Stamp Smarter

The fine line is simply being a good stamp God or a bad stamp God.

You are saying that you want everything to be good... I am not so convinced about people when it comes to the "review" area of stamping.

I have had some very sick write ups and personal attacks through the email system coming from "reviews"!

So my experience of "reviews" is not a good one.

Sorry for the double post but I wanted to add one more thing. Everyone has opinions, but a single opinion is like having your neighbor tell you his kids are the smartest and his wife the most beautiful women in the world. You may or may not agree. The real value comes about when you can compile many, many opinions and begin to see the trends.

"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind." LORD KELVIN, 1893

Anyone who walks away forming an opinion based only one a handful of reviews is not doing themselves (or others) justice. The value of the site will become much greater when we have hundreds of reviews in the database. Readers will be better able to develop well informed buying decisions on many levels at that point.
Don

Don, not necessarily germane to the topic, but your quote from Kelvin bring to mind a quote for the CEO of a very large corporation I worked for.." Trust in God,...in all else bring data."

Seem to me the site will build the data that all can draw upon to learn from.

I do not think SCF is the place to advertise for people to do and be "reviewers" of "stamp smart".

ebay sales and feedbacks are the reviewer's of me as a seller! I live or die by this system as a seller.

Let the new stamper or others read my feedbacks and make their own decisions about me as a seller.

The ebay system is the closest we will ever get to a quality stamp "review" area. The seller's reputation is built up over many years of very hard work from every sales that is made.

Devil's advocate...

We are all (assumedly) credible people
of integrity, here... but let's call
the proverbial spade a spade...

*Anyone* can register to Stamp Smarter
and give a fake name... other than an
email address no proof of identity is
required...

Given the above, I'm most sure that some
people will use a made up name simply as
a protectionist measure, whilst others
may use it as a 'weapon' so to speak to
use Stamp Smarter against their competition,
and most assuredly (as we all know) there
are sellers out there whom potentially might
do just that...

Just one collector's opinion, here, for what
it's worth...

Randall

What a fantastic concept and execution - congratulations to everyone involved in this revolutionary project!

An ethical seller has nothing to fear - other "sets of eyes" are always valued, and appreciated. We all make listing mistakes, and I am always thankful to hear about mine...

As a buyer, this site is extremely valuable. It tells me, in a nutshell, which sellers are responsive, and which sellers continually sell problem stamps without appropriate disclosure in the descriptions.

That's my mini-review of Stamp Smarter.

John

John C. Knudsen

KGV,
I simply do not follow your logic. First, people are already 'reviewing' many sellers in forums like this one. I won't bother to link them but you can find many such 'reviews' if you care to look. Are you saying that this should stop too? Or is it just Stamp Smarter that you fear or dislike?

You appear to be arguing that the feedback system for ebay trumps any other method for recording a sellers performance and has more than enough educational value. Are you serious? Surely you do not believe that. Surely you do not believe that giving a person 20 words is accepted space to have feedback. Surely you don't think that the fact the ebay scrubs the majority of the information after a month of two is a good practice. Surely you are not arguing that ebay feedback system if perfectly acceptable for a buyer to be able to figure out how to avoid being taken.

What is your opinion about other review sites like Angie's List, Yelp and a multitude or others? Are all of them 'bad' because millions of people are offering reviews of products and services? For years newspapers and magazines contained reviews of restaurants, movies, theater, etc. In your eyes were they threatening to those who were making a personal profit and income from these activities? If I am understanding your argument correctly you do not feel anyone should ever review a philatelic book, organization, or service because it might be detrimental to those who make an income from them.

Does your perspective extend to everyone and their opinions or is it just when there is money involved? In other words, I greatly appreciate many of your threads and posts, a good example is your "Australian KGV Stamps explained" thread. But do I accuse you of misdeeds or undermine your educational attempts by saying you are 'walking a fine line'? You present a lot of great info for collectors in that thread, but truth is that it is your opinion and some may go out and spend substantial amounts of money based upon that opinion. I consider what you are doing as someone who is posting their opinion as a means to help/educate others, not that you are 'walking a fine line'.

