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Someone please explain the DIBS system here in the Classifieds/m2m (1 Viewer)

I'm done buying and selling in the classifieds. Place is a wasteland now. I'll keep my wanted ad open for the last couple of things I still need and bump it once in a while hoping that I get a PM one day from someone with MGK molded blanks to sell me. What good is saying you want something publicly, thinking you're the first to it, only to be outbid in a PM? This would make me upset on a good day and angry on a bad one if it was for something I was really after.

If I ever sell (unlikely at this point), it's going to be through PM's only.
 
Dibs to me means you bought the Item. I am on 80s BMX Bike forums, and Home Theater Forums, and when people say dibs on there you are100% committed to buy the item. If you don't it could mean you would get publicly shamed or even banned/suspended from buying and selling. On this forum dibs is supposed to mean you are going to buy the item, but too many times people post DIBS in the classifieds only to a few minutes or more later say, "Whoops I read it too fast and didn't realize that is not what I exactly wanted and now release my DIBS." To me that is total BS. There are ZERO repercussions on here for people who do that other than the seller possibly not dealing with you again. If you have the time to post DIBS you should have the time to read for the sale thread completely and look at all the pictures.
 
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Eloe2000 said:
Wow... two days in a row and the same thing happens. I wasn’t involved in this sale but the other person who got snaked with me yesterday was. I would be livid.

I have got to say this is being driven, not by the sellers, but the snakes in the grass.

https://www.pokerchipforum.com/thre...o-de-mexico-casino-ithmus.68869/#post-1391952
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Gotcha!
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I kid! I don’t think I got the Yellow hot stamps either. The snake got snaked. Oh well life goes on. lol
 
If this really is a free market and nobody cares about flipping and it’s really a community like it apparently used to be and such — then what’s the problem with asking people in a For Sale Ad to contact you via PM if you’re interested in buying?

Why does every transaction have to be in full view of everyone if the site administrators or owners aren’t policing individual transactions?

This dibs thing seems silly and pointless if it’s not an actual system with enforcements and such....what if someone yells DIBS and I know from history with them that they’re an awful buyer? I should get to sell chips to whomever I want if this is the free market it purports to be.
 
This is what the guidelines say ...

FOR SALE ADS MUST HAVE A PRICE. Offers by PM no longer acceptable. If you do not know what to ask, make your ad an Auction.

I’m not sure why people get banned for retracting a bid in an auction but there is no consequence for offering chips at a stated price and then reneging on that offer. Perhaps it’s too difficult for the mods to monitor and police.

In any event, this is not how to deal with people in a community supposedly based on trust.
 
57A34CC3-3E5F-49C6-AEE0-7A5172F2844E.jpeg


But also... probably best to just close this sales ad and stop the pig pile.
 
I get the price part - I’m not saying use PMs for price fixing - I’m saying if you put a for sale out there for $50 for a rack of chips and someone PMs you and says I’ll take it for $50, I’d rather deal with that person than some random who types “DIBS” and then tries to figure out whether they actually want it or not.

Really though the entire thing is just weird to me. PCF takes no responsibility for any transactions but tells us what kind of transactions are allowed and all transactions are between 2 individuals but you can’t accept offers via PM only via replies in a thread that everyone can see?

It’s just weird. Only forum I’m on that works this way.
 
Eloe2000 said:
Wow... two days in a row and the same thing happens. I wasn’t involved in this sale but the other person who got snaked with me yesterday was. I would be livid.

I have got to say this is being driven, not by the sellers, but the snakes in the grass.

https://www.pokerchipforum.com/thre...o-de-mexico-casino-ithmus.68869/#post-1391952
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I think that the seller isn’t entirely off the hook in this case but I can sympathise as they’re new to the forum. Someone has weaselled their way in via PM but even still I think that the seller should have stuck to the original selling price.

It’s happened to me a couple of times when I’ve sold something. The weasels waited until I’d put “pending” or closed the thread as sold before they sent a PM offering slightly more than my selling price. In both cases I told them that they missed out and the chips were sold. In one case I was insulted for not accepting their higher offer.

This is just an insight to what can go on in the murky world of PMs. We really need sellers to stick to their guns or if they’re wanting to squeeze every penny out of their chips / genuinely don’t know the values of their chips then set up an auction. Don’t think there’s any way of enforcing that so probably best to chalk it down to experience and keep it in mind next time you see that seller listing an item for sale.
 
