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Posted by D Sherman on Friday, December 19, 2008 at 15:59:29 :
I listed a knife on ebay, and they immediately pulled the listing, saying it violated their weapons policy. Naturally, there was no actual way to email an actual person at ebay to ask them exactly HOW it violated their policy. The cancellation notice pointed to a page that detailed their policy that said nothing about the kind of knife I was listing being banned. I thought maybe because it was a bayonet, but when I searched for "bayonet", there were 1800 listings. I thought maybe it was because it was an AK-47 bayonet, but when I searched for "AK-47", that came up with lots of listings too. I thought maybe it was because I called it a "survival knife" that they didn't like it, but again, there were gobs of "survival knives" listed. Naturally, their email threatened to cancel my account if I persisted in violating their incomprehensible "weapons policy". Nevertheless, I thought I'd give it another try, this time calling it a "Russian military bayonet" instead of a "Russian AK-47 bayonet". Sure enough, the listing's been up for a while now, and no cancellation. Maybe they just haven't caught it yet, and maybe when they do they'll do all kinds of bad things to me, but it looks to me like their system is simply programmed to automatically cancel any listing that contains the phrase "AK-47 bayonet", without any human actually looking at what the thing is.
When is somebody going to create a true alternative to ebay?
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