Just a quick note that FurBuy's Terms of Use (policy) file has been updated. The change basically added new sections concerning Advertising and Off Bid-Sheet Sales:
http://www.furbuy.com/docs/terms.shtml

In a nutshell: Please do not place graphical ad banners in your auctions, items, comments or forum posts. Please DO feel free to post a text link to your site or services though. Absolutely do not post an auction that's not selling anything just for free advertising. Also, do NOT cross-post auction items to other sites for sale, offer to privately buy an item someone else is selling off the bid sheet, or offer to allow a buyer to do so.

Seems fairly common sense, but these have been violated an awful lot lately so we decided to make solid policies about them. Violation of them will result in warnings, suspension or banishment.

So in an effort to keep you guys updated more frequently, and get more feedback on upcoming features, we've taken down our on-site News section from the main page and replaced it with links to our LJ and FA journals. These are where we'll be posting news and info, since it helps support a couple of our favorite sites and makes things more convenient for you, our users and followers, to keep up to date and reply with feedback.

New Features
I just finished a small feature improvement on FurBuy regarding re-posting auctions. For beginners, relisted auctions will no longer appear in the Newest Auctions section on the FurBuy main page - they have had a tendency to flood the section too much and relisted auctions aren't really new, per se. Secondly, we're actually keeping count of how many times each auction has been relisted as well as the number of views from prior listings, resetting the view counter to zero (0) when the auction is relisted. And finally, those numbers are now being displayed on the View Auction pages, but will only appear for relisted auctions - first-run auctions will not have relist information on them. View counters will now only show the number of views for the CURRENT listing of the auction, not an accumulated number of total views across listings.

Upcoming Contests
While activity and accounts and auctions and bidding has been continually growing on FurBuy and that's a great thing, we would like to bring more folks (both buyers and sellers) into the site. So I've been pondering contests to help do exactly that! Prizes will include Amazon Gift Cards varying from $25 to $50, and/or one year of free membership at either the Seller or Bidder level. Some metrics for contests we've been considering have been "Highest Selling Auction", "Highest Gross Sales", "Highest Gross Purchases", "Most Referred New Sellers", "Most Referred New Bidders", "Most Auction Views", "Most FA Watch Referrals", "Most LJ Community Join Referrals" over the period of one month. Clearly some of these categories lend themselves to some potential for abuse, and we'd have to add some restrictions and guidelines to what is and isn't counted, and do some super-secret back-end validation of things, but overall it could be a very positive experience.

So, what do you guys think? Questions, comments, additional contest ideas? Let us know! Reply on this journal. =)

( X-Posted to our LJ Community: http://community.livejournal.com/furbuy/ )

Lately there has been an alarming number of what we call "off the bid sheet" sales on FurBuy. We would like to inform users (both bidders and sellers alike) that this type of activity is NOT welcome on FurBuy and your account can be suspended or banned for it. These occur when a seller asks a bidder to "just send me the money" before the auction closes and the rightful winning bidder and bid price are determined.

Auctions with bids on them CANNOT BE CLOSED and for good reason: so other bidders have a chance to bid and so sellers can enjoy more profit from additional bidders on their auctions - and further, once a bid has been placed it's a binding contract. If you want your auction to close earlier, you should either consider carefully how long you run your auction for when you are posting it, or contact our admin team and we can shorten auctions for you, with certain considerations.

Bidders, if a seller contacts you asking you to send money before the auction is closed, PLEASE CONTACT US and let us know immediately!

Sellers, if a bidder contacts you and asks you to sell them an item before the auction closes, PLEASE CONTACT US and let us know immediately!

Whenever you sell/buy an item "off the bid sheet" you are negating the value of the Feedback and Ratings system, and losing a great deal of security and support that's built into our system. Furthermore, you could wind-up in a very unhappy situation with a high bidder at auction close who you cannot complete your obligation to and receive negative feedback. This goes for bidders too.

DUTCH AUCTIONS - Lately several sellers have been attempting to use the Dutch Auction feature on FurBuy for selling static items in a "First Come, First Served" fashion. PLEASE NOTE that this is NOT the intended use for Dutch Auctions and having users contact you and make payment prior to auction close is considered "off the bid sheet" sales which are not welcome. Please note that Dutch Auctions are exactly the opposite of "First Come, First Serve", because of how they work typically the last bidders wind up being the winners - you simply cannot know who the winners are and how much each item will cost until the auction closes. Ducth Auctions also work best when every item being sold is IDENTICAL, Dutch Auctions do not work well for "Dutch Ladder" sales where you are selling different levels of commissions or items based on the bid level.

So what's the solution? We are working very hard right now to bring you two new features: Storefronts and Commission Tracking which will resolve all of these issues. In the meantime, we ask you to please refrain from engaging in "off the bid sheet" sales on FurBuy, and refrain from setting up "Dutch Ladder Auctions". For the moment we will not be enforcing this very rigidly, but once the proper solutions are implemented we will.

We're always updating and tweaking the site on FurBuy, many things get changed or improved without any comment and there are so many such things it's sometimes hard to keep you guys up to date on them. I just wanted to comment on some changes made in the last month here.

Many of the changes lately have been in the back-end administrative tools which we use to help manage accounts, auctions, images, news and any other thing you can imagine on the site. Today I've completed the admin tool for adding and updating Contributing Memberships for users, and processed a number of memberships as well. My apologies to those of you who have been waiting for a couple of weeks now for that, my father took ill and passed away last week, so as you can imagine these have been very trying times for me. But all memberships, both new and renewals, have been processed and we're up to speed!

