SUBAT

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  Katrina Anderson replied on Mar 17, 2008

  I have been following the PSU and other forums on the ERbay Subject.

  I do not use Ebay that much, only rarely to buy or sell. However, having read the entire thread on PSU relating to a user auction site i must say i am very concerned.

  Firstly, i have lost count of the number of seller run auction sites that have come and gone. Mostly because the owners/admin could not agree on many issues. How will the proposed new community site be any different??

  Most on this PSU thread seem very keen to create this new community site. In reality, what you are trying to do is create another monolithic Ebay that you control so YOU can control the OAI to your liking. In reality you are allowing Anarchy to creep in here and playing out nothing more than a power struggle for your own ends.

  This doesnt mean i disagree with what you are trying to do, i don’t, but i certainly disagree with the way you are going about this. The impression i get, and quite a few others i have spoken to is you are creating another teamsters union.

  You have a miriad of alternative sites available to you, most are crying out for support. Have none of you even considered contacting the site owner and or admin to see if they would be prepared to work closely with you. Is it not now becoming a case that you want total control or nothing.

  Please think very hard on this, as being predominently a buyer i am becoming increasingly cautous of any seller, and i have bought from quite a few, who is actively promoting your own website.

  The world spent 50 years bringing down communism. Are we about to see it resurrected on the internet in cybernetic terms.

  
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  Anonymous replied on Mar 26, 2008

  Some news — apparently the rumors are true, eBay Inc. is indeed paying buyers for complaining and/or leaving low DSRs, which action is rewarded with coupons for future purchases. See one 10% off coupon here, good for $100. (Hopefully the link works.) Others of higher values have been seen and several threads on the eBay boards mention them (one thread, then another). Even typically neutral AuctionBytes has come down hard on this one (read the article) and it’s easy to see why as this latest eBay lunacy can do nothing but encourage fraud and seller-abuse.

  It is also true that the trend toward a merging of the eBay Inc. and USPS monopolies is moving forward, now with specified shipping being linked to promotions (such as they are) and calculated into search ranking. The AuctionBytes article: EBay Requires Specified Shipping, Factors It into Best Match reports: Beginning this week, eBay will begin requiring that all new sellers who are listing for the first time specify their shipping costs using the Shipping Details section. A few months from now, specified shipping costs will become a requirement for most listings on eBay, including listings from third-party listing tools…. eBay’s shipping calculator supports only certain USPS and UPS services. Not good.

  PayPal acceptance has also now been made mandatory across the eBay UK site, including the imposition of the 21-day ransom in the UK.

  Finally, everyone who has run the SUBAT unity badge or any of the strike-announcement banners and had a sale killed for it should be aware: as of 3/25 listings cancelled for policy violations" will, they say, no longer vanish but will instead "appear as unsold, allowing editing to make them “compliant” in order to be relisted. Note the violations that will be excluded: “A few policies are excluded, including some severe banned items (e.g. firearms, narcotics, etc.) and VeRO violations for potentially counterfeit items.” Why does this matter? Because it raises the question, will violations of eBay’s murky corporate censorship policy fall into that “severe” category? Will we be able to see the listings cancelled in the future for evil violations like daring to mention an alternative auction venue? Or the ones killed for explaining to buyers the wrongs and consequences of eBay’s new policies? How about the ones killed because they mention the coming May strike/boycott or any of the protest sites, this campaign page included? Will those go to the Unsold area to be preserved? If so, all sorts of eBay-illegal speech may soon have a lasting presence, coming into the light in a new way and making such (usually $0.01) sales more worthwhile as communication devices. Unless they are put into that “severe” category. And that will look even worse for eBay. (If they do continue to blot out sale pages killed for ‘speech violations,’ ranking such violations with firearms and narcotics (!), and anyone would like to make a registry of those pages via screensaves before erasure, message me, I think it’s worth doing.)

