NOS - really?!?

[Dave Hicks]

(12-12-2016 01:55 PM)toml_12953 Wrote:  For some reason, they won't let people mention The Auction Site by name here. Weird and somewhat childish, I know but rulez iz rulez.

I've often wondered where "TAS" came from and now there's some "they" that apparently isn’t allowing ebay to be mentioned. Wow! Even more amusing is apparently he's not allowed to say ebay in the text but can have ebay in his link.

We have had some ebay issues over the years. One guy used to post link after link with no commentary and people got repeatedly annoyed. Some people thought they were his own auctions. Others just got annoyed with threads started just to link to ebay. (At one point someone suggested, or maybe we had a rule, that you must say SOMETHING about ebay links, but as I recall the guy doing it didn't bother.)

Another prominent HP calculator dealer on ebay got attacked here by what looked like dozens of collectors - but it eventually turned out that all of them were one guy - another HP calculator dealer on ebay who as far as I can tell had exactly the same business model as the guy he was attacking. I made that guy stop by telling him I would reveal his real name if he kept it up - he had cultivated a goodguy/collector-only image by using one ebay account to buy and a different one to sell, whereas the guy he was attacking here used a single account for both and thus had a badguy/reseller image.

Several times, I have received complaints from people demanding that I remove defamatory comments about their ebay auctions. One guy claimed that he was going to go to the FTC for "restraint of trade". Other people have demanded that I "do something" about people who use this site and who allegedly didn’t deliver an ebay'd calculator or misrepresented it.

Since I provide this forum as a free service and it really isn't focused on auctions elsewhere, receiving threats and complaints like this is kind of an annoyance and I think people should post their complaints on the auction site's feedback system. The auction site takes a share of the price so certainly that can provide some level of customer support - more than I can at least.

Some time back then someone - I think maybe Luiz - had the idea that if people were required to mention their ebay names when they talked about ebay here, that would cut down on the shenanigans. So we tried that for a while but people kept "forgetting". (About 90% of the time.)

However, terms like TAS, fleabay, all seem to predate this, going back to the 90s as far as I recall and show up elsewhere too so I don't think they were created here. For example, if I google "That auction site" (quotes included), I get lots of links to various forums talking about things people saw on - I assume - ebay. Amusingly, if I bing the same string, the second match is ebay! (The first match is one click away from ebay.) So I guess bing gets a point for being clever on this one.