New Forum Guideline: Vendor Transactions and Complaints

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TLDR: The moderators of the forum have created a new forum guideline to help keep the forum useful and informative. Members are now asked to send order inquiries directly to the vendor, either by email and\or PM instead of creating a new thread on the forum. Group buys established through the forum are an exception.

Complaints about order delays, refunds, and other problems should also be handled via direct message or email with a vendor. To follow the guideline, simply refrain from starting posts about those issues directed at vendors in the threads; DM (direct message) them instead.

As DIYESK8 grows in popularity there are lots of new builders buying parts. Many esk8 vendors are here on the forum. The forum is meant for sharing ideas and knowledge with the global esk8 community. The forum is not a place to publicly press a small vendor or to vent frustrations about orders.

Posts and threads about shipping delays and deals-gone-wrong typically have no generalizability to the whole community. In years to come, we want the forum to be filled with useful information, not posts about orders and refunds.

Many of the threads on the forum take an immediate nosedive when someone starts complaining repeatedly about a vendor transaction. Here are some examples of things to DM your vendor about, instead of creating a topic about it:

  • Waiting for a part and annoyed that it hasn’t arrived
  • Vendor didn’t respond fast enough to your text/email/phone call/smoke signal
  • You want your money back
  • You are angry about a transaction and you want to insult a vendor

Members should write about experiences with vendors if the community can benefit. You can post if it is civil, informative, and truthful. Vendors are welcome to share information about order batches in a one-to-many communication.

As always, any posts that include name-calling, threats, or “trolling” (repeatedly complaining about the same problem) will be deleted at the discretion of the forum moderators. We also generally feel that screen caps of private communications are not appropriate. We will review member accounts for this behavior, and consider suspending accounts if needed.

Hopefully everyone can agree to this improvement. We all want the same thing; to learn, build, and ride!

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I feel like this has been a long time coming, thanks for cracking down on it and keeping order on the forum :+1:t3:

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Well written & very fair guidelines that will help protect this amazing community and prevent the most useful info from getting buried.

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@onloop @anorak234 thanks for the positive feedback.

Also, a quick thanks to the other mods on the forum for donating their time and brainpower to the forum:

@lox897 @cmatson @longhairedboy @laurnts @barajabali @lowGuido @Mr_Mahal @jacobbloy

These guys keep things running here! :clap:

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Is it possible for this thread to be a MUST READ, (tutorial in-order to use the forum). Like tutorials in games where you HAVE to go through it? Also please pin.

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I suppose it IS electric-skateboard.builders, NOT electric-skateboard.customerservice.

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.support is one of the new TLDs and i’ve registered mine as a domain for support tickets on my own builds. I would encourage other vendors/pro builders to do something similar.

I’m loving all the new TLDs. I snatched a few esk8 related domains for future use.

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First off, I want to say thank you to all the mods, including @onloop, for keeping this place informative and a great resource for everyone. I have contributed a few topics myself that I hope to revise as times have changed that have been passed around, and I hope to offer a new piece soon as I’m planning a new article for new builders to prevent them from buying stuff that will not suite their needs, and help steer them in the right direction.

Now, to the meat. I hate the complaining about little annoyances as much as all of you (and yes, I’m guilty of doing this is the past to some degree, sorry guys). However, I do see some use to some of the complaints. It’s sort of like reviews. Right now, theres no universal reviewing system. Some e-skate companies have a review system on their site, but I think those are not a good basis for the community because it’s so easy for a vendor to take down bad reviews, or bury them by putting the 5 star ones first.

Here’s an example. Sorry torqueboards for this one, no offense meant by it, I fully support your work. Flaws will exist is some small percentage of products in any market, and we are all prone to it as designers and manufacturers, so no hard feelings.

But to the story… Someone complained about the beautiful power switch that torqueboards sells failing for no real reason a few months back. I myself have had 3 fail for no real reason, and the last one failed less than 10 seconds after connecting it. I thought I must be doing something wrong, I was going crazy trying to find it. Then, this topic was created by someone. And I was amazed to see how many people posted they had the same problem. It was clear to me at this point that the switch was prone to failing for some unknown reason when ran at 12s. I knew then to look at other power switches in the market, and that the problem wasn’t how I was using the switch. By someone complaining, I learned that I was not the only one (by a long shot) to have this problem, and I was able to come up with a solution.

Alternatively, someone could of seen that topic and said, hey, I’m not going to try this product because a lot of people had issues with it, thus saving them some possible headaches later.

My proposal is… What if we had some way for users to either rate and write reviews on purchases from eskate companies on this forum? Idk about you guys, but I won’t buy stuff from amazon without reading some of and scanning through the reviews, and hundreds of purchases later, I’ve bought very little junk as a result (usually, the junk happens when I buy something with no reviews). We live in a society today where reviews are critical pieces of information that can give insight about a particular seller or product. I see people complaining and whining like babies on amazon, but I just ignore what I perceive to be bad reviews. The same concept could happen here. People will write bad reviews about a product that doesn’t deserve it, but the hope is that if the product is actually good, the good reviews will outweigh the (unjustified) bad reviews.

To me, the best way would be to have some system of rep points, where a buyer and seller can rate and write a small comment about a transaction after it has been completed. A forum I participated in when I was younger for buying and selling items had this kind of system. It would also help prevent random people selling random used parts from scamming or trying to scam, which is an issue this forum has yet to see, but it’s possible and prevalent on some forums.

When a user goes to the another users profile, theres a section that shows up that shows the users reputation as a buyer and as a seller.

What do you guys think about this idea?

