Vendor complaints versus design discussion

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This forum is great.

The one fault I find in it though, is how shadowed posts become when talking about vendors. Yea a lot of you are great, but there’s a lot of bs that comes along, the community just kind of sweeps these events under the rug and closes posts, instead of holding these companies to standards of business, y’all hold people accountable to standards of individuals. And the cycles continue. There is not a single esk8 vendor I’ve dealt with that holds their business accountable. I won’t bother listing all the shit I’ve personally witnessed from my local crew dealing with vendors. But hiding, closing, and deleting posts, and not having a vendor review category on the forum, in my opinion is allowing these businesses to not be held accountable as businesses. Especially when its the same thing over and over again, and the posts get closed and hidden. We’re just allowing people to spend their hard earned money, on shit known to fail, because the community thinks removing vendor posts keeps the forums clean.

No, this is diy, we should be forcing out the bad by calling it out, and building a better community, that will be building better esk8s. Because an informed community is a better one.

Aside from that, I mostly enjoy the forum.

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This is a valid concern. Oddly enough the ones enforcing this, like myself and @treenutter and @pschotiller and several others are also business owners. On one hand, foil hattery would suggest that we’re all in cahoots and this is all just a hamster wheel we placed in our mall for you to think you’re free while you are in fact trapped among our products. therefor, close up the vendor bashing threads it makes us all look bad because…

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… we’re pretending to just be regular people but our disguises are too thin!

No. This isn’t fucking AOL or CompuServe.

The hoofbeats are in fact from horses, not zebras. (pronounced zeh-brah, apparently!) there is a much, much less sinister reason for this and it is… drum roll…

WE DON’T WANT TO FUCKING READ IT. My god man, the threads never end. Yes we know @torquboards has weird customer service people, we know @onloop will have a late shipment and may tell you to fuck off, we know @chaka is behind on that one build for that one guy oh no and we all know it takes me fucking forever to finish a complete and sometimes its really hard to get hold of me.

THAT’S NOT WHY PEOPLE COME HERE. NOBODY OUTSIDE GIVES A FLYING FUCK ABOUT IT. THEY COME HERE TO LEARN.

This isn’t the motherfucking daytime vendor drama club, bitches! People come here to learn about stuff. Somebody just now posted THIS AWESOME thread about the love in this room. How the fuck we gonna have love in this room with all that hating over there next to the water fountain?

No. Fuck no.

In everything, balance must be achieved. No hate means no hate. Love means love. IF you have an issue and wish to respectfully warn people about it, that’s fine. Do so and we’ll let you know pretty quick if it crosses our well established and obviously patterned lines. We work WITH people to post these kinds of things. Because everything needs to be a positive in some way. It is in fact a positive thing to warn people about swindlers. But it needs to be done so respectfully.

but you can’t have a culture of positivity and learning and hope and love when people are bitching all the time. You like being in the room when your parents fight? Hell no, me neither.

And i hate bitching. I hate drama. every time i find myself in it, i escalate it until everyone else hates it too and it finally ends. I fucking hate it. Like right now, i’m seemingly meandering on into a rabbit hole of irony regarding my hatred for bitching. I am, in fact, bitching about bitching. You see that shit? LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO.

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I get it. We shouldn’t harp on negativity.

But the new guys shouldn’t have to spend 2600 on torque boards vescs and the entire crews vescs(26 of them) fail within 3 days to a month.

Or torque boards continuing to sell bs antispark that fail on first plugin and say you turned it on wrong(there’s one fucking button)

The new guy shouldn’t have to buy cheap ass motors from JLABs just to have the bearings be shot and the bell set screws come loose and strip the shaft in the first day of riding and the vendor not offer replacement.

Or getting a focbox with a manufacturing defect, such as c27 touching the housing because it wasn’t soldered on flush and the cap explodes on first plugin since its shorted against the housing. And enertion says send a video showing the settings, but the thing doesn’t even boot since the DRV fried on plugin, and you purchased a 1 year no questions asked warranty. And a video of it not turning on is apparently not good enough with pictures.

