Audiogon's new face

[ack]

Same here

 

[DEV]

I have made two purchases recently and I can tell you it was very painful for both me and the seller

#1 sellers not receiving my questions

#2 I finally got past that and actually trying to make the actual offer and upon pressing send, error would then show up. Did this a few times and got fed up and then provided my email for the seller to communicate in such. They must be loosing allot of business.

#3 you still can not contact anyone, sending a personal PM

The site is still messed up, many times it won't load and a server error comes up on my end.

They talked about a NEW and Improved site, can anyone tell me what I'm missing! because what I'm experiencing is one heck of a mess.

 

[MylesBAstor]

Down tonight again. Can't even get to landing page.

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

 

[steve williams]

I just got on first try

 

[Bruce B]

Down tonight again. Can't even get to landing page.

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

I got an error as well.... Did you refresh your browser Steve?

 

[steve williams]

I got an error as well.... Did you refresh your browser Steve?

No

I have gotten in 3 times here in the past 15 minutes

 

[steve williams]

Well guess what. I just tried again and got the error you saw

 

[DEV]

Who ever is responsible for doing this Audiogon site sucks big time and should be fired and the old site just put back up. I just tried going on, three failed attempts to finally get on. I saw an ad with pictures that I wanted to look at and when I clicked onto such a window came up saying "not available at this time", what the f..k is that. So then I decided to check out thread posting from members and upon clicking Audiophile Forums a page comes up saying "Internet explorer can not display the web page"

Like I said above fire who ever is responsible for doing this new site, this is 2012 and the way this is being done is like they are back in ...., absolutely horrible and unprofessional.

I still do not see anything that is better than the old site, they still will not allow you to send a personal email. I see many are now adding their email so to communicate, they really are their own worse enemy, I'm sure their revenue must be way down.

Looks good on them!

 

[DEV]

Just tried the audio forums again as you can see from the time and still down, boy is this site ever messed up badly!

 

[MylesBAstor]

Seeing as the people who knew what they were doing are gone, it seems that Audiogon, sadly, is going throw some death throes unless the new people wake up quickly.

 

[steve williams]

Seeing as the people who knew what they were doing are gone, it seems that Audiogon, sadly, is going throw some death throes unless the new people wake up quickly.

was the site sold?

 

[MylesBAstor]

was the site sold?

I don't know what went on there but Arnie, one of the founders, as well as Bill Leebens have left Audiogon.

 

[MylesBAstor]

Think this was also what Bill Leebens was referring to in his post. From over at AAff on 2/8.

DAM!!! Audiogon is passing the Check System malware virus! I just clicked on the Audiogon homepage at work yesterday and IE crashed. I opened it back up and the virus loaded. I run Microsoft Security essentials and Defender and was up to date. Microsoft spent 8 hours trying to sort out the mess and get all of the hidden files back. Long story short, I have to do a complete reinstall of Windows 7 on my office PC that I use to pay bills with etc. Thank God I was not on the server. From now on I will only check Audiogon from one of my Macs at home. Dam Audiogon to Hell...

Followup:

Yea its one thing to be just a poor functioning web site. Its another thing all together when they are the source of major trouble. The variant I got was very wicked according to Microsoft. They had me with their teir 3 security support, and he said that the virus had hidden so many critical Windows files a reload was the only way to ever really sort it out. At least they got me running so I can write payroll checks this week. I searched google and I am not alone. There is a thread on Audio Asylum and AVS about the same virus and Audiogon. So I wanted to put the word out here too. I don't wish this crap on anyone.

 

[steve williams]

If audiogon has a known virus why can't it be removed?

 

[MylesBAstor]

If audiogon has a known virus why can't it be removed?

Same reason they can't keep it running? Maybe the reason it's down is to remove the virus. Certainly there's more IT, tech saavy people here than I Amir??? Peter???

Of course why and how did this occur? To my knowledge, this never happened before the changeover.