  • Love it
  • Hate it

0 voters

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I agree that complaint threads are an annoyance but how do we ensure reliability? I as a customer would like to know good and bad experiences by others before I make a purchase to make sure that I’m buying a quality product instead of duds or if there are issues with a seller, how serious are they? Are they small nuances like late shipping or is it a more serious issue like missing components on a pcb that make a product unstable under a specific use.

What I’ve seen work really well in other forums where there is a mix of vendors, and diyers is feedback threads for vendors.

For example, Enertion could have their own feedback thread where people can post positive ans negative experiences, so that I can then read and decide whether or not to purchase from them. We would not hide or shame people with negative experiences and we would also highlight the amazingness of a vendor and their products. This also helps with manufacturing defects, and whether a recall is warranted. If a lot of people start posting that they’re having issues with a product, say the nano-x, we wouldn’t have a dozen threads about it. I could read the feedback and go like hey, I’m having that issue too or I’m not having that issue at all.

Just a thought.

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I like that idea also. Having some form of user feedback about a vendor and their products is useful information in the process of building a board.

I just think some alternative to every pissed off customer creating a new thread would be great, that doesn’t involve censorship. Without giving users anyway of alerting others in the community that they have had issues with a vendor or a particular product, it feels more like censorship. If you give people a better way to share this information, than it’s not censorship. Your just doing what forums do, which is shape the way you want information shared on the forum.

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Sometimes a response from a vendor is not forthcoming until it’s aired publicly.

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@evoheyax @PXSS thanks for this feedback. I hope that we can clear up an issue here; we are not attempting to stop members from writing about problems with products.

We also are not making any attempts to censor constructive feedback.

@evoheyax The problem we face is that when people feel they’ve been wronged by a vendor (whether it is justified or not), they get vicious. Emotions run high, and a lot of negative (and useless) chatter ends up in the threads.

I’ve been a mod on the forum for about a year I believe, and in that time I’ve deleted some pretty atrocious, hateful text written by upset customers. Sometimes the original complaint was legit, most of the time it isn’t. But either way, the forum ends up being overrun with garbage if we don’t attend to it. If we didn’t moderate/delete the flagged posts this forum would be a sad place! The guideline is an attempt to stop that kind of banter before it is posted. Our goal is change the culture of the forum so that we all use it in a more constructive way.

@evoheyax As far as creating a review system, I like the idea, but I think there would have to be some supplemental tools added to the forum to implement it. Members are already able to start a thread about one or more products. I’d argue that every build thread is a review of the parts that are included. It’s not as organized as the amazon review system you mentioned. Similarly, members are encouraged to share details of a product that isn’t working in the forum, we see that all the time.

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That is a valid point.

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Another point. In airing my experience on the forum I got an answer as to why I was having problems and also a resolution from another forum member. From 2 people actually for which I am greatly appreciative. This is why we have a community in my eyes. To help each other. I am not advocating name calling or getting personal in any way, that should not be tolerated. ( and it never helps ). Experiences good and bad should be able to be discussed.

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Check out the last thread we dealt with. Ido really thought he was doing a PSA by posting his experience. Nothing in his initial post was vicious. He stated that “he ordered, received notification that the product was back ordered and then proceeded to cancel his order, he talked to them daily for a week about it and his request was still ignored”

He then proceeded to say be careful with this business which is warranted.

He got flagged and his next post was a little more aggressive, but still civil. Some users have had cs issues with tb based on the comments, yet you’ll never know that because the threads that talk about it are locked and hidden away.

Then the thread became a bash of the op with rhetorics of him yelling from the toilet and getting a pitchfork and other things which in honesty turn me off from the community. The community got vicious, not the op. The op stayed polite and confused throughout.

If we had a feedback system or thread, it would not only be a vehicle for communication with vendors in the public eye where the vendor cannot just ignore a request, but also a way to see who the better vendors with quality product and customer service are. Not only that but it would keep the forums clean from clutter as it would all be within a single thread

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@PXSS are you talking about this post by @Idobartal ? :slight_smile:

This is a great example of the kind of post that we are discouraging. We discourage it because: The issue is only relevant to a particular individual, the complaint is based on the expectation that turn-around time for a refund should be within a week, and the post helps nobody in the future. The posts screen-caps several uninformative private communications.

Small vendors respond more slowly, that’s just a reality of working with small vendors and OP clearly didn’t understand that.

@PXSS I disagree with you about that. The community responded by noting that the OP had a rather extreme response to a relatively small problem. In the end he got his refund, which is what would have likely happened without the post. The sentiment from forum members was clearly “we don’t want to hear about it.” As mods we’re listening and responding to what the majority are telling us.

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That was me. I like to try and bring up toilets and pitchforks whenever possible.

Preferably red toilets and pitchforks.

Also I’m sick of people giving dexter a hard time for not answering shit right away. The man works out of his fucking kitchen, just like me, just like a lot of people. It might take you a week or more to get an issue resolved with him, but he will resolve it and he will always do the right thing where customer service is concerned.

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Well said @treenutter. I have a lot of respect the vendors that support the community. When issues arise they don’t get solved by airing our dirty laundry to others. At the end of the day we have to remember that their are human people behind these computer screens.

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So to dot point some resolutions that we could use other than flagging and deleting the thread: @evoheyax @PXSS @treenutter

  1. A thread dedicated to each vendor and experiences with x vendor
  2. A category specifically for vendor complaints that wouldn’t be seen on the home screen, but only if clicked on from the dropdown?
  3. A review system that could be incorporated onto the vendor thread

I’d also like to raise the point of the current flagging system, I REALLY don’t think that 1 flag should delete the post, and I’d also like it to be changed so the mods check it BEFORE it is deleted. I will create a separate thread for this if needed. @onloop

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