I get it, the post a out x vendor taking their time gets old. But when vendors claim their shit is the best then don’t stand behind it and we sweep it under the rug with a locked post, the next guy ends up with hundreds in paper weights, and we just let them waste money on shit bound to break. And the cycle continues…

As I said the forum is mostly good. But we really should be holding vendors accountable as businesses not as people. I get it were all friendly on the forum. But I earned my money, I need a good reason to give it to you. And I certainly don’t want to encourage or support promotion of products by ignorance, which is basically what we’re doing. Locked posts dont even show up in search. We ship it all to Neverland

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Sometimes you make a lot of sense and I hear ya…other times I read your posts and just think “he must have let some fumes build up in his workshop”

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There was sooooo much discussion about this within the mods. Every point you raised was weighed. I myself, a fan of darwin and letting the beaten exit on their own, even saw the light eventually.

when it was all said and done, we decided to get firm with vendor bashing and make sure it didn’t take away from the rest of the forum.

Thankfully the new guys have no idea how bad it was. Every other thread was “where’s my order” and “that guy’s a jerk” and “holy shit i just got refunded and told to fuck off”

You see, the truth is we’re terrible people.

Maybe we should have a section off to the side for it. Maybe that should be reconsidered. But then the issue will move from “we don’t have a place for it” to “oh look how neatly they shove our concerns to the side”.

I’m game for re-debating it if the rest of the mods think its worth it. Just know that we don’t make these decisions lightly and that we’ve been here since the beginning. like the literal beginning. Jason invited us here to start this thing up right and we’ve watched everything since that time. These types of decisions are based on those things we watched and learned from.

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you’ve been here long enough to know exactly what i’m talking about. We’re either up to our nuts in bullshit posts or we’re explaining why seemingly legitimate complaints are being brushed off.

We had to pick one.

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I think what my side lady friend’s son is trying to say is we don’t need to neatly balance every thread with a side of negative bullshit.

Thanks for the effort though! A+

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So you agree with me. Good.

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waiiit a minute…

YOUR FACE.

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@Deckoz in case you hadn’t seen it, below is the guideline we mods all agreed on. There’s a difference between design or product observations, and complaints about a single order.

I have to make this argument every few months, nothing new here. We close threads that are related to a single order or JUST HOW MAD someone is about the speed of their order, return, or refund. The rationale is in the post below.

People get really upset when they’ve paid money and don’t get what they expect, we all understand that. But the drama doesn’t serve anyone.

Feedback about products is 100% welcome and always will be. Even if it is criticism. Especially if it is criticism. Did a product fail? Write about it! We all want to see that.

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full disclosure, a lot of us actually are in cahoots, but i didn’t think pointing that out would be helpful.

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Just a thought but…

Instead of making a post dedicated to complaining about an order or vendor why don’t you just make a build thread for your board. Then if there are any updates with your build progress you can update the post. Updates can be anything from new wheels, motor, paint, etc… to blown out bearing trying to break a speed record or even a delay cause items aren’t arriving on time so you haven’t been able to complete your awesome ride.

We’re all builders here and we love to help and see different build ideas.

If you’re having a set back because of a particular issue we can usually provide suggestions to dealing with it. As well as the issue will remain visible for other people too see and notice trends.

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@Deckoz we had a truly BS “vendor” here a few months ago. Without going into specifics or naming names, that vendor was quickly and readily shoved out of the community and off of the forum. The forum and its members created an environment where that person couldn’t continue. We look out for each other.

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There’s such a range of ages on here now though some kids dont know any better,but saying that there’s a lot of adults in this world that act as morons too,the only time I would open a thread up about a vendor would be for not receiving a product or felt I was being treated unfairly or being blatantly lied to,all after actually trying to work it out behind the scenes of course! I think it’s safe to say most people are honest and probably give a accurate time of turn around and shipping,patients is something iv gained with age but some just don’t aquire better characteristics and stay the same and it shows in there childish posts bashing vendors,but not all of us are listening to them,it’s quite clear what some people’s motives are,my advice to people waiting on products is to weigh up how much you actually want it and is it worth the wait and just be prepared to be patient should it take longer! Vendors are people just like me and you and have lives to live as well as a business to run,so respect them and they will respect you and at the end of the day your problem will get resolved!

