Starting next week we are opening registrations

Site News & Feedback
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If our dev team can pull this off, starting next week, we will move from a private community to open registrations. Our current operating model stifles growth, so in order to for the community to grow, we will now allow anyone to register. We have actually ran into a problem of having too many sellers and not enough buyers. Since our members aren’t inviting others like we thought they would, we need to switch. If you’re worried about this move please keep in mind that our open registrations will come with a few safeguards. Our developer is currently working on a state-of-the-art SMS verification system for new members. This system will need an actual phone in order to register on our website, and it’s smart enough (or it should be) to differentiate between Skype/Google numbers, or any other web-based number providers. The second safeguard will be mandatory social profiles on file for all new members. People who do not have a problem verifying their phone and identity are less likely to cause problems. We believe this new system will be adequate enough to keep most bad apples away, but we do realize that once we open registrations, there will be an influx of “iffy” buyers/sellers. Even if that happens, please remember we catch everything during checkout tickets, so if you follow our rules, you will have nothing to worry about.

Hopefully, this move will kickstart the activity. Even though we are happy with the current progress, we know very well it could be a lot better.

P.S. Once we open registrations we will be on a lookout for moderators! We’re already eyeing a few potential members :slight_smile:

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great news !

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My five cents on the telephone registration security feature. There are services that provide numbers for registering with just about any property, and some work 100% of the time.

In general though, this is a good move IMHO, if more people (and more properties) come onboard, that will be very welcome!

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Yes, we do realize that. But they’re not free and it’s about making it cumbersome for the scammers. At the end of the day, the safety is still all about doing things via checkout. A potential scammer has to:

  1. Get a PVA
  2. Fake a social profile (hard to create a real looking one, we’re really good at spotting fakes)
  3. Pass our checkout

… in order to cheat someone. People who circumvent our checkout and get scammed will get no help from us what-so-ever. But people who do use our checkout don’t have to worry, as we go all out at the slightest whiff of malicious activity. Since we launched a few months ago, we’ve only had three instances where things went wrong during checkout (mostly due to our fault and letting a scammer slip by). However, we were able to make things right in every instance, which included account recovery and in one case, recompensation.

There is (almost) no getting around a middleman transaction, so even if scammers do attempt to try, they will be roadblocked at checkout.

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