The shopping forum has been slowly deteriorating into little more than a place for people to vent their frustrations. Two of our primary goals with Adult DVD Talk are 1) to provide good channels of communication between consumers, retailers and studios and 2) to help keep each other informed about the good, the bad and the ugly of Adult DVDs. I'm not sure why the shopping forum has developed into a soapbox of sorts but it has. Our forthcoming policy is not a direct result of any single instance or thread, it's more of an effort to get things back on track.
The retailers represented on this site work very hard to develop a reputation for providing quality service. Many posts made in this forum can be extremely damaging at times and are sometimes made with no basis whatsoever. We want to avoid this situation.
I don't have a policy set in stone just yet. I do have a couple ideas that will be incorporated into a complaint policy in one way or another.
If a forum member is going to complain about the mis-handling of their order(s) they will be required to provide the following information in their post or their post will be deleted.
1) Include any order numbers related to their complaint. We will require an order number to enable a store's customer service staff to associate a user's forum profile with their real name and any open customer service issues. Too many complaints are posted here in the forum that provide no means for a retailer to directly contact a customer based solely on their forum post. We do not share the email addresses associated with your forum profiles with anyone. If your email address is hidden then a retailer really has no way of knowing who made teh complaint.
2) Date, time and method of contact. Anyone posting a complaint will be required to state when and how they attempted to notify the retailer of their problem. We don't want people posting complaints here in the forum without first providing the retailer ample oppurtunity to address the issue. There will be some minimum time requirement as a guideline.
Of course there will be complaints that aren't order-specific. Those issues will be exempt from these requirments.
I'm sure some folks are going to immediately start waving the 'censorship' flag. That's fine, they can post somewhere else. We run a moderated forum, not a public newsgroup.
I'm open to feedback as we work towards ways of salvaging what was once one of the best forums on ADT.
Edited by - Drew Black on May 30 2002
Edited by - Drew Black on Jun 17 2002
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