Intent Governance: Scored per Intent, Throttled, Never Banned
A quality score on every intent signal, computed from its own match-to-conversation history, so the match feed stays worth reading.
Intent matching only works if intents are real. A buyer who publishes twenty intents, collects two hundred matches and never opens a conversation is not evil, but they are saturating sellers’ match feeds with demand that does not close. Governance is the throttle that keeps the feed useful without turning the platform into a bouncer.
What gets scored
The score is per intent, not per buyer. An intent with fewer than three matches scores 100 — there is nothing to judge yet. From three matches on, the platform looks at the intent’s match-to-conversation rate against your tenant’s minimum conversation rate and turns that ratio into a score out of 100. The score is recomputed whenever a new match or a new deal touches the intent, so it follows behavior rather than freezing a first impression. Scores are invisible to other users; a seller never sees “this buyer is throttled”, they simply see fewer weak matches.
Thresholds
The thresholds live on /settings/market/governance: the score below which an intent is throttled, the score below which it is paused, the score below which it is flagged for review, plus the minimum conversation rate, the minimum response rate, the maximum average response hours and the expiry-without-action period. The lowest applicable score wins: flagged beats paused beats throttled beats none.
Enforcement
Enforcement happens inside the matching engine, not in a queue. A paused, flagged or disabled intent is skipped when new listings are matched. A throttled intent is still matched, at lower priority. Nobody gets a stern e-mail; the intent simply stops competing for attention until its numbers improve or somebody looks at it.
The governance screen
/market/governance is your tenant’s own quality-control view of its intents: search, filter by governance action, sort by low score, high score or response rate, and a strip with total, clean, throttled and flagged intents and the average score. Per intent you see match-to-chat, chat-to-offer, response rate, average response time, the expired-without-action count and the funnel counts. The actions are throttle, unthrottle, clear a flag, disable a flagged intent, resume a paused one, and reset a manual override to automatic scoring. Every manual action asks for a reason, and a manual override sticks until someone resets it — the recompute will not silently undo a decision a human made. Silent, unexplained governance changes are how platforms end up haunted by their own admin panels.
Why this isn’t a permanent ban
Scores recompute as matches and deals accumulate. An intent that starts converting climbs out of throttle by itself; one that never does keeps waiting at the back of the queue, still visible to its owner, still editable. Governance is a friction layer, not a banning mechanism. The point is to keep the match feed useful, not to police buyers in perpetuity.