So maybe number of negative itrader ratings is not such a good metric to build such a system around after all?
I think it would be more accurate to say that the number of
positive itrader ratings is not a good metric to
forgive a bad vendor.
However, negative ratings are useful. Kind of like... a guy who kills just one person in his life has a good rating, percentage-wise, but is nevertheless not someone you want your friends to hang out with, because you don't want one of them to be the one who doubles the negative rating. To a less-over-the-top extent, you can apply a similar concept to negative vendor ratings and reviews.
I think the current ratings for Mark show that, in the past 12 months, six people have been happy with their transactions, and nine have had major issues generally involving monetary losses. However, that's just in the iTrader ratings. When I was browsing threads about Mark, some of the negative ones were from people who did not leave him a rating. They should have, but the point I'm making is that not everyone knows of, or will remember to use, the itrader ratings. Even I, bloodyminded bastard that I can be, didn't think of it immediately. Many of his customers probably aren't even nsxprime members who can contribute to the ratings here. Thus you have to assume there's some multiplier greater than 1 on the number of people whose dealings with Mark went bad in the last year. But even if were exactly 1x, that would
still mean Mark's screwed 9 nsxprime members in the last year. Isn't 9 a bit high for a bare minimum? Go further back and even more members got raw deals... 35 different members have given Mark bad reviews, while 21 said they had a good experience. That's a
lot. Even if there's someone worse, it's still a
lot.
For extreme contrast, look at Chris@SOS's ratings.
Zero negative ratings. Zero in the last year, zero in the last two years, zero in the last four years. Zero,
ever. Sure, he's probably had actual issues here or there, but they've been sufficiently small in number, or minimal in form, or he's resolved them well enough, that nobody's EVER given Chris a bad mark. SOS' iTrader score isn't the usual sum of negative and positive that happens to come out positive, it's just pure positive. Dali and SOS even have similar numbers of reviewers, with Dali receiving marks from 56 people in the last four years, and SOS receiving marks from 50 people in the last four years. The difference is that all 50 of SOS's were positive and 4/10 of Dali's were negative.
So, yeah, to some degree, you can absolutely read something into long-term iTrader ratings when deciding whether someone merits their posting privileges. But, like I said, whether you do or not is obviously your call, because it's your forum. Functionally, all I can do from my end is have an opinion, for all the good that does.