  Thanks,
  Julia

  P.S. To Katrina: while I find it vaguely offensive that you would speak down to one as wise as Lily, your bizarre misapprehension of 20th century geopolitics gave my entire family a good laugh so thank you for that. In the future, however, I think we should stick to the auction-related matters at hand. Or, if you really believe the eBay trading community was and is founded upon “the basic human frailty of greed,” perhaps you should indeed resign from this campaign, as everyone here knows better than that. We want to save the eBay Community, not deride it.

  
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  Anonymous replied on Apr 2, 2008

  Hope Ebay gets a clue.

  
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  Debbie Thoreson replied on Apr 7, 2008

  ANNOUNCEMENT: Come One, Come All!

  WHAT: An online Round Table meeting to be held at Fair Shake!

  WHEN:

  • DATE: Wednesday, April 9, 2008.
  • TIME: 7:00 pm PST; 8:00 pm MST; 9:00 pm CST; 10:00 pm EST.
  • U.K.: Thursday, April 10, 2008; 2:00 am GMT; 3:00 am BST
    

    WHO: ALL groups, sites, forums and individuals involved or interested in the ongoing eBay
    boycott are WELCOME and encouraged to attend.

    
    

    SUBJECT: Boycott eBay Unification, Planning and Delegation.

    
    

    WHERE: Meeting to be held in the Open Round Table Room named “Oak”.
    
    www.fairshake.freeforums.org
    —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
    Some Information about FAIR SHAKE:

    
    

    While there are already many sites promoting the eBay boycott, there is often very little communication between most of them. FAIR SHAKE has been created in an attempt to network ALL of the groups together — not to replace any of them, but to promote communication and information sharing.

    
    

    Many people have different ideas about what is important in this effort. Not everyone agrees, but that’s okay! We have all been affected by the changes eBay is making, and many people are working hard to deal with those changes.

    
    

    • Some believe eBay will back down. Others don’t think there is a chance.
    • Some have decided never to list or buy on eBay again, and have quietly moved on and are selling on other venues.
    • Many think they need to find ways to cope with eBay’s changes, because they cannot imagine their business surviving any other way.
    • Some are boycotting and posting on blogs and news sites to make the necessary “NOISE” to grab the attention of the media and help educate the public — to break the eBay “habit” and learn to list and shop elsewhere.
    • Some are loose-knit groups with a lot of enthusiasm, but little organization.
    • Some are located on websites that don’t appeal to everyone.
    • Some groups are focusing on trying to build a new auction site … others think we should be all only be supporting one that’s already established … others think we should support four sites … and still others encourage ongoing research and listing EVERYWHERE, to keep trying them all out.
    • And then there are individual efforts.

    
    

    If you haven’t heard the song that was recently released by fellow boycotter Joe, go listen to his music through the link at FAIR SHAKE:

    
    

    The Rain Has Come
    http://fairshake.freeforums.org/turn-up-the-vol…

    
    

    FAIR SHAKE is a place for ALL groups and ALL individuals to communicate their efforts and needs with each other. As a result of this sort of networking, someone like Joe makes a song. And someone else says, “Hey – I could make a video out of it!” And then someone else gets an idea for distribution of the song and the video, and so on.

    
    

    Joe made a great contribution, but without the networking and help of others involved in the boycott effort, no matter how great the song might be, it won’t do much good if it isn’t shared and distributed ALL AROUND!!

    
    

    If one group comes up with some great ideas for templates or posters or letters, why not share them with ALL to make it easier to make a bigger impact?

    
    

    FAIR SHAKE is not “just another group.” It has NO leaders. Its only agenda is networking, unity, and communication for all concerned with online marketing.

    
    

    Groups are encouraged to keep their autonomy, and direct their efforts as they feel appropriate, but to network with others to strengthen the movement for all of us.

    
    

    Please visit FAIR SHAKE, read the mission statement, and look around. If you have any more questions, please ask! I hope this has clarified things for you a bit.

