Submissions

Why do staff members keep disabling my submissions, only to put the exact same submission in and accept their own?  

Kinda pathetic.

How regularly has this happened? I had a quick look at your recent submissions - and there are plenty, so thank you for contributing - and I could only see one instance on the first page or two that had been rejected/disabled in favour of an identical one resubmitted by a staff member. In that case, I think there was another submission pending from a second community member which had something incorrect. My assumption would be that the staff member in question was reviewing the other submission and chose to submit a corrected version - perhaps not noticing yours was a valid one that should’ve been approved instead. From my perspective, that looks like a genuine mistake - and one with ensuring the transfer/change makes it into the update, versus just gets rejected and not reflected into the update, in mind. I find it unlikely that any staff member(s) would be doing what you are saying with any malice behind it.

I think perspective is important because, as I say, the vast majority of your submissions are being enabled - it doesn’t look like anything systematic or malicious is going on. If you do feel there’s a genuine pattern, please cite me a couple of extra examples (you can do it via DM if you prefer) and happy to look further.

More than once and not only for my submissions, but @P174 has the same issue. So I'm fairly certain it's not a “genuine mistake”. Happens too often for that.

I am talking about Rob2312 btw. The other guys are only doing it when they add the contract length or if I made a mistake, which can happen. Those aren't the submissions I'm on about. It's just this one guy.

See Davor Matijas, Vasco Lopes, Moritz Wels, Matteo Meisl, Ivica Batarelo etc. For most there's atleast 2 hours between “the original” submission and Rob's submission. So 

Only the domain name is different =))

Even if this was true, he could still enable the original submission and disable his own. Yet, he did not chose this option. Further proving my point.

I am trying to engage in a discussion with you about this, because as a fellow staff member, believe me, we all value the contributions of the community. The essence of the Data Update is the fact that it is community-driven submissions that keep it up to date.

Having some of your submissions rejected/disabled can be frustrating, I'm sure. However, again, I really don't see that there is a conspiracy, or something widespread, going on here. Which is what your initial post certainly suggested.

You have over 1,300 Data Submissions. Of the ones that are marked as Disabled (which number about ~75), a total of two have been moderated by the staff member you mention (Davor Matijas & Vasco Lopes).

The other three examples you cited pertain to other users' submissions. Of those three, two appear to have identical data - with one having had the transfer start date corrected.

Respectfully, I do not know what point it is that you are making that has been proven. If you're saying that there is a staff member who is regularly disabling/rejecting your submissions in order to ‘claim’ them for themselves, then there is no evidence of that. The rejections in the conditions you cite (specific staff member, where data you submitted is identical to theirs) account for less than 0.2% of your submissions. The job of the staff members is to moderate the many submissions that you, and others, kindly provide. As a run-rate of accurate moderation, I think it is going pretty well.

One other possibility with these instances are that the staff member has submitted their own submission without recognising that there is even a pending submission from a community member. For staff, submissions are auto-approved - and this could be the scenario here; which I am mentioning just to further point out the fact that in this case, there would really be no malice/conscious thought process in deliberately not approving the community member's submission.

If the number being rejected - that shouldn't be - was significant, or even genuinely noticeable, then I think your frustration/concern would be more justified. There is absolutely no benefit to any staff member ‘claiming’ the odd submission from a user, here or there, nor any downside for that user (especially in the case where that user is a prolific submitter and has contributed heavily over time). So I will still maintain my original stance: which is that your accusations are without basis and, on a more human level, feel unnecessarily personal. Ultimately, everyone that plays their part in maintaining this site's Data Update is on the same side and we are, presumably, all here and contributing our time for the same reason: to be able to use that Data Update in our games of Football Manager. It's a shame there is a feeling that there is something underhand going on, when there isn't evidence to justify it to any meaningful degree and I am hoping that all concerned/involved can see that the big picture is one of a healthy submission-and-approval process in the vast, vast. vast majority of cases and move on.

Lol

@motdattan  I don't there's any reason to assume something malicious here or be as aggressive as you are.

I think what is happening is that Rob is going through submitting lots of transfers without properly checking if there is already an equal pending submission.

If he was on this page, or any number of similar pages, he can simply click Data Update > Edit Data to go straight to the form without seeing the timeline and noticing that there is an existing pending submission 

You can tell that he hasn't looked at your submission and manually clicked disable because the timestamp where it is disabled is exactly the same as the submission, that means it has been automatically disabled due to his submission.

Perhaps I can work around this by making it clear when there are pending submissions when you enter the form.

It is much, much more likely that he's going through a list of players from a website like transfer market, googling “Moritz Wels sortitoutsi” (that's what I do because Google's often better than our search…) hitting the first result which doesn't list your pending submission and then clicking edit data. Thereby never, ever seeing your submission at all.

