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Provider tag fee increase
I suggest to increase provider tag fee.
Justification:
- Business has money to spend;
- Further deterioration of children summer projects;
- More responsibility for actions (loosing tag is more significant damage);
- Now it is easy to recoup 200$ just with one offer thread. Example: repuc. He scammed in thousands;
- Forum owner will have dollars to pay for admins investigative work on new providers;
- Forum will look more attractive for larger business. Now it is skid cest pit with all home made and basement hosts. Bigger business want to spend money;
- Inflation.
Fees
- New yearly fee for provider tag?239 votes
- Leave it 200$35.15%
- 400$4.60%
- 600$2.93%
- 800$2.09%
- 1000$30.96%
- Debian, thanks!24.27%
- Would you be interested in scam insurance?239 votes
- No. Impossible to implement.44.35%
- Yes, for 7$/year.26.36%
- Scam, thanks!29.29%
Comments
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/97476/requests-forum-guidelines
Reported already to move to "General".
This forum sucks ass, and your solution to solving it is pumping more money in to it?
No thanks
How would you improve it?
You posted in the wrong section you mofo.
It suck ass due to low quality offers. Increased fee would drive away those bottom feeders. We, as a users, would start seeing bigger companies with their offers. Bigger companies can offer better deals if they want due to economy of quantity. Small, insect type hosts - no.
Countless issues were brought to lights in the past week, most of which are still unaddressed, such as banning members who speak on Dustin criminal verdict from court. This is what more money does.
So small businesses who already run on super small margins will just not be able to advertise? The community should do more research before buying from random people.
There is ad banners (which I never saw, due to adblock).
I personally love the system on XSS.is. Users can deposit funds as "insurance," which is provided by the admins to users in the event of an exit scam. These deposited funds instill a higher level of trust in the user among those who purchase from them.
@LeroyJ your idea is based on false assumption that legit providers will get lots of business just by spending $200 on provider tag, there are lots other expenses to run actual business or even before making actual offer here. However, no matter what you do, you can't stop scammers. They are always scammers those will find ways to scam, at most @jbiloh can do is offer paid tag to people who are here from last couple of years and are active. That way some random guy can't just post offer and scam people.
Side banners that nobody can see seem like a good alternative for self-promotion; thanks for the rational suggestion. OMG can 't believe I'm really trying to explain something, please nobody answer me, I aint gonna read anyway.
BLAH BLAH BLAH CANT HEAR YOU.
So basically, that will end LET as it is, ant turn it into amazon like, just as a forum.
Is all this because of 3-4-5 examples that gone wrong here? because if that is the case, there are more legit providers on LET that the scam/no so good ones.
Low quality offers are pretty easy to weed out if one is doing even a minimal amount of due diligence before placing an order. I don't see a problem with cave hosting if my use case matches the criteria. Actually i find having the option pretty much a good thing. It's not my problem if some guy orders a @repuc VPS and expects brilliant service. Also it's exactly these kind of scam offers that will be the first to shell out just about any fee regardless what the exact amount is as it's recouped rather easily. Actual content beyond advertisements on the other hand can not simply added by imagination.
Of course it would be good if there would be some real repercussions if a given host turns out to have some serious problems but that's kind of besides the point.
Yea, if you think $1000 will keep scammers away, think again.
It sure wouldn't keep away these 23 mysterious exit-scam hosts....
We lost 60% of the Hosts initially when this fee was added.
Now you want to increase it? wat
imagine this, paying 1000$ to do a 20.000$ scam, and you have the option of selling for 50$ from start, well, who is in?
If you imagine that any provider will pay 1000$ to sell at sub 7$ for the first 12 mo, that is like hitting the jackpot, drunk, at 4am, on a poker game, and you actually do not know how to play poker.
paying a 200$ to might sell something at low margin, that is feasible.
@MannDude had a good idea, and also others shared some good ideas, why not go that way?
Before voting, what is the system of scam insurance? Sound interesting
Regards
Ok, probably I should examplarize this with usual scam scenario:
This is very rough schematic of exit scam. With increased fee such schema entry fee also would go up and period which required for recouping investment is prolonged as well.
Recently we revoked 4 provider tags because the hosting companies had elements/characteristics that appeared to fall below our standards. These providers got through the initial review process and were granted permission to signup for a provider tag. That shows that we need make some common sense improvements to the initial review process to try and reduce the potential for recurrences. Of course there will never be 100 perfection during an initial review process but we will strive for constant improvement. It also shows that there is no need to tear it all down and start over because generally speaking the review process has been successful.
That said, no matter how good our initial review is that does not mean hosts might or might not later fail. That's normal in the course of business in all industries, including this one.
In percentage terms to show some context, the 4 tags recently revoked represent 1.6 percent of the provider tag base.
Take a look at cracking, hacking and blackhat forum of xss.is. Deposit is good example of insurance. Thought, for LET to become a insurance company/bank is not an option
The idea from the other thread where this is already being discussed:
For scams, not much you can do to really weed it out. Sure, you can increase the cost of posting an offer which will work to a degree. But users need to be smart enough to not pay $12 for a year of
8GB RAM 4 vCPU 100GB NVMe Unlimited bandwidthor whatever from some company with a nulled WHMCS, lorem ipsum on their website after being in business for two weeks, even moreso if they're from a country where there is literally no (reasonable) recourse for you once scammed.@LeroyJ
OK, bring the pitchforks on me, by what you wrote above, it is a customer problem, that he believes unicorns still exist, not a provider issue.
If the customer cannot smell that "too cheap" is fishy from a new provider, that is not an entry tax/vet problem. Scammers will go where there is a potential market. Did you saw a fake Cartier store in a decent mall in a big city?
I do not mean to be disrespectful to forum members, but guys, if it stinks a mile away, it will stink when you pick it up.
Its all good until one day the admins will runaway >.<
Going strong for over a decade now, quite literally operated by FSB now, small chance for running away.
Before you had to be "interviewed" on Jabber to register, now they are completely closed last time I checked.
Exploit.in does it in even different way, either pay to register($100 from what I remember) or prove yourself on other affiliated forums. They also have "Escrow" like xss.is
You're right. However, until that happens, the system works pretty well.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/darkside-ransomware-makers-accused-of-skipping-town-without-paying-affiliates/
A fee increase might solve the problem in our minds.
However, let's not forget that even some of the most appreciated providers (like NexusBytes for example) have failed and made an exit scam. Some of the most popular providers with sales also failed (like HostSolutions who failed with a RAID crash during a market affected by Chia cryptocurrency).
An increase in fee simply provides a bit more peace of mind, but that's about it. In the end, it doesn't even matter.
It is called, invloctation ( hope I got it right
)
Nothing against those who try to scam, i hate them, but they are here from the beginning of time. Some measures will filter a few/most out, that is a fact, at the same time, the customer has to do a little research and not believe everything he sees.
"Trust no one" at least until he proves he's shit