Well, to be honest I always thought that there should be some nice aknoledgment for the people we trust as reviewers. It may be very well for you here that you don’t trust the badge but the username … but what about that other bigger category of clients that don’t use the boards and have no idea who are the usernames here ? What about the people registered on the boards that don’t always have the time to interact with others, to post / PM and go into the chat room to know who is a sure bet to trust and who not?
Yes the system is open to abuse. But what system isn’t ? Does that mean that instead of working to improve it we just give up on it? Corruption is a potential danger in most life aspects: politics, economic, social interactions etc? Did you ever see someone saying, “no, we won’t have a president, what if he will become corrupt” and “no, we won’t have managers in our company as they might be corrupted”.
I am actually surprised at Sam who after reading a lot of requests for improving the TR system makes a poll with just 2 options: keep the system or scratch it ! Sam if you are trying to take a decision based on democratic input, why would you ignore the 3rd option that was also discussed, the one to improve the system?
How to improve it, there have been some ideas already and I don’t think here is the right place to go again trough a lengthy suggestion posting. But I can list quickly the more obvious and simpler improvement ideas that would take care of most things the current system suffers:
- Get more people established as TRs. This would reduce the potential corruptibility issue, as TRs would become a more common thing. Also it would improve the TR demographics and would give escorts a more fair chance to get TR badges on their profiles even if they are based in a smaller area and don’t travel a lot.
- Do not expect the TR status to be requested, think of system that you give it away to the deserving ones. Here is one of the weakest points in your current system. Some clients, even genuine will never ask for this out of modesty and even if they asked they did it because lots of people encourage them to do it. A client suffering of too much ego will not have a problem to ask for it and of course those are also the people that may later try to abuse their badges.
(The idea of deserving ones can be different. James was more for an automated system, where any client after a certain time on the board and a certain numbers of unrated reviews will receive a badge. I was more of the idea that maybe yes, the potential TRs may be selected by an automated process but to become in fact a TR you also have to pass a public vote, in a special TR forum. I won’t bore you now with the details, but I can go in more details later if you wish).
- Any escort that encounters a TR that wants more benefits because of his badge – simply report him ! If you are aware he is a TR, then you are aware of the boards and reviews moderators, so it should be quite easy.
So yes, I would vote for a new TR system that would listen to all decent improvement suggestions. In case you won’t bother with that, I do agree with scrapping the TR system, as I hate the abuse as well. But this is like me saying I want to be very healthy but if I need to be sick, I prefer flu to cancer … Still wishing for the healthy part though