What do you think about setting standars?

There is actually something like this happening out there (verification of the good guys) it just hasn't been made public as of yet. It works based on verification of contact info and public references. I will have more info in the weeks to follow.

Frederick

It would be nice to have a standard tagging system so to speak.
It would also be nice to have a list of reputable breeders . I know I got burnt a few times when I was new to all this. Heck, I still could! At least I have gotten to communicate with alot of great people through fauna. Great people with great Leos!

Glad to see you liked my idea Shannan, I would put something together but financially it isn't possible at the moment. I have too many other things going on also! I will keep the idea in my mind and work on something later in the year possibly.

Originally Posted by geckogrl6

... I believe anything on top of this would be extraneous. (I can spell ) j/k

Originally Posted by geckogrl6

I have kept on file the dates I recieve a new gecko, who/where it came from, morph, and more.

LOL.....

ya got me Glenn!
thank one of those words that just looks wrong no matter how I spell it! stupid English!

Heaven knows I make lots of errors too, sometimes I cannot seem to hit any correct keys lately.

About the standards thing, I would be surprised if anyone here could get together a set of standards for leos or other geckos and then have it widely accepted. I am not saying don't try, but be ready for a lot of people who will either not want your standards, or who will argue for amendments and so on. If you try hard enough, sooner or later you will come up with a set that holds up.

Regarding the reputable breeder list, any such listing would have to be pretty flexible. Someone rated as a good guy one day can wind up at the bottom of the heap in short order after a few sales gone bad. That could be due to lots of things such as bad luck, or maybe suddenly the dealer needs money badly and sells whatever can be sold as quickly as possible with good service going out the window. Happens all the time, so the breeder list would need lots of flexibility, sort of like the BOIi.

I like the idea of Public records.
The problem would be coming up with a set of standards so that everyone's records look the same.

Here's my idea (I know it's long, but it combines standards with a good guy list and public records!):

Start with a committee of previously identified "good guy" breeders that will agree to check out anyone wishing to become a member before offering approval. The original committe would consist of people of the calibur or Marcia, Jodi, and other so called "Proven" good guys.

Once approved, the person becomes part of the committee (so basically all members are part of the committee). If a guy goes bad, the majority can kick them out (maybe a warning points based system like fauna somehow). This would prevent from individual disputes causing someone to loose their membership.

To become a member, they need a majority vote for approval, but not everyone has to vote (and perhaps they need a $5 fee just to keep the site up and running). Upon approval, you get the "seal of the reptile better business bueru -like thingy", you can call yourself a member of the "good guy" organization (whatever we decide to call it), and the Software.

The software that you get would be for keeping track of your animals (very similiar to other herp software). You can enter weights, make charts, and fully describe all activities regarding a certain animal. If you are still a member, you can "Upload" your stats on a given animal to the website (all done automatically of course). This way, the software is creating the page of stats about a gecko, thus, every page will look identical except for the data itself. It could include: date layed, date hatched, morph, parents, weights (in a graph and table form), latest pictures, and all other applicable information (some fields required, others optional). The animals could also be linked together so that if I were looking to buy a gecko from Marcia, I could see that it's parents are from A&M, and then use A&M's page for the parent to find all siblings of the one I just bought, ect. There really is a lot of functionality that could be added.

Anyone would be free to browse the list of animals at any time, thus creating an "inventory" of the good guys stock. Uploaders could also have a choice of marking their animals for sale, or sold to, deceased, ect. Viewers could search by breeder, age, morph, ads only, ect. Such a place could really become a "standardized" resource for anyone who wishes to purchase from a "verified good guy".

Granted, it would take a little bit of money for initial website costs and A LOT of time to code, but it is definitely do-able. The only downfall would be if people decide to NOT use the software and NOT upload stats, then it would defeat the purpose.

After a leopard gecko section gets up and running, depending on success, it could also be expanded into other reptiles as well. Other lizards, snakes, ect.

If I get good feedback from you guys... I'd be happy to volunteer my time this summer coming up with the software and web site and get the whole thing going. Since I haven't worked with any forum-based software for voting or databases we'll have to see how long it would take, but I'd be happy to contribute my time to such a worthy cause. I'd also be happy to dedicate some of my webspace to beta testing of the entire system.

Obviously there are many details of such a system to work out, but this is just a preliminary Idea. So let me know what you all think or if you have any questions.

Edit: I am a student in a Software Engineering Program so I would be able to do most of the coding, but keep in mind I am a student, so it would be a while before any such system could be up and running.

Edit Again: Just came up with a way to track people's good/bad guy posts. New members (Unverified from acheiving committee status)- free signup, could also post about particular transactions with people who are already full members (so they had better have proof if posting a bad guy report). Each post would contain a poll: "Should the member gain a point, loose a point, neither". A user can gain points by having many good guy reports, or loose points by having bad guy posts. Only verified good guys can vote on the polls, and the poll would close after one week. If the member has 3 bad guy reports in a row, or the user gets more bad guy reports than good guy reports they loose their membership. Specific numbers would have to be worked out later.

When I first started this thread it sounded like a good idea, but it's going to cause more of a headache for everyone. I would assume that almost everyone has a good way of organizing their info, but everyone is different. I think we should just use Fauna as the mediator. No lists, or programs, or scoring. Just use your judgment as well as everyone else’s judgment on Fauna. If you're concerned about a possible purchase, just post a topic and get some help and look further into it. There's no harm in asking the community here for help, that's what this is here for.

No one is perfect, and we're all bound to make mistakes, so it's not worth getting shunned off a list, when you know you're better than that. Hopefully some of these mistakes can be caught and avoided by the help of everyone here, or from a simple email to the breeder. I couldn't even spell standards correct in the title, haha. There's proof already that mistakes and misrepresentation can be made. So basically, represent your animals the best you can as a breeder, use your best judgment as a consumer...and if you're concerned post something here. I think that would be the best.

Maybe down the road we can create our own, reptile specific forum that we can have control of...but for now, this is here, and is easy to use, so lets use it.

If we ever do look into a forum of our own...lets make sure it has a spell checker haha. Maybe we can ask Fauna to look into implementing one here. What do you think?

Yeah this place definitly needs a spell checker...

I wouldn't wait around for fauna to get one though, I've been looking at the software that fauna uses... no easy way to implement a spell checker. Oh well I guess we'll have to do the old Copy-paste from Word trick