Inactive BoonEx Members - Market Cleanup

We (Moderators/BoonEx) need to start slowly but surely removing products from the Market that are tied to members who are no longer active at BoonEx. This will help keep new/current members from running into communication issues, product activation issues, and/or support issues.

In the future, If you receive a PM from a Moderator regarding a product that 'seems' to be inactive (meaning not updated, no responses from PMs, etc.) simply respond in a timely fashion advising if the product is still 'active'. This post should also be a reminder to all vendors who have products in the Market. If your product is no longer supported (regardless the reason why), please remove them from the BoonEx Market place.

 

If you have experienced an issue regarding 'no response' on a product, please let one of the moderators know what product you are referring to. Please DO NOT send us emails about a member who is known to be active but yet was slow in response time. We are more interested in members who have not posted anything (forums, product updates, etc.) or communicated with members over a long period of time.

 

If multiple attempts to communicate with vendors by moderators fail, products will be hidden from the Market.

 

My own personal example:

A few days ago I sent a PM to Kevinmitnick and have not yet received a response. According to his products, he requests a maximum of 12 hours to respond, which of course I have waited longer. Has anyone been in contact with him within the last week?

If anyone knows how to contact him, please do and advise him to respond. I do not see any recent activity/posts made by him so I would assume that if there is no response by Friday, this person is no longer at BoonEx. Depending on the responses here by other members and/or lack of response by Friday, his products could be hidden from the Market. If you have any information regarding Kevinmitnick, please let me know.

I am alive 

As a side note, something should be automated to hide products which developer didn't logged in for more than a month or something.

 Pffffftt.. C'mon now.. Let's not get 'logic' involved in this

I thought the idea was that you could use the Market to download modules from your shopping history in case you lost them.  I have a couple of modules from a developer that is not active, he does maintain a site off of Boonex.  I try to keep a back-up of my modules of course.  I guess I should also keep an off-site backup as well; something I have not been doing.

Also, what if we are willing to take a chance on a module that is in the market is from an inactive member?

Perhaps instead of taking them completely down, and there are Dolphin 6 modules in the market from inactive developers, a big red sign that states, "This developer is no longer active on Boonex,  Purchase these modules at your own risk.  Boonex will offer no disputes moderation for these modules."

However, there probably are some inactive developers with very outdated modules that should be removed.  Maybe put up a list of the developers that are to be removed so we can review it?  Guess I am just worried that I might lose access to a module but I guess most of the ones I have are from active developers.

Is it possible to have it where the modules are still available to those that have purchased them without anyone being able to purchase anew because the developer is inactive?

The current system is very inflexible. For me, when a developer is inactive, I hide their market items. This removes the chance for new purchases for a possibly broken and unsupported product, but allows me to unhide them to allow downloads from customers who have already bought the module.

In the case of disputed developers who don't answer, I do have to suspend their account, which means the products will become unavailable, period. In those cases, I recommend off-site backups, because there's no way for me to unsuspend them early or restore access to individual market items while the account is suspended.

The best way to handle this would be to:

1. Remove the ability to purchase from the vendor - archive/download only for previous customers
2. Keep active market items downloadable for previous customers when the vendor is suspended

But neither of those options are available to moderators.

Good idea on cleaning up. To help this happen and alleviate the problem, we'll now work on...

- Showing last-activity date to moderators and perhaps some list of the longest-inactive ones

- After 3 months of inactivity moderators would be recommended to contact the member, and suspend them if no reply has come for 1-2 weeks. Perhaps a notification to moderators would be sent to alert about 3month+-inactive Vendors.

- Allowing direct (by link from shopping cart history) download from suspended members.

I don't think a vendor should be suspended simply because they're inactive. If they have an open (and valid) dispute, sure, but otherwise, pulling the items from sale (but still allowing downloads) sounds like the better route to me.

 I can't say that I completely agree here. The reason being is that if that 'product' that you download happens to require an activation key of some sort or you need some kind of support, you will end up suspending the vendor anyway for not responding. Since we do not know if the module will require any of this ahead of time, you might as well get rid of it if the vendor has not been active on BoonEx within 3 months. You can pretty much figure that they are not on vacation.

They(vendors) should stop selling their unsupported products, at least upon moderator/admin request, or they will be suspended.

If vendor come up some time later and cleanup their products they can be activated.

Also the features (mentioned by Andrew) are already implemented and you(moderators/admins) can check it for sure if this is enough to start the cleaning.