FAIR SHAKE

How do we bring everyone together?

This effort has many great leaders, but along with that have come many different approaches, and disagreement about the best way to proceed. Everyone speaks of unification, but few seem willing to "give up" any of their own prominence in the effort, whether real or imagined.

The Fair Shake Forum has been created with that in mind. This forum is NOT LED by anyone, and is OPEN TO ALL who have ANY interest whatsoever in the Online Marketplace.

The purpose of this forum is to bring EVERYONE TOGETHER, without reducing the autonomy of the various group efforts that abound on the internet.

We would like to have everyone's help in gathering everyone together in this MOST NEUTRAL SITE for the purpose of networking and Unification. If you would like to voice your support of this forum, ask questions, or make suggestions, please do so. If you think there is something missing or detracting from this site as a place to congregate, please let us know, and we will do what we can to improve it. Thank you.

PLEASE, EVERYONE: Let's TRULY get United, so we can put our time and energy BACK INTO the efforts of communicating the need for change to eBay, and building alternative marketing venues. If everyone involved in the effort would agree to post important things in this ONE PLACE, you could stop spending so much time hopping from one site to another to figure out what others are doing.

I love this new site & the principle it was created on!

I've said in the past and I'll say it again, "sometimes you must go along to get along."

I appreciate everyones efforts, determination and energy.

The country is full of good coaches. What it takes to win is a bunch of interested players. And I believe we have the interested players!!

Oh how nicely put!!

Welcome to Fair Shake, msent!

If I knew how to post that sentiment top and center on this forum right now, I WOULD!!! It IS about the players, NOT the "leaders". This forum has no leaders at this point. They will emerge, I am confident, all in good time, and they will be of the type who know how to truly LEAD and not try to take over.

THANK you for joining this effort. Your input and efforts will always be appreciated here!!

Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. ~ Frederick Douglass

gladhand wrote:Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. ~ Frederick Douglass

Great quote! Hey, glad, would you mind also posting that in the break-room under "Inspiration"--it would seem to be appropriate there. What encouragement for our resistance efforts against the policy changes at eBay!

Done-

I like this new site and what it represents. I believe we need to stay together. Too many are branching out into many different selling places and forums.

I think there should be one major place for dialog, and from there we should unite and choose a single site to migrate to. We should keep active the threads at ebay to inform the people who are looking for help to come to a place.

This is going to take some work, and I'm willing to do my part. We need to bring people together and keep them united. This needs to be an organized union of buyers and sellers.

Welcome, Fancy! I'm so glad you have found us, and that you will help us to spread the word not only about the resistance efforts, but to this site as an information point, as well.

I truly believe this site offers the potential for great networking for all of us as we step into the future of online marketing. It will only be as good as we make it--but we already have a GREAT group of people congregating here!

:o)

Fancy wrote:I like this new site and what it represents. I believe we need to stay together. Too many are branching out into many different selling places and forums.

I think there should be one major place for dialog, and from there we should unite and choose a single site to migrate to. We should keep active the threads at ebay to inform the people who are looking for help to come to a place.

This is going to take some work, and I'm willing to do my part. We need to bring people together and keep them united. This needs to be an organized union of buyers and sellers.

Thats an arguement we have not heard before on the PSU forum. Problem with that is a lot of people have put a lot into ebay, they would have deffended it to their last. But now they feel as if they have been turned on by the very thing they were protecting. i really do not think you will be able to get every person to take that chance and make a new ebay, even now most are listing o more than one site.

We have been looking at the idea of bringing in another option, by searching for a search engine that will make us just as strong, and making it so that even though we are on different sites and auctions that we would still have the customer base through the search.

We understand that it is not going to be easy but what is?

Here is my basic opinion:

There should be a major search portal leading to a few chosen sites few sites sellers have united at.

It is clear to me, being a computer tech amatuer, that it won't be easy but I do thrive that it can be done.

This was posted under New Developments by member Maggie45 - if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to check it out.

AUCTION & STORES SEARCH

There's Hope... If we can spread the word on this.

Here's a tool for buyers so they can search online auctions and stores that don't include ebay listings.

If you're a sellers on Blujay, Ecrater, PSU stores, - you're already included If you have your own website, or want to suggest another store hosting domain, let me know.
_________________
For Antiques, Vintage Toys, Trains, Glassware..
http://Pennsylvania-Antiques.com

For books
http://pa-antiques.ecrater.com

Online Sellers United
http://forums.delphiforums.com/ecrater/start

You-Tube
http://www.youtube.com/maggied45

Fair3 wrote:This was posted under New Developments by member Maggie45 - if you haven't seen it yet, you might want to check it out.

