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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 1262452, member: 27832&quot;]Well, in the <i>very</i> old days, you could look up contact info given the handle. As I recall, the rule was that eBay would provide the other person&#039;s contact info to you, but simultaneously provide <i>your</i> contact info to <i>them</i>. This kind of mutual transparency could solve a lot of problems that we see today, but it introduced other problems as well.</p><p><br /></p><p>At one point, I was promoting my auctions (for a very specific type of hard-to-find RAM module) by seeing who was bidding on other auctions for the stuff, waiting for those auctions to complete, making sure that they weren&#039;t bidding on anybody else&#039;s auctions, and then emailing them to point out my auctions. I thought I was being a good citizen -- I was taking pains not to interfere with other sellers, I was only contacting people once, I was being very polite -- and most of the people I contacted were quite happy, with quite a few going on to buy from me. Some people ignored me, which was fine. Eventually, though, someone took offense and reported me to eBay, who gently pointed out to me that spamming bidders was <i>not</i> okay. Looking back, I feel like an idiot -- but at the time, eBay was such a different place that this seemed like a perfectly reasonable approach, and as I said, most of the people I contacted seemed to agree.</p><p><br /></p><p>I do miss the old days (I&#039;ve been a member since 1998). But times change, rules change, and buying and selling patterns have to change in response. I started out mainly as a seller. With today&#039;s buyer-weighted protection policies, I&#039;m extremely reluctant to sell there, but I&#039;ll bid on things that I never would&#039;ve touched before.</p><p><br /></p><p>If I sell to a crooked buyer, my protection is frail and brittle indeed.</p><p><br /></p><p>If I buy from a crooked seller, I&#039;ve got multiple, robust layers of protection.</p><p><br /></p><p>If I&#039;m a bidiot and offer 60x face for silver, I get what I bid for, as it should be, and as it always has been. I&#039;m guaranteed to get my silver, as advertised, or to get a refund. I&#039;m not protected against overbidding.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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