page here over others or similarly remove them. Despite what people who try to use this argument want to think. It just doesn't happen. -- Lagg 18:02, 4 November 2013 (PST)

I will assume the main reason bazaar.tf is not allowed a page is because of the sites shadiness seeing as you didn't address anything else I said. So, the market manipulation part could be proven by simply posting a link to the page where it is supported, if they removed it then they obviously don't support market manipulation. As for the stolen code, you could start with those screenshots you have, feel free to censor whatever you feel is necessary, since screenshots are really easy to fake anyway, for example: http://puu.sh/59jQC . besides, if bazaar.tf has any dark secrets which you can prove exist, I don't see any reason you shouldn't expose them. If you are in the process of gathering evidence to expose said dark secrets, then you shouldn't treat bazaar.tf like it is guilty until you can actually prove that it is guilty. -Gimmechocolate (talk) 01:03, 5 November 2013 (PST)

I probably didn't address anything else you said because it deviates from the topic. Just like this is starting to. You're missing the point here though. The simple fact of the matter is that beyond this wiki, we (as staff, personal opinions aside) don't particularly care about someone's dirty laundry. It's not our place. I have no want or need to sabotage the site itself and the problems caused by releasing the accusations from their sources is not worth it at all. You yourself emphasized this by showing how easily one can claim that a screenshot is proof of something merely by inserting different HTML in a website. Furthermore this starts to come into the realm of actively trying to prove guilt rather than merely taking someone's word for it that the project isn't worth associating with. And that is something I couldn't in good conscience do without solid evidence like aforementioned emails. As it stands, and this is about the 3rd and final time I'll say it: This is a pragmatic decision based on existing evidence and consideration of the history of the author, and the site's notability. But in effort in trying to end this discussion: If you ask me, this site did not win any points once I saw a slur about it being a trading site "without jews" on a group post and a similar slur in a footer. Typical of something tied to 4chan and what I have come to call gamerprogrammers. That alone would have been a pretty damned good reason to remove the site in itself according to our policies and now that I've remembered this, any doubt I've previously had about this decision is gone. In fact, I'll archive this discussion while I'm at it. Clearly it's reached the end of its life. -- Lagg 02:24, 5 November 2013 (PST)

You mentioned notability, here's a 3rd party indication of traffic on the major TF2 trading-related sites (provided by alexa.com): http://puu.sh/52e5y -- maybe it's time to remove tf2items and tf2b since they've fallen lower than bazaar.tf? I personally think bazaar deserve its place. Maybe you don't use it or have never heard of it, but that doesn't mean it's not used by many in the community. - Ruiner (talk) 07:44, 4 November 2013 (PST)

I would not have any objections to either of those, if the community thinks so. However, the main reason that previous sites have been removed have largely been because the site itself stops being maintained by their creators, and I know for a fact that at least in the case of TF2B, Athernar still maintains it (I've pestered him in the past a few times regarding new features that I think should be added).

Really, it's up to the community. If they think Bazaar.tf deserves a page, and TF2B and TF2Items and OPTF2 don't (which, I should emphasize, are mutually exclusive issues), then they should make this clear in a discussion page. -- LordKelvin 08:53, 4 November 2013 (PST)

I think it's about high time this is ended. It's been decided for quite some time now, and that decision reinforced, that this doesn't deserve a page on this wiki. If you believe other sites don't either, mark them as such. The page will now be locked since people are unwilling to shed the delusion that they have a right to self-promotion here. -- Lagg 17:35, 4 November 2013 (PST)

Bazaar.tf getting a wiki page is no more self promotion than any other website getting one. The last page was removed because A. It was bad, which is irrelevant when making a new wiki page and B. The website seemed too small at the time, which we have already proven no longer applies. -Gimmechocolate (talk) 01:03, 5 November 2013 (PST)

The previous page was deleted because, as I said, it was more of a how-to rather than an actual page that documented the features of the site. The quality of the previous page was substandard, so it was deleted. Additionally, I believe the site was still in beta at the time, and we have policies against creating pages for incomplete products.

Different rules apply to community sites, as opposed to in-game content, I should think that would be obvious. I'm still not fully convinced that this site is notable enough to merit a page on the Wiki (mainly because the only place I've actually seen it mentioned is on 4chan, and even then only a very few times), and the Wiki should not be used as a form of advertisement in any case, otherwise every small TF2 site would demand to have its own page, which would create clutter. -- LordKelvin 22:28, 3 November 2013 (PST)

Notability

I believe that this page should be allowed another chance.

Full disclaimer: I am a Bazaar "Affiliate". All this means is that my name on Bazaar is blue and that my community has a banner on Bazaar's communities page.

In the interest of being accurate and informative, the wiki's admins should not allow their personal feelings to interfere. bazaar.tf is certainly popular enough to be considered "notable", regardless of how the site's staff may or may not have acted. The fact that this page was previously very poorly-written should not bar it from existing in the future, after being rewritten of course. bazaar.tf is still very actively maintained and developed. A reddit post about a browser game developed by bazaar.tf reached the front page of /r/tf2.

If the main reason for barring the creation of a new bazaar.tf wiki page is the fact that in the past it was merely used for self-promotion, then the problem is not with Bazaar itself. The problem was with whoever edited the page previously. Instead, allow someone else to create a wiki page. -- Dr. McKay (talk) 14:26, 14 January 2014 (PST)

Just looking at the Alexa rankings, Bazaar is ranked slightly above TF2 Warehouse, and significantly above TF2 Trading Post, both of which are listed as notable community trading websites. The 3-month trend shows the rank has improved by about 90% in that time period, so in regards to popularity there isn't much to be debated. The about page also shows information about popularity. As I write this, 154k total users, 400 online, 640k trades, and 118k automated trade offers.

I hate to bring up the old argument that seemed to have shut this page down in the first place, but I'm not exactly sure how this kind of site could fix prices (if you know, please explain!). From what I can tell, current item prices are gathered from backpack.tf automatically, with the source cited alongside of the price, and again on the about page. As far as individual trade prices goes, that's up to the users.

The contributions to automated trading by the site's developer(s) is quite significant in itself, and I believe the exact same bot-base has been adopted by backpack.tf[1]. If a site has reached the point where it's affecting and contributing to the largest community sites, I certainly think it should have its own page. Rannmann (talk) 15:08, 14 January 2014 (PST)

I take it nobody with authority cares to respond to this? Dr. McKay (talk) 18:09, 12 May 2014 (PDT)

Sure. --Piemanmoo 19:40, 12 May 2014 (PDT)

The preceding discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it.