I often leave negative trust feedback for scammers before they scam anyone, or after they scam others. I don't often get scammed myself.
Perhaps the wording next to "negative" should be changed from "I was scammed" to "this person isn't trustworthy".
Sounds like a fair suggestion in my opinion since its a good change in wording.
It's possible for people to be suspicious from the start and it doesn't hurt to be proactive in preventing fraud since it's not always "I was scammed" but I am preventing people from scamming / their intentions are suspicious to me.
If you flag them before they scam, potential victims are alerted by the "trade with caution" note next to their posts.
If you wait until after they've run off with all the coins, it's too late. By then they've made a new account and a new scam thread.
Seems daft to me to only allow us to leave negative feedback after the event, and only if we were personally scammed.
If it's green I trust them white impartial either way (neutral) red I got scammed.
Old one was bipolar either trust or don't trust so can see why it seems daft to say only if I was personally scammed they get negative feedback.
From that viewpoint and considering the change it may make sense to add a new color
Thinking of a stop light system
Red for proven scams it's trade with caution / avoid
Green for trusted users
Yellow is a caution/warning and could fit in the neutral category
(or perhaps a 4th category making it possible to be ambivalent to them aka truly neutral feedback, alongside a suspicious but with not enough evidence to call it a scam outright category)
The question would be how other people view yellow ratings and if enough people agree it is suspicious how would it impact the related trust levels.
Ruthless and Butter do make a fair point that neutral could be used to label someone suspicious but it just seems ambivalent by default in my opinion without some sort of specification.
That said Theymos called it trust improvements for a reason which is why it makes good discussion.
(as for the ponzi threads would skip to red, the yellow is more for those borderline cases either way where your not really thinking a scammer by default but not necessarily trustworthy either E.G. a new service that hasn't done many sales yet.)