 

[ack]

You can't remove a virus if you don't have the tech staff to summon... I've had technical discussions with audiogon staff in the long past regarding security holes in their pages I had found, and they were pretty savvy people. It sounds like these people are now gone, and whoever's left doesn't know how to run the IT side of things; frankly, it sounds like they don't even know what 3rd party vendor to call or what anti-virus software to buy.

The technical problems will only mount down the road, e.g. when hard drives start to fail? It feels like whoever's left has a big mess in their hands and doesn't know which way to turn to fix all this.

 

[MylesBAstor]

Other reports:

I spoke to a dealer the other day that sells frequently on Agon, and they have money of his and wont release it. They keep saying they are working on it.

I cant get in touch with another dealer that I am trying to work with either.

Its sad.

Sad thing is, I don't think the update had anything to do with improving the site. It was all about them being able to more tightly monitor the site and keep track of all transactions. Obviously people were listing gear, being contacted and then going off site so Agon couldn't collect their fees (eg. don't hit the sell button, just go offline and negotiate).I know that for a fact because people wanted to do it that way and I refused on grounds that it was kinda like stealing

OTOH, I never found Agon very helpful in disputes. One time, bought something in a Dutch auction and none of us got the product. Turned out that the ad was posted by someone with an unsavory reputation in the industry and needed some money to pay bills. Agon found out and kicked the guy off the site, but didn't tell any of us who ended up paying for this cable. And Agon was totally useless in trying to recoup the money.

I finally got this cable a couple of months later (and that's there's no Reader's Digest version of how I finally received this cable) and it wasn't what promised. Another person in Australia finally got his length of cable and it didn't work out of the box. Last thing heard from the chap was that he just wrote it up to a bad experience He was tired of trying to fight the Agon system.

 

[ack]

Sad thing is, I don't think the update had anything to do with improving the site. It was all about them being able to more tightly monitor the site and keep track of all transactions. Obviously people were listing gear, being contacted and then going off site so Agon couldn't collect their fees (eg. don't hit the sell button, just go offline and negotiate).I know that for a fact because people wanted to do it that way and I refused on grounds that it was kinda like stealing

Correct. For example, anyone with a high enough positive feedback could deal offline, not caring for more positive feedback - thus not paying the fees, and letting the ad expire or removing it entirely; and if the buyer was dissatisfied and sent negative feedback, the seller could simply not accept it.

So instead of fixing these business issues one by one and rolling changes in phases, they re-designed the whole thing and rolled out this mess. This could have avoided the aversion to the new look and feel, log in problems, search issues, etc. Frankly, it sounds like their internal software architecture was not scalable to start with.

 

[mep]

Audiogon would never help you in a dispute, even when it was crystal clear the seller was a scammer. It's like getting Fed Ex or UPS to pay a claim for which they clearly caused the damage. They put you through a meat grinder in hopes you will just give up.

 

[DEV]

It's amazing reading the above postings and defiantly mirrors my experience.

Since the changes to the site a serious virus call "bloodhound" has attacked my system but been stoped each and every time, it shows as high PRIORY WARNING! Four times now just looking at my reports. They have some serious issues.

Dispute resolutions, what a joke! Absolute waist of time and energy, better things to do in life.

It really is a shame because I have met allot of individules from all over the world and been able to sell items off that I no longer wanted but now it's just a mess.

I believe once they added on the % for an actaul sale plus charging for placing an ad caused them allot of issues, they were making allot of coin from ads just being placed but then greed kicked in and they decided to get some more money out of transactions. I know I paid my dues selling items, usually larger ticket ones and looking back at how much money they made off my transactions kinda makes me sick.

Timing is everything and right now is the time for someone to start up a new one as mentioned earlier but to do so successfully you need skilled individuals to keep it up and running smoothly 24/7 specially when you are dealing with individuals from all over the world.

Do the numbers and look at how many adds are placed daily and the revenue just in placing such provides, some pretty serious numbers.