Equipment Exchange

If a buyer/seller has substantially failed to honor their part of a deal that was agreed upon, chances are good that you have a valid complaint. If you have contacted that person and asked them to make the issue right and they have refused or not responded, you likely have grounds for a thread in the Feedback forum. Before posting such a thread, ask yourself if a reasonable amount of time has passed to allow the buyer/seller to address the issue. When in doubt about posting a complaint thread, feel free to discuss the issue privately with any of the EE Mods/Staff.

At a minimum, a complaint should contain enough information to allow someone who knows nothing about the deal to understand what happened and when it happened. A link to the original ad is always helpful. Sometimes including excerpts from IM or e-mail negotiations is useful, but if you choose to include them, please see the next question.

Please do not include "real names,” addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses in your initial complaint. This information should be published only after receiving permission to do so from the EE Staff. That information may be published in due course, but it should not be present in an initial post.

If you include portions of negotiations from IM or e-mail, please remove any identifying information. For example, "Joe Smith, [email protected]” should be removed and Joe’s board username inserted instead.

Finally, please avoid derogatory language in your post. It’s not necessary to call the other party names or otherwise insult them. You may think that they’re a "@#$%” or a "*&^%” but including that in your post is counter-productive.

The Mods/Staff in the EE all, believe it or not, have real jobs and real families to attend to. Your complaint will be addressed, but it may not happen instantly. If your complaint has dropped to page two of the Feedback forum without apparent notice by Mods/Staff, feel free to reply to thread to bump it back to the top of the forum.

If your complaint involves an Industry Partner or Dealer, please note that these complaints are handled by Staff only and that may delay the response (There are fewer Staff than Mods.)

In almost all cases, the person you’ve levied a complaint against will be given the opportunity to respond to the complaint before a decision is rendered. This is only fair as there are always two sides to every story, even if the person cannot offer a credible defense against the complaint. If a complaint is particularly well documented, a preliminary -1 may be suggested by a Mod/Staff, but the person complained against will still be given the opportunity to respond. If no response is offered, then a decision will be made in absentia.

In some instances, a review of the available evidence will suggest that no -1 is warranted. These decisions are not made lightly and do not in any way suggest that your complaint was voiced in error. However, there are some instances where a complaint simply does not warrant the entry of formal negative feedback. Please don’t take such a decision personally.

You can always ask an EE Staff member who was not involved in the complaint to review the outcome. Keep in mind that decisions in complex complaints are virtually always made only after much discussion in the Moderator forum.

The first thing to realize here is that ignoring the complaint will not make it go away. If a complaint has been made in the Feedback forum, you will need to address it. If you don’t address it, your account will eventually be suspended and your name and location may be published on the board.

The first thing you need to do is realistically assess your role in the transaction. If you’re "in the wrong” you will do far better in the Feedback forum if you accept responsibility for your mistake than if you try to argue that you aren’t at fault. If you truly believe that you’re blameless, then state your case. If, on reflection, you realize that you could have done things better, then state that and propose a solution to the problem.

The EE Feedback forum is public. Anyone is free to offer commentary regarding the complaint at hand. If the commentary is particularly negative, then go back and review your role in the transaction. You may find some insight on how you need to go about fixing the situation if you take a hard look at how others view it. If someone has posted a harsh view of you, in light of the complaint, then keep in mind that you do not make yourself look better by responding in kind.

Not at all. Sometimes it’s not the problem that dictates the outcome, but the solution. If a mutually agreeable solution to the complaint can be found, negative feedback can often be avoided altogether. That’s not always the case, but the fact that a complaint has been made does not mean that you’ll eventually receive a -1. You might, but it’s not guaranteed and your response to the complaint goes a long way toward dictating the outcome.

Not necessarily. Removal of negative feedback is handled on a case-by-case basis and is done solely at the discretion of the Mod/Staff who entered the -1. If you want to know if your -1 can be removed at some point, ask the Mod/Staff who gave it to you.

You can always ask an EE Staff member who was not involved in the complaint to review the outcome. Keep in mind that decisions in complex complaints are virtually always made only after much discussion in the Moderator forum.