Tarheel4Life said:
I get the price part - I’m not saying use PMs for price fixing - I’m saying if you put a for sale out there for $50 for a rack of chips and someone PMs you and says I’ll take it for $50, I’d rather deal with that person than some random who types “DIBS” and then tries to figure out whether they actually want it or not.

Really though the entire thing is just weird to me. PCF takes no responsibility for any transactions but tells us what kind of transactions are allowed and all transactions are between 2 individuals but you can’t accept offers via PM only via replies in a thread that everyone can see?

It’s just weird. Only forum I’m on that works this way.
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FWIW I have mentioned this several times around here but people mean different things when they say "calling dibs" in threads. In the situations we are talking about the buyers specifically posted publicly "I will take the rack. PMed" followed by a PM and request where to send the money.
 
This thread is so dumb. No sale is final until the money has been paid.

The “rule” in the PCF guidelines means that the ad isn’t allowed to say something like “looking for offers on these chips”. It doesn’t mean you can’t accept an offer received by PM, obviously.
 
superchromix said:
The “rule” in the PCF guidelines means that the ad isn’t allowed to say something like “looking for offers on these chips”. It doesn’t mean you can’t accept an offer received by PM, obviously.
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Yes, I believe this is the spirit / intent of the rule. A seller, by placing a For Sale ad, cannot fish for pricing by asking for interested parties to send them offers by PM. In this case, they should use an auction.

If someone independently offers "X" amount of money to the seller by PM, then there's no rule against taking that into consideration, I suppose.

"Market value" for our little plastic disks is a strange thing. I remember listing some chips for auction earlier on in my PCF days at what I thought was a reasonable starting price, but got not a single bite. Two years later, I list the exact same type of chip for sale (not the original batch) at about the same price, maybe 10% higher, and there was almost a mad scramble for them. Didn't expect that at all.
 
superchromix said:
The “rule” in the PCF guidelines means that the ad isn’t allowed to say something like “looking for offers on these chips”. It doesn’t mean you can’t accept an offer received by PM, obviously.
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You’re putting the word rule in quotation marks, but it’s not like it’s some ambiguous unspoken guideline - it’s right there in black and white at the top of the page. And it was a deliberate change! It’s not like it was added by mistake. If someone listed “rack of Mapes 100s, $5, but taking other offers via PM winkyface”, just so they could sit around fielding PMs, and ultimately deciding either to auction or not to sell, I would hope we could all agree that they were abusing the rule! Do I think they should be tarred and feathered or forced at gunpoint to sell to the first timestamped dibs (god I hate that fucking word)? No, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable to lose classifieds privileges. That’s what we do with auction reneges, right?
 
I still don't understand why the rule against soliciting offers exists, other than as a moderator said here the rule was created because of "issues" and "member feedback".

Announcing that you have something for sale and are looking for offers is a perfectly normal way to transact. It's the standard way that deals are made in every collectors' hobby everywhere other than this forum. And even right here on this forum, it still happens all the time via PM, and it is apparently the way that the most-valued chip sales take place. The difference is that on PCF no one outside a small insider network is allowed to participate in these kinds of high-value make-me-an-offer negotiations, because public solicitation of offers and public advertisement of deals available subject to negotiation has been forbidden, due to "issues" and "member feedback".

Auctions are not a suitable replacement for offer solicitation. I mean, it's good that auctions are allowed, because for many people in many circumstances auctions are a great way to sell something (and a great way to buy something as well! It's so much better than refreshing the Classified screen every waking minute hoping to be the first one to spot a deal). But there's a lot of things wrong with auctions as well, particularly in the format the PCF uses, and there's a lot of reasons why a seller wouldn't want to run one.

Forbidding public listings of offers to negotiate a sale is just bizarre. I get that there's some kind of history here, some situation where a bunch of members felt like a bunch of other members did something "unfair" somehow, but without knowing that history myself I feel like the forum has made a huge mistake.
 
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I think you can still solicit public offers if you wanted to. You’d just need to list an item for a price way over what you think anyone would pay and use the old ”Don’t like my price? Make me an offer.” line. Those offers would need to be posted in the thread, not sent by PM, to follow the rules.
 
