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Appeal to colleagues and people who participate in auctions.
2 months ago
It worries me. It worries me that people pay for FA Plus, for example, but instead of beautiful features, we don’t get anything meaningful so that people can protect themselves, their money and their time.
I’m not calling for bad reviews, I’m not calling for any actions. I’d just like this problem to go further than the inscription “well, it’s your own fault if you fell for the scam, that is sucks man”. I’m an empathetic person, and I blame the security system first of all. When you’ve been on a site for several years, being completely sure that the author of the post will write to you, and not a scammer, you won’t think about the fact that you were deceived. It’s always easy to say that the one who fell for the scam is to blame, until you yourself get into such a situation and everyone around you blames you for your stupidity.
I wrote a letter to Furrafinity, a letter about how it would be possible to make at least an attempt to correct the situation that has arisen. I am not a popular artist, not a mastadon of the furry community, I am just a person who cares.
And I worry about my own and other people's wasted time. People who know me as a artist and creator will not let me lie - I am friendly and always answer, I am talkative and communicative, I am a person who sees other people first of all as people, friends. And it is important to me that no one deceives my friends. And it is important to me to know that I will have something to live on tomorrow, because the world is terribly cruel, unfair, and in general, hard to live on. You never know what will happen tomorrow.
If you have the opportunity and strength, better knowledge of English, or you know someone from the FA team personally - please, please, let's at least make an attempt to do something about this and not just throw it all away with "well, it's not my problem". Not only for others, but also for myself. I don't know a single person who hasn't been deceived by scammers at least once in their life. Or hasn't encountered this when their loved ones were deceived.
My letter and proposal to the furrafinity team (already sent via tickets) looks like this. I don't know where to write, there is no "box for your proposals" here. Or at least I didn't find it:"Subject: Proposal to Improve Auction Security on FurAffinity
Dear FurAffinity Team,
Over the past year, the community of artists and buyers on your platform has faced a serious problem: a significant increase in fraudulent activity related to auctions.
The scheme used by scammers typically works as follows:
When an artist announces an auction, fraudsters monitor the participants placing bids.
They then visit the profiles of these users, find their contact information (such as Discord, Telegram, etc.), and reach out to them using fake accounts while impersonating the artist.
Finally, they demand payment directly, creating the illusion of an official transaction.
Despite various preventive measures taken by the community (warnings on artists’ pages, notifications in auction posts, urgent announcements about detected scammers), the issue persists. As a result, both sides suffer:
Buyers, who lose money and trust in the platform.
Artists, who lose income and whose reputation is harmed.
We would like to propose a feature that could greatly improve auction security:
introducing a special mode for auction posts, where comments with bids are visible only to the post author, but hidden from other users.
This change would solve the problem for several reasons:
Anonymity for third parties. Scammers would no longer be able to identify and contact bidders, eliminating the root of the issue.
Transparency for the artist. The auction creator would still see all bidders and be able to ensure fair play. This also protects against fake bids, without negatively impacting user reputation.
We believe that such a feature would:
Increase trust in the platform.
Make auction participation safer for everyone.
Strengthen FurAffinity’s reputation as the leading platform for artists and their clients.
The artist and buyer community would be very grateful if you could consider this proposal and take steps to protect users from fraudulent activity."
I'm not so good at any kind of agitation, appeals, etc., I don't know how to influence some situations, but if you have the opportunity, connections, suggestions, you are a community mastadon, or just person like me - share, write to your friends about problem, I at least just want to know why it is impossible to implement at least something on the part of the site that would protect people who sell and buy their creativity from others...
U can repost that post I saw on Twitter, friend of my friend do that!
I think yeah, it will show amount, cuz it is auction? Hmm! Still, the person who was outbid will have to see that he was outbid and by how much in order to continue the auction or not continue if decide that is too much for them
But then it disrupts the auction. How would people place bids, if they cannot see the previous one? Hiding their usernames would be a better solution.
BUT. You will need a whole new system for that, that isn't gonna be easy to build and implement and not everyone wants.
We are currently working on code that could be used and how this could be implemented.
We'll see how difficult it is to implement, so far, in words, everything doesn't look difficult. So I don't don't sure that "whole system needed"
How would you do it? Add a special section in comments? Implement an auction system? Something else?
I originally thought of something similar to auction sites, but with nicknames hidden, hence the "whole system needed".
I hope I don't come off as rude, I am simply interested to poke and discuss this idea :)
This ->
https://x.com/moansfactory/status/1.....91408594464896
Fa use Twitter and they, maybe, will see that.
Thank you for the information > >