Suggestion: Trader: add trader profile to "Message user info elements"

[Evaelis]

Hello,

After switching to Trader for almost a week now, I am missing the ability I had to directly view a summary of each user's trading profile.
Right now, a lot of our users do not check the trader profile anymore as it is not directly available.

For instance, I currently have this layout on my board:

What I used to have was something like this:

The current button only works for OP, however, I'd like to have this profile available for every answer on a thread.

Thank you,

 

[Andy]

Lets say Tom is looking at an item John is selling:

Tom can quickly view John's trading history, this should be enough.

 

[Evaelis]

I do agree that this button works for OP.
However, lets say Tom answer that he is interested on John's thread. (And maybe John's thread is really successful).

John must open Tom's profile to have access to the same information. If he has n answers, he must do n times the same thing instead of just reading the answers on his thread and having the information available.

Also, I do have a sections "Want to buy" on my forum instead of "Items for sale", so the situation can be reversed.

 

[Andy]

John must open Tom's profile

If Tom is offering to purchase the product and John doesn't know Tom, then going to the profile page of Tom would be a very good idea, he can look at all of Tom's details including any Trader history.

If he has n answers, he must do n times the same thing instead of just reading the answers on his thread and having the information available.

In the event there are several potential buyers wanting John's item then yes he will have to look at each profile. This is really the best way, as much other information besides the Trader info is in the profile page.

 

[Evaelis]

You're right, more details can be found on the user's profile page.
However, that does apply to nearly every information available on the left part of the thread. Why do you have a banner "Staff member" when anyone can just browse your profile and see that you're an administrator?

Moreover, you do not want to waste time on a user with a trader profile full of negative feeds (would you browse the profile of an ebay seller with 100 positives and 900 negatives? You wouldn't, even if that user used to have only negative feedbacks and only recently began to provide good services). Directly seeing the trade summary and then choosing which profiles you would like to browse is way faster, especially for someone on mobile who can not afford to open 10 tabs while reading a thread.

Furthermore, users blindly engage into trades if the information is not available directly. I can give you quite a number of users getting scammed because they did not check a trading profile (negative feedback as someone got scammed and currently have an active complaint) or because they do not check that the person they are talking to is the same as the person they talked to on the forum (Users often use Discord to chat faster).

You should not expect users to use the board as a developer would, they do not read the rules, they usually do not follow a logic behavior even when money is on the table. That's why more than 200 euros are scammed a day on our board.

 

[Andy]

It would be nice to have the trader information in the avatar area, but it's not something that's easily done, that info is compiled in templates and not something that can be easily added to.

You could use this add-on to send an email to the thread starter with specific warnings.

https://www.xf2addons.com/resources/new-thread-email-member.112/

 

[Russ]

@Andy here is a possible implementation:

1. Create custom user field with title "Trader", which is non-"User editable", and "Viewable in message user info"
2. Update this field each time someone adds a review

You could even make the field a star rating, based on the % of positive reviews.

You could also have an option to display the rating on the message user info, which would just update the "Viewable in message user info" flag for the custom user field (or you could just include instructions with your add-on that this can be disabled in customer user field settings).

 

[Andy]

Hi Russ,

Thank you for your suggestion. The problem with this idea is that I really would not want to show trader information unless viewing a thread that is in a classifieds forum.

 

[Russ]

Hi Russ,

Thank you for your suggestion. The problem with this idea is that I really would not want to show trader information unless viewing a thread that is in a classifieds forum.

I thought of that, and couldn't see a way around that. On the other hand that would be a good incentive for forum members to maintain a good rating since it would be on every post on the forum

 

[Andy]

On the other hand that would be a good incentive for forum members to maintain a good rating since it would be on every post on the forum

There's a secondary negative impact of doing this, it's called gaming. You want to avoid many badges under an avatar, it intimidates newer members from replying to a member with many badges, this is bad.

 

[Evaelis]

I don't have much insight about how XF2 works so these are just pure speculation.

Is there anywhere you could get the list of all the messages that are being prepared (Just like XF1 where you could have all the userids while having thread information using a hook at the right spot) and then use that list to retrieve all the trader profile in only one query, if and only if, the thread is in the right section? (Maybe you could add metadata to the post itself if you don't have the parent section in the current scope)

Or, would that be possible to add a column in the User Entity, that would cause little overhead each time a user is fetched in database but could prove useful if we want the user trader profile on member card. Then it would be possible to inject a variable (like "is_trader_section") in the post rendering.

Here again, I don't know how different XF2 is from XF1 so these ideas may not be implementable.