Spring Cleaning: Reporting Listing Violations
In light of it being nearly spring, I’m going to bring up a type of spring cleaning that helps the marketplace: reporting listing violations!
When listing items, the item you have must match the release page exactly, including reissues, promos, color, year, country, etc. If a listing does not exactly match the release page, it can be reported as Not Actual Item. Before reporting, ensure that the release listed is totally different from the page it’s listed from.
To do this, click on Details for the listing:
Then, click on Report Item:
From here select the type of violation it is. Not Actual Listing is the default selection. Click submit and it will be put up for review. A staff member will review the report to see if it actually is a violation and approve or deny it.
Removing listing violations not only improves the validity of marketplace sales data, but helps ensure that buyers get the correct release, reducing headaches from returns.
More information about unique releases and the types of violations are here:
- http://www.discogs.com/help/mp-uniquereleases.html
- http://www.discogs.com/help/mp-listing-violations.html
- http://www.discogs.com/help/contributing.html
The “Removing listing violation” is imo too stiff and doesn’t take into consideration that anyone wanting to annoy, revenge him/herself for any ground, [b]can[/b] place a claim; if the claim happens to be ungrounded, you will never know who did this to you, Discogs will not say sorry for the trouble, maybe even not care cancelling the marking in the seller’s *storyline* (you will [b]never[/b] know!), you’ll have to relist the item or create a new one, etc… and last but not least, feel the bad psychologic effect created by the use of such dramatic and painful wordings such as [b]violating![/b] when in most cases, we’re talking of minor mistakes, many times linguistic formulations (I experienced this myself) and other reasons; I’d like to hear the % of grounded versus ungrounded claims! If the latter is bigger, think about what a waste of working time this means!
MARKYMARK902FM: The issue with sellers that do not know how to properly grade records will never go away, i.e listing as ‘mint’/”played a few times”. Obviously this is dumb, however the only way to combat this is not to buy their items. Contact them requesting they downgrade to NM explaining carefully why, and no doubt they will ignore you. Only buying from sellers who’s listings appear honest, and who’s feedback is generally good, is the only way to push the crab apples out.
So how do I report sellers that keep items listed after they have already sold said item. I have yet to actually have a successful purchase on Discogs as every purchase this appears to happen but item is taken down afterwards. Guess it’s back to Amazon for vinyl sales.
Not sure where else to put this request, but if you could please delete the abused apostrophe from your FAQ in “Discogs is a user built website that relies on it’s userbase” my OCD soul would be much appeased. Discogs has been a great reference for years now–many thanks for what y’all do.
Just out of interest if another seller is selling cds as MINT, But then in the listing they say – Comments: Played a few times, Mint condition. How can this be fair, trying to compete with them on price, they advertise as Mint but its been played a few times ? Tried to report this listing but option doesnt give me chance to explain what I think the problem is with other seller.
Really good question, Amsreddevil. That happens to me all of the time. I ask the seller detailed questions which reveal that they are not selling the correct release, but then it goes right on being sold as such even though I know otherwise….
Can you further define “Malicious use of the Report Listing Abuse feature”?
How do you deal with an item listed for sale that matches the release, but when you ask the seller for more details, it turns out to be not that release. There is no way of a staff member being able to see this if you report it, so what bes to do then?
Reporting the (sometimes very many) Violations within the catalogues of big sellers might not be as effective as reporting those of smaller sellers: Discogs has confirmed that, whilst they encourage the big sellers to also play ball, they are rather less strict with them: even if it is acknowledged, through Reporting, that a seller has many hundreds of similar-Violations, this can sometimes constitute a small enough fraction of the seller’s catalogue that, effectively, Discogs will let it slide. There are some big-catalogue sellers who can simply relist reported/removed violations without the same prospect of being suspended from the Marketplace as exists for smaller sellers.
“Click submit and it will be put up for review. A staff member will review the report to see if it actually is a violation and approve or deny it.”
I had three violations recently that were confirmed by staff to not be violations when I filed a support request about them, so is there a bug where sometimes they are confirmed as violations automatically when submitted, without human review?