Trade rules

Deadlines on a trade, and what gets recorded when one stalls.

A trade has two sides and three steps each: tracking added, marked sent, confirmed received. It completes when both sides confirm.

Settings

Setting	Default	Values
Days before silence counts as ghosting	7	1 to 20
Keep a record of back-outs and ghosts	Count back-outs and ghosts	All, Back-outs only, Neither

Days before silence counts as ghosting

The deadline on each outstanding step. The clock restarts whenever a side adds tracking, marks sent, or confirms receipt, so it measures how long one side may go silent rather than how long a trade may take. The overdue side is the one it counts against.

Changing this does not affect open trades. The value is copied onto each trade when the offer is accepted.

The 20-day ceiling is fixed. A trade record has a finite life, and a deadline landing outside it would leave nothing able to close the trade, freezing both sides’ goods.

Keep a record of back-outs and ghosts

Whatever this is set to, a stalled trade still closes at its deadline, both sides’ goods are still released, and the notice still goes in the thread. This setting decides only whether the outcome counts against anyone.

Value	Records
Count back-outs and ghosts	Both
Count back-outs only	Deliberate withdrawals only
Count neither	Nothing

Back-outs only exists because the two are different evidence. A back-out is deliberate and the trader typed a reason. A ghost is inferred from silence, and a trade finished off-app looks identical from here.

Turning it off stops new records without erasing existing ones. They live out their clocks and still appear in the trader lookup, which flags that the setting changed.

Negative outcomes never reach user flair in any configuration.

Notes

Trade Post does not store shipping addresses or payment handles, and there is no setting for it. Traders exchange them in Reddit messages, started from a Message button on the trade card. Messaging the other trader.