WebSlave

Ah, yes. "Proof of identiy". That sounds pretty easy, doesn't it? You would be astonished at how easy it is for suitably motivated individuals to fake anything and everything. Which means that staff here would have to become private investigators and forensic specialists to try to qualify said "proof" being offered. I've seen my share of likely photoshopped driver's licenses over the years, and heck have even gotten forged attorney "cease and desist" documents sent to me now and again. So I really don't have a whole lot of faith in such an activity.

Besides, who will I get to replace the moderators when the current ones tell me to go to Hell when I tell them that is now their new job? I sure as Hell am not going to spend all my time doing such a thing, and hard as it is to believe, the moderators DO have a life outside of this site.

Then what about the liability from the inferred guarantee that anyone buying and selling here has been properly vetted and serves as an implied warranty that the seller or buyer is exactly who the say they are? When that is proven wrong, and you get screwed, aren't you going to be pissed at ME because of it? And if you have pockets deep enough, you might even consider filing a lawsuit against me as a result. Thanks, but no thanks.

As I mentioned in an earlier post there ARE legal minefields in running a website of this nature. Likely any attorney worth his or her salt would consider me crazy if I said I was going to take on a responsibility such as that.

BTW, I am sorry if it appears I am extremely negative when replying to suggestions here. Truth of the matter is that I have spent a lot of time over the years constantly thinking about how best to run this site. And point of the matter is that I have been thinking for at least the past year about how closing the BOI was going to affect the site, and knew the current scammer problem was a near certainty that I would need to address eventually. So many ideas being presented now really are not new to me. So I find myself explaining why I have already rejected such ideas as I thought about what would it would take to implement them, as well as trying to foresee problems they may cause.

Of course, I can't think of everything, and maybe I sometimes read more into things than I should. But all in all, usually when I suggest a plan and am asking for input, I have already thought pretty deeply on the matter, and am really looking for better ideas that I might have overlooked, or hoping that someone else sees something in my suggested plan that I hadn't thought of. And quite honestly, all the while knowing that there is a better than 50 percent chance that any change I make will cause a ruckus one way or another with a number of members, or perhaps be mostly ignored and wasted time and effort. If such changes that I have done similarly in the past would have left physical scars, I would be an awful sight to behold, indeed.

Anyway, I am planning on sticking with my original idea of just allowing BOI style replies in the classified ads sections and running with that. I have asked my programmer to mod up an admin panel so I can control the thread locking function so as to limit that to paying members only. I just haven't decided what level I want that to be set at, so I want the flexibility to be able to change it IF needed and AS needed. Will a scammer be willing to pay just $25 to become a Contributing level member and able to lock their ads? Beats me. That might just be a negligible cost of doing business to them.

As mentioned in my earlier posts, ONLY replies to existing classified ads will be allowed to have BOI styling posts made within them. New threads such as "searching for info on JOE BLOW", etc. will not be allowed. But if Joe Blow posted a classified ad here, then yes, that will be acceptable then. The reason for this, as stated before, is because I am only interested in steps that will prevent, or at least reduce, the incidences of alleged scammers using THIS site. If someone has questions about someone on another site, I suggest you go to that site for your information. That is their problem, not mine. I am trying to initiate plans to help members on THIS site with the other members using THIS site, and no one and no where else. As for those buyers and sellers on other sites that people might have problems with, as someone who I am very fond of often says, "Not my monkey, not my circus."

As this gets fleshed out, I will comment more about the implementation and rule changes that will need to be adopted.

Thanks to all of you who have contributed ideas and suggestions.