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Not my forum, relative new comer…not sure if my comments have any value :stuck_out_tongue:

Noticed that this forum attracts allot of people who are unfamiliar with ESK8 tech. Some of them are considering building their own board without even having any prior experience riding a longboard or mountain board. They come across certain vendors spamming this forum in a strategic manner (posting products multiple times, posting ‘‘specials’’ several times, etc.) without any repercussions. Those vendors also tend to hide certain specifications on the items they offer and obviously, none of the downsides of their mass production designs are listed/mentioned (discharge rates, BMS specifications, lack of replacement parts, etc.).

High exposure, low prices results in lots of newcomers asking about these products. I tend to see the same questions on ‘‘eBay ESCs’’ and cheap Li-Ion packs, horridly designed motor mounts, etc.

Those actually selling good products and offering excellent post sales support do not nearly get the attention they deserve. They don’t spam the forum, nor excessively highlight their products. Some of them get rightfully deserved referrals when people ask for advice, but that is about it.

Would be good if there is a better balance there. Single threads for vendors, excessive posting of ‘‘Black Friday’’ deals etc. could maybe be removed. Is there for example really a need to list the entire inventory of a shop here one day/post at a time?

Would also be nice if people could list recommended components and list downsides of certain brands without getting into trouble (Maytech VESC is bashed beyond any reasonable point, but discussing design issues of certain other products is at times considered problematic).

Typical shipping times of vendors is also something that I find valuable. For example, waiting for about a week for a replacement VESC from the same country as opposed to 1 day from Italy (more than 1000km away, props to skating.eu) is something I would have loved to know about :grin:

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I’m not sure why this was split but since it was

-build threads. Meh cool and all. But not for me. -issues are typically on failed products that shouldn’t be for sale due to failure vs success rates

Ie: TB VESC - out of 26 of them, 100% failure rate TB antispark - out of the 11, 100% failure within 1-2 on/off cycles Kaly and BKBs original motors(same manufacturer) had under sized shaft set screws, bell spins on shaft. Focboxes - not all are created equal(97% of them are just fine lol)

I’m not here to argue about whether a someone’s order took to long or shipping,or even refunds. I’m saying these vendors should act like businesses. Sell a defective product, not offer a replacement, and ignoring your customers isn’t how companies grow.

Its your business. Own it along with all of its downfalls… Oh wait that might mean more money out of your pocket vs lining it with the stones you sold to a poor smuck. But that poor smuck wasn’t trying to be your beta tester…or maybe he was.

I don’t care for the drama either, but watching people buy the same shit over and over, and it failing, and customer services stop responding or ignoring. Then someone brings it to light here, the thread gets opened, everyone except the purchaser supports the vendor, thread gets closed. Off to never land it goes. More then likely won’t get a replacement or refund unless you use AMEX or Paypal like a champ. And then the next person falls into the same hole, because all the information of failures lives in Neverland, an unsearchable place. And the cycle continues.

Sometimes if your lucky the vendors fix the issues for future batches via design changes. But more then likely your still stuck with that one shitty broken thing that didn’t work from the start.

Do I have setbacks? Sure. Do I have any vendors to complain about their semi half thought out engineering? Personally, not anymore, as I’ve been building everything myself with the exception of motors, the wood plank and the truck. So the only one at fault can be me. But not everyone has this ability or tools.

and yet there is censorship…what the post is about…

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Learning what is and what isn’t a failed product, is part of that. Otherwise we’d all be building the cheapest rideable failsticks around.

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You mentioned TB vesc as a failed product and 100% fail rate but iv ran 2 for over a year on bldc to look after them and they have never let me down!

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I’ve got a dual and a single with TB VESC’s, only problem I ever had was a single running FOC and @torqueboards replaced it. Its been running fine for months. My dual has been running for over a year in BLDC without an issue at all. I’m wondering how much of this user error or environmental maybe.

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I’m still working on a new ESC still in testing phases but hopefully this should be the last testing phase! I want absolutely zero issues what so ever besides you breaking it with a hammer! :slight_smile: It will be an on-going effort to make the ESC better each iteration. I’ll probably do a test beta run sometime in a few months so for those that seriously have tremendous DRV issues. Please PM me as I’d like some hardcore testing done. I have a few people in mind but the more the merrier. This would not be a free testing product :).

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