In the relatively short time I've been on Ice In Space I've seen many threads appear and disappear regarding positive and negative experience with retailers.
I suspect Ice In Space would not be keen to fuel discussion of retailers either negative or positive, however, I wonder if providing a more standardised area for such comments would benefit all.
Some scattering thoughts....
Perhaps a list of moderator maintained retailers is created. Then perhaps users are given permission to post a message about that retailer (or several). Perhaps that message would not be a standard forum message but something more standardised such as an area for free text but also rating/multiple choice type options, so that some basic facts are always established such as:
- how long the dealings with the retailer have been going with regard to the said comments (specification of number of days)
- contact methods used (selection of phone, email, etc)
- number of previous good dealings with the retailer
- number of previous bad dealings with the reatiler
- multi-choice style ranking of various things such as promptness, friendlyness, opinnion of pricing.
If users could give feedback on retailers it would be important to provide statistics on overall # reviews of the retailer, as some are obviously low volume and others high volume, you don't want one disadvantaged. But then there's that whole reason Ice In Space probably wants to steer clear of it.... potentially disadvantaging a retailer or facilitating an unfair bias.
I guess I get a little tired of the threads about the retailers because they tend to go around in circles, there are always people that like them and always people that don't like them, and so reading back on the threads it would be very hard for a newbie to get any idea from the thread if the retailer is actually good or not, where as perhaps a standardised questionnaire with resulting general statistics might be useful.
Hard to say.
As a reader of the threads I'm often tempted to reply to pledge my support or dislike for the mentioned retailer, thinking that people who read current thread B might not have read thread A 6 months earlier where I did put my opinion forward. However I don't like fuelling the threads. If I knew my opinion was always included in statistics of retailers though, I'd put it in there once and forget about it, perhaps only to update it later if my opinion changes..
As I said at first, probably something that Ice In Space would rather not delve in to, for many reasons.
One thing useful that would come out of it, is a comprehensive list of retailers so that any new person to the hobby could, even without any ratings or comments, instantly know 3+ retailers they could call to compare for themselves.
I guess that's perhaps the point... it's not so much wanting to prevent normal forum discussion about retailers, but to provide a useful resource of them, where a scattering of forum threads of 5 years each with 20 replies isn't particularly useful to a new visitor.
All said and done, I'm quite happy to just continue as is
had a chuckle with "technical backup and after sales service" }
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