The site is not for-profit in any way shape or form so I don't understand why you think that no mentions of it should be made in this forum. I know for sure that it is costing me large amounts of money and time with no way of recovering it. There are no ads, there is absolutely no personal gain. It is like me telling you that you shouldn't have spent your time on the "Australian KGV Stamps explained" thread because it may be self serving for you; that your motivation was to raise interest in these stamps and collecting area so that you can sell more and/or increase demand for personal gain.

Unlike virtually every other site where users can contribute, the entire database is owned by all the Members. No one is trying to build a knowledgebase here only to have to owned by a forum company or its traffic used for commercial profit. (Nothing inherently wrong this setup, someone usually has to pay the bills.) It bothers me when we have poured so much into it and made every attempt to keep it commercial free as a service to the philatelic community only to have you come along and say that no one should be 'advertising it' here. If this is the rule then let's remove every mention of any web site from this forum, Stamp Smarter is more benign than 99.5% of them.

And lastly I understand that posting a 'rush to judgment' can be bad thing; we have taken every step to prevent this from happening. But is this not what you are doing; rushing to judgment before we even get off the ground? Beyond that I find irony in that you are basically providing others a review/opinion of the Stamp Smarter site in this thread. Isn't this the very thing you are saying should not be done? You are ok with posting reviews of the Stamp Smarter site publicly but are arguing that no one should do the same for your ebay listings?

I got a lot of feedback from many people, some of it was not 'positive'. But it is all welcome and I worked hard to use it to improve the site. I do not fear the criticism, I try to look at it as an opportunity for improvement. Sure it is sometimes hard to hear, no question that I am invested (at many levels) in this project. But this does not mean that having people raise concerns and offer suggestions for improvement should be ignored or that I should be butt hurt. If Stamp Smarter is not for you so be it; but you should not fear it any more than you do something like this forum.
Don

51studebaker! You really do not think I am going to read all that do you?

You have to write a novel to justify your position........?

Some comments on a couple narrow areas of this discussion:

With regard to damaging someone's reputation by way of an internet "review" or posted internet comments - the legal community is already looking at that issue as a potential source of income for them. That narrow area of the law will become a specialty law practice area for some serious law firms. By the way, a person can damage someone's reputation in MANY ways - even by simply asking a question. For example, "Does Joe still beat his wife?". Or maybe by SELECTIVELY "pounding on" the same ebay sellers all the time. In the end, using words like "in my opinion" may not prove to be a good enough "legal shield" for those who choose to make accusations about others on the internet - but that's just my opinion.

With regard to Angie's List, Yelp, Scambook, ebay feedback and other such systems - ALL review systems are flawed to some extent. Just as there is shill bidding, there are shill reviews, and reviews that are tainted by personal bias. Some companies have their employees post favorable reviews. People write slanted reviews simply because they have a grudge against someone. Wise people take with a grain of salt ALL feedback / review systems.

"WHY" create Stamp Smarter? Why rally the troops to join (yet another) ebay vigilante group - If not for financial gain? I put that question to a psychologist friend. His theory was simple: control and power. Just as writing ebay feedback gives one power over someone else - so does making "an accusation" about someone on Stamp Smarter. It gives you power over that dealer in a sense. He added that some people have a psychological NEED to exert power or control over others.

If the purpose of Stamp Smarter was purely educational there would be no need to name names.

Sorry to disappoint fellas and ladies, but ebay doesn't have the market cornered on "dodgy" behavior. There are crooks on DelCampe, BidStart, at brick and mortar stamp stores, at dealer tables at stamp shows, at stamp auction houses, on Craigslist - and let's not forget the crooked doctors, and lawyers, and politicians, and mechanics, and furnace repair guys, and butchers (think thumb on the scale), and in pretty much all locations where people and money intersect.