AUCTION & STORES SEARCH

There's Hope... If we can spread the word on this.

Here's a tool for buyers so they can search online auctions and stores that don't include ebay listings.

If you're a sellers on Blujay, Ecrater, PSU stores, - you're already included If you have your own website, or want to suggest another store hosting domain, let me know.
_________________
For Antiques, Vintage Toys, Trains, Glassware..
http://Pennsylvania-Antiques.com

For books
http://pa-antiques.ecrater.com

Online Sellers United
http://forums.delphiforums.com/ecrater/start

You-Tube
http://www.youtube.com/maggied45

They are just the google searches they have so many limitations that they are not much use, I think they struggle beyond three sites and the more words you use for a search the less you will get I have one on here.

Live alt auction search

And there is also one here from purple_reading_giraffe

Alternative Auction Search

We both attempted to make changes with it to make it work, I think PRG did a lot more than I did, as I gave up once I realised it was not going to work the way I wanted it to, and just switched it to internet search with the auction sites having priority.

The javascript search is not that great as it is javascript and is limited, as not everyone has Javascript, javascript can't activate all the auction search engines, and it is clanky at times.
But what I intended doing with the page until I could find something better was to link all the search engines I can find together in one place, so I at least give my customers some option. If you go to the bottom of the LIVE alt auction search page there are a few alternatives but again they each have limits.

If you check out the PSU site on the MOAAS project then you will see we are trying to push for it to be started again, and we may have the opportunity to do so but I think we will have a lot to sort out and, the project is in need of a lot of help.
So any help you can offer would be great.

If we can get the MOAAS running the way we want it to, then we should be able to link it to all and any sites, or most of them and at the moment personally I think that is our best option.

I think this whole search engine thing is one of the very best ideas to have come out of all of this. I wish I had the knowledge to help, but unfortunately it is WAY beyond me. However, I will keep this in mind at all times, and if I come across someone who might know how to lend some expertise to the project, I will certainly try to direct them to where they can assist.

I wish everyone trying to make this work the BEST of luck. This could be a HUGE gift to what we are trying to accomplish in getting the whole online market stabilized and fair again. THANK YOU.

We all will be saved from feebay very soon. They have broken every law and they get away with it. The ebay community spent years building ebay what it is today and for this very reason the community needs to make them realize that. Ebay's management has gotten rich off the community and the way they pay back the community is with higher fees and forces the community to accept their payment services. No way. We need a change and we will be getting. Very Soon. Mark my words. Feebay will be gone. A new marketplace will be emerging and we will all benefit from it. Feebay, charges us for listing an item, selling the item and when we collect on our item, and we still need to wait 21 days to collect, while the person who bought the item can easily say they don't like it and neg us. Feebay will not last. We need a better way to sell and shop and one that benefits us, not the CEOS.

** Newbie Alert ** ;-)

I very much agree that the idea behind an independent search engine is likely to be positive but there are of course technical limitations. In fairness, there are also various workarounds too. The bigger problem however, once you have a search site, becomes getting people to use it!! But that's another discussion should the search engine/site ever come together.

In a perfect world most of the alternative auction sites you want included in the search facility would be willing to share access to their listings database and that's very unlikely to happen. You can access the eBay API by joining their developers network but almost every other alternative isn't geared up to enable such access or protect their data from accidental or malicious misuse.

Probably the next best technology that could be used would be RSS newsfeeds - live XML feeds of current listings. This is a very real and workable solution. Our only problem here is so few sites exploit the possibilities of this technology.

I'd be interested to know of any sites I'm not aware of that offer full blown dynamic RSS capabilities. So far - apart from eBay - I believe it is only Tazbar, eBid and eCrater. Less comprehensive feeds are available from Silkfair and even more restricted RSS facilities are offered at PlunderHere, AuctionsWorldwide and a couple of others.

To see what RSS feeds are capable of doing you can see Tazbar's feeds in action for a few of their sellers at www.TazSellers.info and for eBid sellers there is a similar site working at www.eBidSellers.info

It would be very easy to create a similar type of site drawing the feeds from multiple sites so users can select a search term (member name/item/color attribute/keyword etc.).

eBid only recently added RSS functionaility to their site largely as a result of user demand. So maybe other sites need to be asked about making RSS newsfeeds available?

There are other options and workarounds to help display search returns from multiple sites and, of course, there is also the option of building your very own search engine from scratch but - to be properly effective - this will demand some serious investment in terms of time and money and it's difficult to see sufficient user demand and monetization potential to justify it.

Hope I've at least sparked a few ideas in peoples minds and please don't take this as being in any way negative. I'm just trying to be realistic about the challenge.