    
    

    NOTICE TO REPRESENTATIVES OF ALL ONLINE MARKETING VENUES:

    
    

    FAIR SHAKE is also being developed as a central location for information on all aspects of online marketing. It is hoped that this site will continue to be used long after the boycott has ended.

    
    

    A SPECIAL INVITATION is being extended to all site representatives to post information regarding your venue. A special section is set up for this purpose. We would love to have representatives from all such sites at FAIR SHAKE.

    
    

    We also hope to have strong representation from each and every group involved in the boycott effort. But FAIR SHAKE is not just for DELEGATES from groups (although that is certainly one way to network) … every individual affected by the eBay policy changes is encouraged to browse and post at Fair Shake at ANY time, regardless of any other affiliation.

    
    

    Looking forward to seeing you there!
    
    www.fairshake.freeforums.org

  
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  Anonymous replied on Apr 24, 2008

  I’m happy to see this SUBAT page is restored!

  And everybody at AVC sends their prayers and best wishes to Lily — get well soon Lil, we need ya!!

  I have some new images too. Sad to say I couldn’t swing them as vector graphics yet, they’re still raster. (If anybody knows of a good free vectorizer…post it, I could use it, Inkscape’s Potrace just isn’t cutting it.) I hesitate to post images here directly because everytime I try it on this Point page something goes wrong and people start getting false security errors…so I’ll try to make them links instead. These are free to use if anybody wants them, but be sure to save them and put them on your own space because the Fileave space has a monthly limit and when bandwidth usage reaches it, the whole thing locks down and everything will just vanish. So host it somewhere else (even on the Ebay servers if you can, what the hell).

  1) The truth about your Ebay fees, where do they go? Under Monopoly Ebay, to salaries in the $millions$, that’s where.

  2) May 2008 strike banner #1 – for use on their site…this is why everyone should keep their eBay ID and Me page. What are they gonna do about it?

  3) May 2008 strike banner #2, with as many alternate auction logos as I could fit (maybe soon to be an image map with links). Most buyers still don’t even know half these sites exist. We have to make them wonder what awesome bargains they’re missing out on by only looking at Ebay.

  4) We will not oBey eBay (large version)

  5) eBay = ePay, for sellers, it’s a scam (small version)

  6) And finally, Martin, I got that 1968 OSPAAAL dictator poster and I like it too. My homage to it: Objects in the mirror are darker than they appear. Sieg Heil.

  Plus the larger SUBAT unity badge (around 450 square…we need a vectorizer!).

  There are more recent outrages from the Ebay pigs, too. If everybody didn’t get their spam about this yesterday, it also appears on their announcement page, rationalizing the sickening new policy where EBay will verify all sellers identities by calling us at home whenever we try to list something. Yep…in place by June, they say. Log on to list from a different computer? SLAP, no you don’t! Not until they call your house and you can prove it’s you. Because Ebay sellers are so likely to be criminals, this is a necessary security measure that everyone has to suffer, right? What a load! Just another Big Brother move, another excuse to log all IP addresses, collect data for spamming (they know everything you do on that site, everything), and now collect phone numbers for sale too. And they’d also like your cell, BTW. Who really believes they won’t sell them? Who believes Corporate Ebay having your number doesn’t already spell telemarketing? At best.

  And when they get done in Australia, where Paypal is now being made mandatory “as a test,” they’ll apply it to other regions too, they say, like the USA…so then they can fully keep potential criminals like us sellers under control, if not just by pink slapping us for free speech or calling us at home, then by holding our payments or even freezing our bank accounts if we’re not in total compliance with whatever idiotic new scheme they dream up next. Thought you could avoid the Paypal 21 day ransoming by taking checks or MOs? Think again, because they’re making sure there’s no escape. Everyone must bow down to their whims, all sellers are peons on Ebay. And we’re their customers. We pay their salaries for this!? WTF man, what next?!

  DOWN with FeeBay!!

  Anna

  
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  tina abshire replied on Jun 30, 2008

  if you need it and I can do it – you got it!!