Fellow members, what do you think about this

[drkewl]

I haven''t been online in awhile as I have been busy with school; however, I just signed on and noticed I received a rather unpleasant message from ''Pricescope Admin'' regarding a post i made a few months back. I mentioned in my post how happy I was with my experience with a certain diamond vendor, whos name i''m supposedly not supposed to mention (they were banned for ''spamming'') and mentioned i would write a review for the site regarding my full experience. In response to this, I received an e-mail basically saying if i mention my experiences or write a review, It will be deleted and I will be banned. The exact quote is below:

"If you will post that review it will be deleted too, this time along with you membership on this site."

Uh huh... um, last time i checked this forum was a place to exchange ideas and inform customers about experiences, GOOD AND BAD, about various stores. I am offended that a site I have learned so much from and has so many wonderful members, would take such an approach and wanted to let you know about this because, personally, I think it is ridiculous. What this company did was wrong and were rightfully banned; however to now ban any talk of this company is ridiculous (I doubt the admin would have any problems of me saying bad things about this company, but in no way am i allowed to write a TRUE customer review?)

I guess they might ban me after i post this as well as it might upset them, if so, I wanted to thank everyone for all the advice and support I have received over my diamond purchase. It is a beauty and I look forward to proposing with it when the time comes!

 

[belle]

you are right drkewl, people can learn so much from ps and we have a great community of wonderful members...do you think it just blossomed that way out of luck? i don''t think so. leonid and irina work hard to keep this board running smoothly so that members such as yourself will not only learn as much as they can about diamonds, but give back and help others in their endeavors as well. that doesn''t mean that everyone has to agree with every decison they make, but as members, we respect their rules.

 

[drkewl]

Date: 10/15/2005 1:12:25 AM
Author: belle
you are right drkewl, people can learn so much from ps and we have a great community of wonderful members...do you think it just blossomed that way out of luck? i don't think so. leonid and irina work hard to keep this board running smoothly so that members such as yourself will not only learn as much as they can about diamonds, but give back and help others in their endeavors as well. that doesn't mean that everyone has to agree with every decison they make, but as members, we respect their rules.

Belle,
While rules aren't always fun to follow, they are there for usually a good reason and i respect that; however, I don't believe I am breaking a 'rule'. If that review was posted, the many many people who casually read posts here but never post themselves (I have no idea how many that may be but i have a feeling its a substantial number) may see my legit review and checkout the company i bought my diamond from. That seems harmless enough, because the customer would be directed to a good compnay; problem is its not a PS company like the crowd favorite WF, GOG, etc. This is NOT my site and obviously have to obey the rules here, but something doesn't smell right to me. I feel that preventing my review from being 'seen' is possibly benefitting the admins more than it is 'protecting' potential future diamond customers. Read into that what u will as i'm not about to start bashing and thashing about

PS - I think that the admins have done a great job here in the relatively brief time i have been involved @ PS; however, i just don't agree with them here and wanted to post my 'frustration' with their decision in a civil yet honest manner.

 

[belle]

drkewl,
the administration of this board encourages consumers to post first hand experiences, both positive and negative, about vendors they have personally dealt with. unfortunately, the vendor you want to share your experience about had employees posing as consumers on this board telling of their ''positive experiences'' as well. this is known as shilling. in an atmosphere such as this, that is considered disgraceful. due to the severity of their actions, the decision was made to disallow any references to that company regardless of the nature.

 

[perry]

Drkewl:

A couple of things you should know...

Pricescope works largly because the vast majority of the post are genuine. I have seen forums where most of the post where shill post by the vendors. You don't want to know how bad it can get and how much you can be mislead.

Leonid & Irena work very hard at resolving minor issues so that the forums can be an honest place with a resonable and freindly dialog (even I have been contacted once on an issue that I could have stated better).

Banning a member or a company is only done for relatively exteem cases. Deleating all the references to this vendor is the extreem measure that I believe has only been done once (for this vendor).

Bottom line: The vendor in question purposely chose to use this forum in methods that were way outside the rules and intent of the forum. This was intentional and gross misconduct for their companies gain. To even allow any further discussion on the forum would potentially benifit them. Thus, the decission was to end their involvement and delete any references to them (super extreem response to a super extreem breach of trust and bad conduct). By doing so, Pricescope also telegraphed a message to all other vendors on what conduct will not be tolerated - and that the rules will be enforced.

Pricescope, as with many other forums, does not maintain a "banned member" list. It prevents being sued and having to defend themselves in court (not saying they would not win - but a very costly endevor which could affect the ability of the forum from operating at all).

I am not denying that you have a great experince with the vendor in question, and am happy with the ring and services. However, were you perhaps attracted to them because of the deceptive tactics that they used here on Pricescope. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Pricescope had no choice really given the nature of the offenses if it was to maintain the credibility of the forums. To allow further discussion on the vendor could actually benifit them. Thus, your right to post on them (and others) has been reasonably suspended.

Enjoy the other aspects of the forum - and feel free to participate.


Perry

 

[strmrdr]

Well said perry and belle.

Extreme actions require extreme responces.
It had to be done to protect the forum and those that come here to learn.
It is sad when consumers get caught up in it and are prevented from saying what they want but the bottom line is the reaction was justified by the actions of the vendor.

 

[Regular Guy]

DR,

I have mixed feelings on this issue, and believe Belle and particularly Perry have spoken well in defense of Leonid and Irina''s approach here. I''ll note, too...that Pricescope does not seem to be signed in, right now, and may purely exit this post when they come on board.

Separately, I had written to Leonid and Irina about their treatment of said vendor...and not so much for past practices...but more, for the monitoring I understand they have taken it upon themselves to do for future posts to keep mention of them off of the boards. I have no fundamental quarrel for their running the board any way they choose...as they say...it''s a free country (and in this case, a free board...we can participate at will, or not). Nevertheless, in the spirit in which the board is comprised as well, I had sort of felt compelled then, as I do now, now that this topic has come up, to at least share my thoughts on this.

