We see a sharp spike in traffic and activity. Honestly, things are doing well. Naturally, we expected an enormous influx of tire kickers and time wasters when we opened up to the public. But the previous model wasn’t realistic, as it solely relied on traffic deflected (and screened by us) from ViralAccounts.com. While it kept everything in check, there wasn’t much going on. When ViralAccounts.com got recently deindexed (someone is negative SEO’ing us), traffic stopped flowing in here, also. We can’t have that, we can’t rely on one site alone, so this is why we decided to open to the public.
Activity is slowly rising (137K pageviews in the past 30 days), there are more listings and more checkout tickets. And yes, this naturally affects the quality of listings, as gems are a lot tougher to weed out now. But, I think it comes with the territory. If you want to find something good, you need to get your hands dirty and look for it. Basically, the burden of finding good sellers was handed from me to the public, as before SWAPD went open, I manually screened EVERYONE who joined. This obviously would never work on a large scale, and ever since we’ve opened to the public, our workload is high enough as it is. For a site that just bearly has 1000 members, we already have four admins and a moderator. Since we screen everything, the workload is high.
And to the contrary, joining may be easy, but checking out isn’t. The security on high valued tickets currently equals a good rectal exam. We perform additional audits, we screen sellers (we already have a problem where to store sellers ID’s), and mostly use a wire payment, which is irrevisable. And contrary to popular belief, our SMS verification system is quite good. It has an excellent reputation, and I see that on weekly basis that it rejects plenty of blacklisted numbers. Also, out moderator @vincent1100 is a verification terminator, he doesn’t mess around. I am actually worried as he keeps sending me scans of passports and ID’s, I am not sure if we’re legally allowed to do this.
Also, we’re always open to suggestions, and we change this site as we go along. In these short 6-8 months (don’t remember when we started getting active), we changed the way we operate at least 20 times, based on situations we’ve encountered. If you have any ideas how to improve things, I am all ears 
