Why would you accept the trade without even knowing who the other person is, or whether they intend to go through with it?
My very first step out of the gate, I get hit with this reputation penalty. Rather than accept responsibility for an obscure, tricky design, you blame the problem on me.
Reputation penalty is for people who do something dishonest, or who inconvenience other users. I didn't scam or even cause the mildest of inconvenience to any user whomsoever. So I didn't deserve this penalty. The fault is yours, not mine.
You should change the way Local Trader allocates penalties so this doesn't happen to anybody else; people to whom it has happened should have the undeserved penalty removed.
The point of the penalty is so that if you discuss the trade, plan to meet, set up a time and place,
accept the conditions of the trade, and then don't show up after all that, you get dinged. So don't accept any trades until you are sure that it will happen, and until you want to make sure that whoever you are trading with knows they will get penalized if they don't show up too. If someone contacts you, you don't hit accept trade, and then you or they cancel the order, it won't affect your reputation. Maybe that was lost in translation somewhere, since we kind of assumed that the trade simply showing up in your listing is enough to "accept" it the way you do, where you discuss it, and then actually accepting it is the pre-final step before you go out to meet each other. Maybe you could suggest how we can rename it?
But in any case, this reputation hit is not a big deal at this point. It doesn't work right, people know it doesn't work right, and I haven't met anyone who actually pays attention to it. Plus, as I said, we WILL be changing the way reputation works in LocalTrader, mainly so that users can actually add reputation feedback themselves instead of it being automatic. Chances are that we will wipe and reset the score (star rating) when we switch, too, since, again, it doesn't really mean anything at this point.