There''s only 2 points of order I''ll share. As I shared the concern, it was explained to me that the vendor, when confronted with the misbehavior, as much as said they didn''t care, and didn''t see the problem. This is a reasonable concern, however, this "let them eat cake" attitude was not written about on the board when the vendor sent to the board what seemed to be a genuine letter of contrition, where they explained the problem''s source as a rogue employee who had since been fired for that cause. Unless I missed something, Pricescope could have then commented on the potentially insincere nature of their letter of contrition, since apparently, they had been given an opportunity to come clean prior to Pricescope''s banning actions.

Then, there''s the question about the future. As I understand it, and despite any other unfriendliness that may exist about Superbcert, mentions of them are welcome here, even though they''re not advertisers, to take a bad case example. (Separately, many other posters are friendlys here, and also are not advertisers, it should be pointed out!) However, this other vendor is being treated in another category. Purely as an idea for sharing...I say let the chips fall where they may going forward. If this company gets mentioned, let them get mentioned. Relieve yourself of the efforts to keep them off, going forward. In this way, I''d suggest that if they continue to have a propensity of positive comments from users, then the reality of their good actual works may come to outshine what had been their actual past mis-deeds, and thereby, an organic process is created for -- if not their return here -- then at least, their reasonable mention here, based simply on user''s experiences.

As to that second point, though, that''s purely my idea. Let the future shape itself. I had also queried the administration if they were aware of any best practices of other bulletin boards as to dealing with the bad behavior of a posting vendor...admitting that as the board owners, they certainly needed to have no justification for what they were doing, but thought, at least for their own edification, they might at least like to know specifically how other boards were run, with respect to this issue. I didn''t hear back from them on this point, but will share with anyone reading this, they did share I was hard to understand...I''ll say Garry has recently said as much...and I''m sure it is only too true.

Lastly, as they will share with you, and I will double that, the board''s administrators work very hard on our behalf to keep this a useful, if not fun board to interact on. Their efforts are greatly valued. Whether or not they ask for our cooperation, we should give it to them. And in fact, they do ask for our cooperation. Still, in the spirit of the "ground up constructivist" approach with which this board arises each day, I''ll make this post in support of another way of thinking I''d ask Leonid and Irina to consider. They may or may not choose to address either the first or second points above, or can delete this post or thread at will. As to my membership, I''ll ask them to note I''ve not mentioned the vendor in question, value being a member, but also could benefit with more attention to my other tasks as well, if it needs to come to that.

With warm regards,

 

[pricescope]

Drkewl, firstly, thank you for the kind words about our forum.

Here's what we wrote to you:

Hi drkewl

This line from your post was deleted:
..."I just bought a diamond from {company name}, which was recently ''banned'' from participating at pricescope for reasons that have nothing to do with their diamond quality or customer service. I will post my review of the site after I get my diamond appraised."

If you will post that review it will be deleted too, this time along with you membership on this site.

Would you please tell us why a consumer would possibly want to use a forum, spammed by vendors?

Your answer was that we don't want any recommendations on non-advertiser...

I doubt that this is the case because people are posting recommendations on hundreds of vendors who do not advertise here all the time (both internet and local jewelers) including those who advertise at the competitors' forums and rather critical to Pricescope.

The reason is that we feel very strongly about breaching the community and our trust.

We do not enjoy being a police one single bit. It is stressful and unrewarding thing to do and we realize that we upset you by asking not to post about them. It is not easy either because we need to communicate with each new member who is not aware about history of the company, which misbehaved on the forum.

Yet we think this is what has to be done to maintain the integrity of the place.

Genuine recommendations and testimonials are very powerful thing and companies who get them are getting promotions and business, which is perfectly fine as long as they make their customers happy and have good ethical standards.

However, value of the recommendations on the forum will be jeopardize if the forum will become a place of bought or untrue testimonials, flooded with spam messages, dropped links, vendors pretending to be consumers, consumers spreading the buzz to get discount from some vendors, etc… These are things we are dealing on everyday basis so the genuine people can enjoy spam-free environment and share their experience. This is our job to deal with this negative stuff and we are not complaining but it is going behind the scene and most members do not see it on the forum. We want to keep the forum clean and nice for the nice people.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few companies and individuals who do not mind to treat PS community as another place for getting free business doing different unethical things I mentioned above.

The company in question particularly created a couple of accounts pretended to be consumers posting positive testimonials for themselves, recommending their own diamonds and discredit competitors to newebies. The company management was aware about what is going on. Some forum members who considered dealing with this company were shocked as much as we were and decided not to deal with them because of that.

We also believe that buying over the internet especially diamonds requires a great deal of trust. We believe that a company that behaves unethically should not benefit from our forum. That is why we are trying to enforce the rules to protect the community from unethical acts.

All we ask from the forum members who enjoy and appreciate clean and spam-free environment of the forum is to help us to keep it that way and not to encourage companies who were breached the trust of the community. We are happy that majority of the forum members support us in this situation and appreciate the fact that we get rid of advertiser who did such things.

We understand that you're unhappy to be told what you allowed to write – we are sorry about this very much – but this has to be done in order to keep spammers and other predators away from the community as much as possible.

We'd love to discuss why we do certain things this way or another but it is just impossible and fruitless because there are hundred of different opinions on how we should run the forum. We cannot please everybody nor explain all the nuances to each member. We expect the members to respect each other, moderators and the forum rules - read it first to avoid miscommunications.

 

[drkewl]

Everyone,
thank you for the kind replies. I won''t drag this any further and will just live with the decision. Have a great weekend!