FTC and WSO's

Dude... be serious... I haven't missed a point since before you were born.

So... you're practicing law... giving legal opinions... great! Please tell us your
bar association number and the states where you are admitted to practice.

Until then... your legal opinions mean nothing. And... yes... your post is silly.

Thank god some people care about the forum...

I'm all for those who want to clean up this place.

So let's say I report a WSO for not being FTC compliant and the mods do nothing about it . Am I to assume they don't care if people are scamming?

You keep trying to make point after point after point, here, to justify your perspective (with which many of us agree, to some extent), yet you steadfastly ignore the point that Big Mike and I have been making to you, which is that you were banned for breaking the forum's rules by posting negatively in a WSO thread when you hadn't bought the WSO.

Are you actually acknowledging that, at all? Or are you just trying to ignore it completely, hoping that nobody will realise that you were at fault?

You've started off a thread to complain about being banned, yet at no point have you acknowledged the reason you were banned.

You might get a lot more sympathy and agreement with some of your perspective, on this issue, if you had the decency to acknowledge that you yourself were also at fault, here.

"Just saying".

Dozens (or more) of members use the triangle to report spam, WSOs and pure stupidity here day after day. They care as much as you do - but don't need the attention of making public accusations.

You've been here 2 weeks, are in the UK, and are concerned with FTC rules?

You are to assume mods looked into it and decided it DOES meet the forum rules. It means you were not right or something is there you don't know about. This forum provides public access - but it's privately owned. The mods are "the police" here - we just help out where we can.

It's not about "questioning the validity of his claim". It's about the forum's rule prohibiting people who haven't bought the WSO from name-calling and making accusations in the WSO thread, when there's an established and more appropriate way to do that. What part of that is hard to understand?

And by the way, "questioning the validity" of something is different from calling someone a liar. I suspect you know that, really, don't you?

The claim that the FTC would have a field day going through the WSO-section is a claim that has been made for years. While the FTC has taken down individual members of the WF a few times, it has never -- to my knowledge -- challenged the advertising channels used by such offers. In case you are confused, the Warrior Forum is simply an advertising platform, similar to the New York Times, About.com, NBC-TV, and thousands of other advertising platforms.

As far as concerns about individual offers go, there is a prescribed method within the forum for addressing those concerns with the forum moderators. If you see a problem with an individual offer, use the Report button and make your case to the forum moderators. The forum moderators will then take a look at the offer to see if it violates forum rules.

If the forum moderators agree with your assessment of the offer, the Buy buttons will be removed from the offer and the thread will be locked, so that the vendor cannot put his Buy buttons back into the offer or redirect the traffic.

If the forum moderators disagree with your assessment, they reserve the right to give you a short vacation to think about the benefits of making false claims against a vendor.

Posting negative comments in the sales thread, which if you are confused is outside the scope of the prescribed method for raising concerns about an offer could get your posts deleted, and it could also result in a short vacation to think about whether you want to follow forum rules in the future.

While your concerns may be valid, the forum rules require a moderator to be involved to moderate between two parties -- the person with concerns and the vendor who paid for the advertising.

Simply posting your concerns to the sales thread not only violates the forum rules, but it also will go unnoticed by the forum moderator -- whose job it is to moderate disagreements -- unless the vendor or another forum user brings your post to the attention of the moderators, via the Report button .

Going outside the prescribed channel of contacting a moderator could be harassment, because lesser people than you may post invalid arguments against a particular product for no other reason than:

• They dislike the vendor;
• They are in competition with the vendor;
• They dislike the product, because it makes their product look like rubbish;
• They believe something in the product is bad, because all they have seen was the sales copy and not the actual product.

As you may have noted, all four items in this list are reasons why someone might post bad comments about a particular offer, and none of the items in the list are valid reasons to damage a sales offer.

This is the reason why the rules are drawn as they are...

If you have valid concerns, take them up with a moderator, who is in the position to look at both sides of the issue and make an appropriate determination as to the validity of the complaint.

If you are posting your concerns on the sales thread, those concerns may damage the offer -- rightly or wrongly, but whether justified or not, your concerns will become other people's concerns, whether your concerns are justified or not.

If you are willing to put yourself in the shoes of the vendor whose offer is being attacked -- rightly or wrongly, then you will be able to understand why the rules have been drawn as they are.

You certainly wouldn't want someone posting in your sales thread, creating doubt in the mind of the consumer, whether you are an honest or dishonest vendor.

If you bring the moderators to a sales thread, and your concerns are justified, the moderator may very well close the offer.

But if the vendor is honest and the product is solid, the damage done by one guy with a chip on his shoulder and a keyboard could be enough to destroy that vendors reputation online, now and forever.

You are claiming the high moral ground -- protecting consumers from their own ignorances and a shady vendor. But I am not so sure that I can give you the credit for owning the high moral ground, if you are unwilling to utilize the mechanisms already put into place to kill dishonest offers -- the Report button .

Man, there is a lot of drama going on in here. You see a rule broken, you report it and let the people running the show handle it. You move on with life and make some money.

Normally, the people who take this to the next level are wasting their time when it could be spent on building their businesses.

Take a look at what you want to accomplish and decide if the time spent dealing with wso sellers and making posts complaining about wso sellers really helps you achieve those goals.

I would hope to high heaven they do not.

Typically, when someone mentions saving others from getting scammed, they don't just stop at voicing their concerns but takes it to a whole new level. Asking for proof isn't a bad thing and if proof isn't provided you either accept it as is or leave thread.

Unfortunately, some think they are entitled to more and won't leave without sabotaging the thread.

This is when people get banned and then come back to accuse the forum of shielding the sellers.

Technically Mike, I was not responding to your "status quo" comment.

I was responding to the following "status quo" comment:





It has been said a number of times that we cannot comment on a sales thread, making statements about the legitimacy of an offer, unless we have first purchased that product.

If we have doubts, we should forward our concerns to the forum moderators.

If you really need access to the written rules concerning the WSO section, you will find them here.

The pertinent section of the WSO rules is:

Also...

Thanks for the clarifications Paul.