There's several ways you can subvert the apparent intention behind this rule:
  • Your suggestion, where you solicit public offers, since the wording of the rule only bans private offers
  • List an obviously high price and wait for offers to arrive, since that way you haven't *asked* for offers
  • Use a Trade ad instead of a Sale ad, and wait for offers to arrive - you can even say "will consider cash" in your ad!
  • List them on Craigslist, then make a "Mine" post in the "eBay / Amazon / Craigslist / Other" forum where you can be as explicit as you like about seeking and considering offers
... but it seems bad to have a rule that's so easily subverted. I question the reasoning behind the intent of the rule itself. I think the rule should be abandoned, not because it's so easily subverted, but because it's a bad rule.

Edit: Also, I suspect that anyone who asked for public offers would be told to make it an auction and would have their sale post deleted.
 
Josh Kifer said:
Ban all sales! Let's ban posting too! Y'all dun F'ed up!
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I'm surprised you haven't gone into all sales threads and just posted "Dibs".


Only saying you because you are the fun troll that knows how to pull it off as opposed the the asshat type troll that ruins stuff.
 
ChipEnvy said:
I'm surprised you haven't gone into all sales threads and just posted "Dibs".


Only saying you because you are the fun troll that knows how to pull it off as opposed the the asshat type troll that ruins stuff.
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Its a very fine line i run, so i try and not destroy everything. I just try to do enough to have a good time....
 
We could have less rules (or leave them as is) and go Mad Max in this bitch.

Or we could have rules that are meaningful and implement the spirit of the law through light moderation, but that probably doesn't work when Mods are busy deleting Piper Perri memes due to worries about her age and the suggested innuendo of the meme.

I'm guessing XenForo is about as good as it gets for something like this, so platform changes that have more robust classified options aren't viable either.
 
CrazyEddie said:
... but it seems bad to have a rule that's so easily subverted.
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I mean this is the whole problem really. We aren't paying moderators to fly around the country to hold sellers at gunpoint to make sure they ship their chips to the PCF approved buyer according to whatever the ever-changing PCF "community standards" are at the moment.

I think it's absolutely fine to point out bad faith like this.

RichMahogany said:
Not always true. I committed to buying chips one time, received PP info, and paid only to have my money refunded the next morning and chips sold to an unknown buyer.
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But that's different to me than a seller having another preference outside of what people want dibs to believe (as evidenced by 7 pages of opinions with no consensus), that's really up to the seller since he will be the one addressing the package in the end, regardless of what the "community" wants.

Situations where buyers expect dibs on a split to be honored even if more convenient to a whole lot buyer. Or buyers expect dibs to mean an automatic hold of some length to which the seller finds detrimental, just to name a couple things.

It just seems impractical at some point to "enforce" dibs against a preference of the seller. You can call out bad faith and let people decide for themselves. Any more effort than that seems impractical.
 
RichMahogany said:
Wow that’s some BS
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That wasn’t the worse part of it. I could have lived with just that, but the seller lied to me all week, and I was even in touch with the other chipper and He Knew I had already paid for these and was waiting on shipment but he went ahead and took the chips that I had already paid for.
They both decided to fuck me over and lie about it. That was the part that bothered me, the lying and deceit.
But they are both “fine upstanding members” - you can translate that to mean “they have good chips that other people still want to buy” so they are given a pass.
 
ekricket said:
That wasn’t the worse part of it. I could have lived with just that, but the seller lied to me all week, and I was even in touch with the other chipper and He Knew I had already paid for these and was waiting on shipment but he went ahead and took the chips that I had already paid for.
They both decided to fuck me over and lie about it. That was the part that bothered me, the lying and deceit.
But they are both “fine upstanding members” - you can translate that to mean “they have good chips that other people still want to buy” so they are given a pass.
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It's all about the benjies chippies man! Just a lil more apparent now than previously I spose.

benjies.gif
 
ekricket said:
That wasn’t the worse part of it. I could have lived with just that, but the seller lied to me all week, and I was even in touch with the other chipper and He Knew I had already paid for these and was waiting on shipment but he went ahead and took the chips that I had already paid for.
They both decided to fuck me over and lie about it. That was the part that bothered me, the lying and deceit.
But they are both “fine upstanding members” - you can translate that to mean “they have good chips that other people still want to buy” so they are given a pass.
Click to expand...

That's fucked up. In all my 1000s of online transactions this is only place that I've been screwed over by a seller. It was only $65 bucks but WTH.
 

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