We have removed the old Contact Info page from linkage on the system and replaced links to it with link to the User Profile page which contains Contact Info, Profile Info, Feedback and other user information in one convenient place. Also on the User Profile page you can find a list of User Interactions links which allow you to work with the user. Currently you can Blacklist a user (from bids/comments on your auctions) and our members will also see a "Watch" link which does not presently do anything useful (new membership feature that's coming soon). We will also be adding a messaging system and a Send Message link will appear there soon!

True "Global Blacklist" is now supported and active on the site! Believe it or not, this hasn't really been a huge priority in the 11 years we've been running now, but as we add more social networking features we wanted to see to it that this was in place before it was necessary. To Blacklist a user from bidding or commenting on your auctions (and in the future your Store Items, Forum Threads and Private Messages) you must go to their User Profile page and click the Blacklist link in the User Interaction section. You can Un-Blacklist the user anytime through the same method (the Blacklist link changes to Un-Blacklist after you've blacklisted a user).

So What's Next? High on my list of things to get done right now is an Automated Ad Banner Submission system such that users can just upload their banner and fill out a simple form, then send payment and we simply login to our admin interface, review and approve the ad to get it rotating. This system would also show all available slots for the current month and months ahead, plus allow users to choose exactly which months to show the banner for. After that we'd like to get an Auction Archive system working so folks can review auctions which have been archived, and also allow sellers and bidders to remove auctions which they no longer wish to see from their My Selling and My Bidding pages prior to archival.

Beyond that we are still sitting on a large set of features which are at varying states of progress. We still have a developer whose sole task right now is forums, who is working on a revolutionary new method of storing and serving forums threads. We'd still like to expand out into Storefronts for users to sell static items at a fixed price, we'd still like to get the Commission System up and running, and we're still contemplating a Want Ads and/or Reverse Auction system. As always, we love to hear from users and if you have any feature requests or ideas on how we can improve the FurBuy experience, please let us know!

Finally, a brief word that we are still in great need of financial support from our users. You can help support us by either becoming a Contributing Member, purchasing Ad Banner space (if not for you, then maybe for a friend!), directly contributing to our mission via Paypal, or just spreading the word about FurBuy and our services.

Thanks again everyone for your continued support, and don't ever hesitate to send us your questions, thoughts or ideas!

Many users have been asking lately for some way to provide better security for sellers against fraudulent users placing bids on their auctions. But thus far none of the complaints have come with any constructive or useful advice on how to approach doing so. A new feature we have been considering for a couple years now but have been worried about implementing which we call "Secure Auctions" provides a possible solution, so we wanted to get some feedback and thoughts from our community before implementing it.
Basically the feature involves allowing sellers to lock down bidding on individual auctions to only users with positive feedback OR users who have a paid membership on the system. This means that new users without paid accounts or positive feedback would NOT be able to place any bids on Secure Auctions posted on the system - they would either need to purchase a FurBuy membership first or establish a positive rating through buying or selling insecurely first. We would require sellers to have a contributing membership in order to use this feature. We realize that this may seem a little "unfair" in some senses, though we also realize how this may benefit FurBuy's ability to support itself and keep running amidst what has so far been a losing (financially) membership system.
So what we want to know is: what do you think about such a feature? As a seller, would you buy a membership (if you don't already have one) and use it to prevent fraudulent bids? As a bidder, would you buy a membership to bid on Secure Auctions? Do you have any other questions, concerns or ideas that may be useful for considering a new system of helping reduce fraud on FurBuy? We want to know!

One other option we've discussed briefly is limiting the number of auctions free accounts may bid on. Contributing members would be permitted to bid on an unlimited number of auctions. While this wouldn't eliminate fraud altogether, it would severely limit the amount of fraud that a single account could generate. Thoughts?

Sadly we're a long ways away from achieving our goal of $400 for December's network fees and the current admin team will have trouble floating it as we're all broke this holiday season. =/ We currently have ZERO homepage ad banners running despite that they are only $5 per month and get an enormous amount of views and click-throughs. We also have a ton of auction footer banners available at $10 per month. Please consider buying a month or three of ad banner space to promote your website, your blog, your FA page, even someone else's site or page! It goes to a good cause and promotes you or your friends. For more Ad Banner info head here: http://www.furbuy.com/docs/adbanners.shtml

And of course we still have our annual Contributing Membership for just $18 per year, that's only $1.50 per month! Even if you won't use it right away, it's better to have it there when you will need it, after all you get a ton of expanded features and capabilites on FurBuy when you're a member! If nothing else, your membership supports the site and keeps us running and motivated! For more info on membership, go here: http://www.furbuy.com/docs/membership.shtml

Even if you can't directly support FurBuy with contributions, please spread the word and help us build a stronger and more aware community. Thanks for your support this holiday season!

Yes, it's legitimate. In order to help protect FA users and FurBuy users, we now send a courtesy message to every FA user for whom a FurBuy account is linked to. This is in order to give FA users a warning in the event that someone is using their FA username against their will or permission. If you receive a message stating that a FurBuy account has been linked to your FA account and you did not create or establish that account on FurBuy, please let us know right away and we'll work through the issue with you. Thanks for your patience and support!

Note: The message you received recently is NOT prompted by user activity, it was an automated message to bring existing users up to speed with the new system. From now on, if you receive that message it will be due to user activity, though.