Good luck to those of you who decide to take up the pitchforks and join this ebay vigilante group. In my opinion, there are better ways for someone to spend their time. Such as organizing a stamp collection, spending quality time with loved ones, volunteering at the local hospital, and so on.

So you won't even bother to take the time to read a reasoned response to your concerns?

Don't assume that StampSmarter will be in *ANY* way similar to the board "The Hypocritical Tyrant" rules with an iron fist. His methods should be the last anyone should ever use. That board is operated with one person's best interests at heart, not the philatic community as a whole.

This board and others are the perfect place to solicit input on a new philatelic venture.

Mike,
Sorry but you obviously have not bothered to actually go to the site and see what it is about. It is not about ebay, it supports reviews of online listings for the very other sites you mention too. Please at least bother to come up to speed and get the facts straight before flaming it.

I do agree with your point any feedback is system is flawed. And I agree there are many ways to spend ones time helping others. (Ask your psychologist friend why SOME people do this.) Can I accuse you of rallying the troops and pitchforks with your post? Are you arguing that there is not a need to help buyer make better informed decisions? Are you arguing that online auction sites are nothing but a positive things for our hobby? Do you have any other solutions for addressing the issue of the large amount of poorly described listings that populate the online auction sites and lack of oversight?


KGV,
Actually no. Being too lazy or apathetic to read what someone has spent time on doesn't surprise me at all.


To others whom might think that I am somehow trying to 'rally the troops here' or am using this forum to promote the site. Please go back and count the number of threads that I started about this site. (I'll save you the time, it was one.) I respect this forum and its readers and would not try to use it to push people into visiting. I have answered several threads that were started asking questions about the site; including those that frankly made unfair and uninformed assumptions about its intentions. Was I supposed to not reply and just ignore them? Yet now am being accused of this nonsense. What's next?
Don

Don, I tried to send you an email through the SCF system, but it wouldn't allow me to (newbie). Also, the sendmail script on Stamp Smarter will not accept Hotmail or gmail addresses, and I got an error message at your other site as well... Just thought you should know.

John

John,
Sorry, I am still trying to resolve why some email servers reject the forwarding of programmatically generated email. You are welcome to use my personal email address. I am not a programmer by profession but will continue to see if I can fix the 'reply to' domain issue that seems to be causing the email bounce backs, thank you for letting me know.
Don

Anyone reading Don's posts who doesn't get a "warm and fuzzy" feeling about this project and it's positive intentions needs, in my personal opinion, to re-think what the future of this hobby might look like if all don't join hands and work together to help clean up the massive amount of online deception in the Stamps Category of the major venues. What you see posted on StampSmarter is just a TINY part of the deceptive or otherwise problematic stuff being sold daily. Why? Well, mostly because most folks do nothing to help. There are only so many hours in a day, and those doing the reporting are busy people with limited time.

So I urge all readers to GET INVOLVED. There are those among our readers who are very expert in certain specialty areas. You know who you are. If you are very knowledgeable about Revenues, for example, why not try to locate and report a handful of problematic items every day? Essays and Proofs? Same thing. A handful a day. Whatever your knowledge area might be. Use it to help the site to grow and become a "safe-haven" for both buyers and sellers, where they can learn and teach.

I hesitated to mention it earlier but even with the very limited number of reviews and after only being up about one month; there are some early signs that the web site is working as intended.

About 1/3 of the reviews have resulted in a seller improving/removing their listings after being contacted. So that's about 30 philatelic transactions where we potentially helped the hobby grow and live another day without frustration, anger, and increased costs. We have also had sellers contact us and thank us for helping them improve.

And I do want to thank everyone who have contacted me privately with words of encouragement and support. Supporting new ideas, and giving them chance of succeeding before passing judgments, not only goes a long way in keeping our hobby vibrant and thriving but proves that we have many people who care about its future.

My only wish is that the detractors at least allow the site to prove itself for 6 months or so before passing judgments about what might happen. If it turns out that it is nothing more than a witch hunt then the criticism should be piled on and I will take responsibility.
Don