I propose that all GB organizers are allowed to run only one at a time. They may propose a second and do research and all that, but money cannot be collected until the last buyer from the first GB gets his stuff.
I agree that this is probably a good rule of thumb. Lately, I think we've been doing basically this (feel free to correct me), despite not making it explicit.
I say we blacklist all GB organizers who take too long. This is not necessarily a reflection of honesty but of competence. Competence includes proper management of workload and delegation or outsourcing of duties. As well as having the humility and wisdom to say, I can't handle it, can some other person step in?
This actually does happen.
As usual,
we cannot guarantee anything, but I assure you that we are screening new group buy submissions (every thread in the group buy subforum requires approval like Classifieds).
unfortunately the mods here are not willing to do much to mediate the group buys and classifieds. Every time I've asked or brought up suggestions I'm told "we have the buyer beware post ( despite it being written in a latin term people may not be familiar with )
The problem is people see cheap items with unrealistic shipping deadlines and people are more than willing to throw money at them without much thought. So part of the blame is on the community users.
I've seen this sort of post a lot lately. I have to ask: what could we possibly do after a group buy has begun to rectify this? If you have a solution to that, we would love to hear it. The fact of the matter is that, yes, there is inherent risk here. As I mentioned above, we can (and are) doing things to help reduce the possibility of this happening (pre-screening). However, when a new group buy runner comes along that doesn't have a solid history of running a group buy, it becomes a judgement call. No matter how reliable that person may have been with classifieds dealings, there's no guarantee with a group buy, due to the time and logistic scale involved. The best thing to do to prevent issues, IMO, would be to stop new people from running them - but that seems a bit extreme, doesn't it? So basically it comes down to, as I said, a judgement call.
Now, keep in mind that these "changes" I speak of are fairly recent, and the group buys that a lot of people bring up as talking points were begun before they were implemented. There will absolutely be a lag between the pre-screening implementation and any evidence of reduced issues in group buys. So it may seem like I'm talking about a solution and you're looking at a bunch of problems wondering where I think we did anything right, but we won't see the effects until the new group buys actually complete.
And as always, I'm more than happy to discuss these things via PM. I don't want to continue taking this thread "off topic" (I realize it's fairly relevant, but it's not quite the appropriate place).
