I worship Ivan like most of us do, I've been in all of his GMK GBs from the start on (love my purple mods), all of these were flawlessly executed by him, and I'm very thankful for that. Also, he has great taste in everything Cherry. Of course I didn't file a dispute or anything over this and don't plan to, and I still think this will all work out.
That said, you're wrong, elrick. You can't blame a newbie for panicking when there's zero communication from a GB organizer for two months while the GB is just at the point that he collected all the money from people. Falling silent for so long is a kind of behaviour that by any GB organizer or vendor is not cool and will always lead to disputes.
As the GH community, in our own interest, we have to stop vindicating and excusing this kind of behaviour by organizers, which is something that is being done by community celebs again and again. I won't even start listing the GBs that have fully or almost gone south during the last year -- it's becoming an epidemic.
We should start a discussion on how we can prevent things like this from happening and make GBs more reliable and trustworthy with the growing number of GBs and orders per GB we have seen. Maybe it should be mandatory to always name a "deputy GB organizer" who can inform people and take care of stuff if need. Maybe there are other ways. To have one guy alone sit on a pile of money, responsibility, and tasks without other people's attendance and help in case something happens is just not a good concept.
Even with Ivan's short return this particular GB is still not going well. Even after his "update" post we don't know anything: We don't know what has been going on in the last two months, we don't know if the order has been filed with GMK, we don't even know about MOQ. We don't know at all what it is that is taking "longer than what was initially expected". It isn't necessary for Ivan to lay out his personal life on the internet, but IMO we do need to ask for more information on the status of the group buy, the MOQ, the GMK order and if there are any further obstacles that will need our patience. I have been in 7bit's Round 4 and Round 5, and I have lots of patience, as I'm sure everyone here has, but we need to know what's going on.
I don't know what happened to Ivan that caused the lack of communication, From my experience with Ivan I'm sure it's been something serious. It is always said here that RealLife is more important that keyboards, and that's true, but collecting 10,000s of $$ from people around the world is pretty much as real as things get. I can hardly imagine any reason for anyone to take that so lightly that he/she isn't able to give any life sign for several months. From a seasoned and respected GB initiator, this way to cope with problems is also sending a very bad signal to college kid GB organizers when they are in over their head.
My message to newbies would be: you are generally right in becoming suspicious when a GB organizer stops communicating for several months in a phase where he shouldn't. In this case it's Ivan though, and Ivan is special in that we know Ivan long enough to be sure that he will deliver in the end in spite of what it might look like right now. Which does not excuse falling silent for so long and then just posting some undescript generalities.
