Hi all! Thanks for posting your concerns.

If you haven't read my reasoning behind the removal of the negative recommendations feature yet, please do so: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/negative-recommendations-feature-removed

In short: giving Pinsiders the ability to leave other Pinsiders unsolicited negative feedback, without having any evidence of an actual sale taking place is the base of this issue and the reason for removing the 'feature'.

The current system is simply dependent on the seller inviting the buyer (which is not likely to happen if the seller knows beforehand that the feedback will be poor). Could there be another way to link buyer and seller? To make sure that feedback is legit, or at least based on an actual sale taking place? Right now, I don't see it but open for suggestions!

Great feedback, this gives me some ideas to work with...

How about re-enabling the ability to leave negative feedback, but limit it so that only people who have messaged with a Pinsider in the past x weeks (and with regards to a Marketplace ad) can leave negative feedback?

Technically this is doable: the site can detect if you were in recent PM contact with the person you are trying to leave feedback for. It can also see whether that contact was with regards to an ad. It could even check to make sure that the PM thread has at least X messages. After all, we don't want retaliatory feedback, just because someone got ignored for making a low ball offer (i.e. a PM thread with under 4 messages is unlikely to be a successful sale).

Not anymore. I recently added the option to remove any "fake" positive recommendation from your profile page.

Note: you can only remove positive recommendations. Ad-related feedback is of course not user-removable.

Update 14/1

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/negative-recommendations-feature-removed#post-6714262