Ive bought more from this forum than ebay and amazon combined…
Here is another thought, why not have it up to the vendors to decide to be legit on their first post… that way the trusted vendors are grandfathered in and the new vendors can gain trust on first posting if they decide to do so…
Just trying to find rhat happy medium because both sides are right here
I really want to thank the mods for all the great info on this fiasco. @mmaner, @BillGordon, @longhairedboy, @DerelictRobot and anyone else that contributed.
This is ‘above and beyond the call of duty‘ type action. Thanks for doing what you do. But don’t get used to it. This is the Internet, So someone will start a new shit storm by the weekend.
I appreciate that this community attracts garage inventors as well as real companies. Let’s keep attracting them while holding them accountable.
Someone has to be the first buyer for a product with no track record. So I hope we can keep an ‘innocent until proven guilty’ approach here.
But if u have something to hide as a vendor here, I’d be worried…
Personally, I think that the less rules and policies there are, the better. I don’t think a vendor should need to publicly announce their identity, but that the information should be freely available to anybody who would choose to ask.
But iirc, we knew who is AlexTech and nothing happened to him in the end. Verifying vendors is not a warranty as they can start to fuck members up when they want and ghost us after.
Dont let perfect be the enemy of good.
Hooray, you’re getting it! This is the internet. There are no guarantees or warranties 
I know ! Don’t spend here some money you can’t afford to lose 
But if vendors had to do business elsewhere, we would at least avoid the BS when I goes bad.
The BS is what helps future customers make a decision on whether they buy from that vendor or not.
This should be reviews based on facts then, not opinion everywhere…
Hmm yeah I see what you’re saying. I read the rest of the responses here too. Honestly it’s just difficult, you’re always going to have ones that bend the rules. So at that point would they lose the badge and have to earn it back after a probation term?
Idk sounds like a lot of work. Maybe that idea doesn’t work but hey we still need more ideas, maybe what Taz and Dareno have been saying is the right way to go. We don’t really want blame falling on mods, I agree with that for sure.
Did you get up super early or just didn’t bother going to bed at all?
I kinda agree with bits and pieces of many arguments here.
While I think it’s important that vendors verify their legitimacy and non-jason-in-drag-ness, I also understand not wanting information like irl address, phone#, etc being public info.
I think in my ideal scenario, that kind of info could be provided to mods (similar to reddit AMA’s/etc), and then the vendor’s identity could be considered “verified.”
2 primary issues with this idealized theory:
Issue Uno: The burden is placed on forum moderators to verify the identity of vendors. This isn’t super fair to our best friends the mods.
Issue Dos: This doesn’t verify the trustworthiness of a “verified” vendor. Some random dude could be verified and still run away with many of our precious shekels…
Thus, I am very much on the fence about this whole topic…
On a somewhat related note, as I may potentially be offering things for sale in the future, I wanted to propose an ordering structure that I think would work well for both customer and vendor.
Since preorders bad, customer would place an order for product but not pay anything until product has been manufactured (proven w/ pics or something) and is ready to ship. Customer then pays the order amount and vendor ships product. This way the buyer is protected from nonexistent product, and the seller doesn’t have to ship out a product they haven’t been paid for.
I am aware this only works for small-batch products, but I thought it could work for some things so… Here it is.
Innovation and development has to be protected at all costs but verifying the identity of an entity selling on the forum should be a bare minimum imo. If I were to participate in a group buy then I would make damn sure I knew the contact details of the organiser in the same way I would expect to have to disclose that information should I wish to organise one.
We ask people to include location as a matter of course on sales threads so providing contact details is a logical step for actual (be it garage or established business) vendors.
As a mod team we are not and should never be accountable for the actions of these vendors but we can at the very least verify them.
This is concerning to me because the man behind these events did it on the back of the community at large.Not just us but the wider esk8 world. Imagine if Jason Potter pulled a stunt like this?
This is no different.
Sorry guys I fucked up and lost all your money but hey look at my new inventory!!
You can not walk into a factory and ask them to develop a product without having a wad of cash and its where that cash came from that concerns me.
That said the information is out there now and this is where our responsibility ends, its up to the public to do with it as they will.
rant over.
To my knowledge, this is essentially the model that @janpom uses, maybe he can let you know the challenges and advantages associated with running a business like this 
I feel that this is fair and reasonable, and would be a good first step towards protecting the community without making anyone “responsible” for the actions of forum members/vendors. I am in favor.
Right, that’s how I do things. It’s been working pretty well at the beginning as I managed to keep up with the orders. Now that I’m having more orders than I can handle it’s not so great anymore since people have to wait a few months after placing the order before I get back to them and often loose interest in the meantime. It’s still better than taking people’s money and then not be able to deliver for a long time.
Stayed up late soldering 
day off work today.
at the risk of being pedantic, do we have an agreed upon understanding of what it means to verify an identity? does this count as proving who i am? this should count b/c the IP address i used to sign up for this site is in milpitas, california and the picture on the ID matches the person holding it.
I would argue yes, and for the record my idea of verified vendor badge wouldn’t completely save you from a neojed stunt. Even if they’re the same person or not, but it is a Little piece of mind.
Can they still rip you off after like psycho/Hyperion? ofcourse, is that on the people who verified their details
No
An ID is not hard to fake, nor does it show what kind of person they are… Verifying someone’s ID doesn’t add anything to whether they can be trusted or not?