There's a famous saying along the lines of “don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence”. Incompetence is maybe a bit harsh in that case, but try and have some empathy that other people are human and act in human ways and that's a far more likely explanation than they're intentionally stealing from you to gain internet points.

And it just keeps on happening without any change.  "We all value the contributions of the community" and "the essence of the Data Update is the fact that it is community-driven submission" mean nothing if you completely ignore perfectly fine submissions from the community just for staff member to come in and do his own submission and reject the open submissions. Wether it's on purpose or not, as a contributing user it's fucking disrespectful to reject mine and put in the exact same submission and accept your own. Pure disrepect towards the community. And come with that “less than 0.2% of your submissions” bullshit. It's not only my submissions but other people aswell. 

"One other possibility with these instances are that the staff member has submitted their own submission without recognising that there is even a pending submission from a community member." Yeah, no shit this is happening. But tell them to fucking check if there's open submissions, because now you're just saying fuck you to contributing users. 

It should be made impossible for staff members to submit a submission when there's an open submission. Force them to fucking check the one that's already there. The one that the community that's responsible for most transfers here has submitted. The one you say is valued.

Your conduct is now getting childish and unnecessarily rude.

As I said before - I understand the frustration. But your way of going about expressing it has become unacceptable.

The size of the overall operation of moderating submissions and doing all of the other tasks that the staff members volunteer their time to do means they are afforded a level of tolerance to what you think should be made impossible. You might not be happy about it, you may even think it is ‘bullshit’, but the options available to you are:

1. Accept that there is some overlap in effort that results in a small percentage of submissions of yours being disabled because of a specific sequence. Keep contributing as you have been, in the knowledge that this may happen to some of them.
2. Choose to stop contributing because of the possibility of this outcome. Again, you are volunteering your time - it isn’t mandatory. If it is causing you this level of frustration, perhaps it is better to stop contributing.

An option not available to you is to swear at anyone who will listen, nor continue this exaggerated personal crusade against a staff member that volunteers their time and puts a lot of effort in to the site. Any further instances of swearing targeted at any staff member on individual submissions, or expletive-laden forum posts, will result in a ban.

That is entirely separate from the mechanics of submissions/approvals that I’ve tried to discuss with you. If you can’t separate the two, then the sensible conversation about this topic (with you) is over.

The site owner may choose to discuss with the staff member at their discretion - but I can tell you for free that going about highlighting the frustration the way you have has done little, except reflect badly on you. If you want to be treated with respect, you should interact respectfully - even if you believe the way a staff member has gone about their duties has ‘disrespected’ you.

-

Don't have to ask me twice

Hello, only just seen this whole kick off from this guy due to him sending me a pretty malicious message on here before getting banned lol. 

I’ve simply just been going through transfermarkt and then searching the player on here and going straight into the data update menu without scrolling down and seeing his submissions. In future i’ll make sure to check for any pending submissions before submitting my own to try and avoid anything like this again lol.

@motdattan i've unbanned you for now.

But please try and be more considerate in future, we are all humans who can make mistakes.

When coding the site I didn't consider and account for every single possibility. I, nor anyone else on the site, deserves to be criticised for that, it's to be expected.

If you simply said “hey guys I think it would be good if people were alerted to any pending submissions when creating a new one to avoid duplicates”

That would be a totally reasonable and welcome suggestion and all that is needed.

I've made the change now so that it shows pending and enabled submissions on the submission form.

For now I haven't coded it so that it prevents a duplicate simply because I have other things higher on my todo list and i'm hopeful simply displaying the pending submissions will be enough.

I've had a few days to cool down, despite the weather, and I want to apologise to everyone here. I've looked back at my messages and I see I overreacted. It still bugs me that the submissions went the way it went and I stand by my points. 

But I should've reacted the way @Footygamer said. It's just that I've been in the updating side of FM a long time, because I love transfers. And no matter how much you did, people never really respected your time and input. And getting perfectly fine submissions rejected and ignored just feels so disrespectful. Even if @Rob2312 did it on purpose or not. If he says he didn't, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and I appreciate him checking for open submissions in the future. And I respect the immediate change my discussion caused. I hope this will avoid situations like these in the future and we can give credit to the people who are doing the hard work for this update. Not only me, but others who work hard to make this update to what it is.

So apologies to everyone involved. I'll get back putting in some submissions and start helping again.

EDIT: Oh, I'm not allowed to.

I've just adjusted your account which should now grant you access to submit Data Updates (incidentally, also compete in Challenges). I suspect these were automatically toggled as part of the previous ban. Account should be back to normal fully, now.