posted on September 6, 2000 04:05:18 PM new
Great news to combat
Prankster teens who bid just for kicks
Unscrupulous sellers who shill their auctions
Unscrupulous sellers who devised a plan to bid at the last minute of their unsold ads to give themselves higher sell-through to earn more listings
Unscrupulous new sellers who give themselves phony positives thinking bidders will trust them and not actually notice the obviously fake ratings they started their new ID with.
Bads news for
Honest people who are afraid to put their CC # on the net
posted on September 7, 2000 09:11:59 AM new
Combats nothing. Yahoo does NOT validate the cards. You can put in any valid number and any name. THe name doesnt even have to match the name used to register the account. So this whole thing is a joke. A few months ago, a seller registered as Phony Man from Phonyvile and put up auctions which stated "I used a phony name, address and CC and here I am posting." Bad bidders know all about it. Real bidders might be scared off. Another great Yahoo "improvement." But I do hear that next month bidders will be limited to 1000 IDs and they lost one for every deadbeat bid. But it gets reset to 1000 each month
posted on September 8, 2000 07:40:23 PM new
Yahoo has saved $100k per 1 million users with their phoney credit card verification.
Yet it helps somewhat. One thing that could have easily been fixed but never was, is the threshold the seller can select for the buyers in his auctions. I have already required CC verification, but in doing that I couldn't exclude somebody with negative feedback who was CC verified.
There was no reason for this except some code had to be rewritten so I guess the Yahoobots had better things to do such as write Neighborhood watch and 1000 listings (AKA how to ruin my personal business without otherwise changing the site in any meaningful way).
So when all bidders are required to be CC verified, they will have to do something to the current code. Is there any chance they will now let me exclude negative bidders? We'll soon see...
I just searched for "section 117" the phrase the Sony Playstation bootleg game pirates used in their ads. I was suprised to find only 8...rather than the 800 of the recent past. Looking at the Sony PSX listings, they suddenly resemble 'normal" Yahoo listings pages...lots of ads and nearly no bidders.
So they cleaned it up at last. How? Not with Neighborhood Watch. Not with 1000 auctions. there is only a few possibilities: They either hired a traffic cop to do what their team of programmers could not do, or else Sony EA and the Cops have started making arrests. i can't think of any other way...
I'm glad to hear TC is out at Yahoo. I must believe he was behing Neighborhood Watch and the reduction in relists. Of course the 1000 auctions limit has taken the wind out of my sales so I have nothing good to say about the new head honcho. I'd like to hear more details about the change.
I will say that just over 1 year ago i met TC and his staff at Yahoo and was well received there. I was gung-ho Yahoo at the time and was in daily email contact with TC with bug reports and suggestions, all at his request. It wasn't until I began to realize bugs were not getting fixed...even simple ones...and that NONE of my suggestions were being implememnted, that I began to sour.
Finally, in about November of last year I complained and suggested that having been a computer programmer in the past, it was my opinion that certain bugs I reported could and should be fixed the NEXT DAY, that he abruptly quit responding ever again. Looking back to my day at Yahoo, I remember telling him how poor the BOOK category tree was, and asked him if I rewrote it, would it be a big problem implementing it into current auctions. He said it was no problem at all, but that Yahoo had a certified librarian or some official sounding titled consultant on the payroll who was already doing a new tree.
Well it's clear that was not true. Ever notice once you've caught somebody in a lie, you never trust them again? I don't know why. I can't think of anybody who i think has never told a lie. I just wonder why he would snoball me rather than let me fix the listing tree.
