Swapd changes for 2021 - Track our progress so you're in the loop!

As stated in our earlier discussion, we plan to revise our internal policies and the way we manage the site. We’re starting from ticket handling and general customer support, but we plan many other changes that we will inform you about. We will use this topic to keep you updated on every change, but we will close comments until we’ve completed the changes. We will try to justify each change we make, also.

Changes for today!

We’ve updated nearly all of our canned responses.

Major changes in our response time declarations. We’ve switched from 4-10 hours to 4-24 hours. All audits are now at an estimated 12-48 hours wait time. Why did we do this? Because new members quite often use those declared times to act irrationally. For example, we had some members file payment disputes after 4 hours of sending the payment, all because “it said so in your reply” and “I thought I was being scammed.” We still plan to manage things the way we managed for years and keep the response times to a minimum. But starting from today, the rules have changed. We’re a lot busier than we were, we will appreciate the patience if we’re away. Also, many canned responses have different ways of doing things, please don’t turn a blind eye and read them, especially regular members who most likely work on auto-pilot.

We’re distancing ourselves from micromanaging services.

The harsh reality is that it should be the seller’s responsibility to keep his buyer happy, not us. We will step in and help if needed, or if the terms weren’t met, but we will now no longer chase sellers around for an answer. Buyers can fight back by leaving honest feedback via our feedback system against sellers who leave them hanging. Abandoned tickets will still be subject to suspensions though, after the deadline expires.

We won’t give constant updates on pending payments.

We used to give daily updates whether the payment made it or not, but this action was always a little pointless. We get instant mobile notifications about every incoming payment, we never missed one, and don’t plan on missing any in the future. If we’re asked, we will give an update. But don’t be surprised if we’re MIA for days (because that’s how long bank wires take sometimes). We will still monitor things on the back end.

We will start to discourage users from using the @administrator tag.

People use it too much, in the most frivolous cases too. We don’t plan to eliminate it, but we want to place a stronger emphasis on leaving the assigned admin to his ticket, so he can manage it as much as he can (rip people who @MeG assigned).

That’s about it for today. More updates tomorrow.

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Changes for today!

We have introduced a mandatory 24-hour grace period.

Why? To make sure all things advertised on SWAPD are sold under truthful statements. For more information, please see our announcement.

We have updated our Terms of Service

No major changes, we’ve reworded a few things in the Fees section and included taxes and invoices information.

We have updated our Transaction Contract

Mostly spelling corrections and included a clause regarding the new mandatory grace period. Also included a clause about taxes and invoices.

We have updated many of SWAPD help files/pages.

Too many to list, but most changes are in line with the remodeling we’re doing here.

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Changes for today!

We’ve added four more countries to our problematic country list.

Today, we’ve added four additional countries to our list of problematic countries. Why did we do this? Because even though we are not experiencing a high volume of scams from those countries, we have a small group of malicious users (from those places) who keep trying to register on SWAPD to do their dirty deeds. We try our best to weed them out, but we’re worried that they may slip through one day. Adding the safety concern badge to those countries will hopefully raise awareness and make things difficult for them. This change (for now) is temporary until further notice.

Today we’re putting the Checkout Bot to sleep.

Beep beep, boop boop no more! Time to admit that this was a failed invention, and it’s too annoying. Today is the last day where you may see the Checkout Bot responding (!help commands still stay though, we’re basically telling it to be quiet unless asked).

Today we’re shipping out the Diamond Awards!

They should be in the shipping center by tonight and start the travel by Monday.

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Changes for today!

We’ve introduced a 7-day response rule to all our tickets.

Respect your client’s time is the name of the game here. For more info on the new policy, click here.

We’ve established a SWAPD Feedback Protection policy.

Users will now be able to leave negative feedback and not worry about unjust retaliation. For more information, click here.

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More changes for today!

Buyer/seller ticket handling policies, effective immediately: Buyer/seller ticket management policies

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Victim Fund has been added!

I believe we don’t need to say why this was done. This program is currently in BETA mode, we will see how it pans out: SWAPD Victim Fund

Opening topic for discussion, as most major changes are now complete.
What I’ve personally noticed:

  1. Tickets are a lot less hectic now, no more notification spam (good).
  2. Less-micro management (good).
  3. Buyers/sellers are taking their sweet time to respond (not good, everything takes longer now).
  4. Mandatory grace period (in my opinion, good)
  5. Victim fund (good for now, but that all depends on user donations)

Upcoming changes for the next months:

  1. User-friendly filters for the front page.
  2. Expanding categories into other digital assets.
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7 days is too long, you wouldn’t expect to be ignored for 7 days if buying a car or any other property.

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I hated all the bot messages, but now I miss messages in tickets. Not sure if that’s because I’m just in a lot of tickets right now or if it’s because we don’t get those messages anymore

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I kind of agree, but at the same time, users are free to ask for updates, and ultimately, leave appropriate feedback stating they were unhappy with the service. You’re also free to ask admins to intervene if needed, it’s not like we’re gone we still monitor all tickets every couple of hours throughout the day.

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We’re in the same boat. We’re not sure if SWAPD activity died or the policies totally reduced the amount of things to check up on. Looking at our cash register I can safely say this will be one of the slowest months in a while, but at the same time, our ticket counter is at the same levels as our last (record breaking) month.

1 Like