![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Smashed penny drama
Mon, Feb. 27th, 2006 07:45 amFor years, I've been subscribed to a Yahoo group specializing in smashed pennies, or perhaps I should say more correctly, elongated coins (called ECs for short). One of the folks on the list runs a website called parkpennies.com, which is a comprehensive catalog of Disneyland and Walt Disney World elongated coins. It's a wonderful Web site and an excellent resource for collectors, and this fellow has been a font of knowledge, a keen researcher, and avid hobbyist for years. He's a terrific guy.
One of the things he does on his site is track Disney EC eBay auctions. Occasionally, if someone is posting coins with suspicious conditions (for example, grossly overpricing them or asking an extremely high shipping fee or doing any of those two while displaying almost no buyer feedback), he'll make a note of this occurence without naming names. Usually he'll just note on his site that a new seller has appeared on eBay and that buyers should be cautious. It's a service that we in the EC community have all appreciated for quite some time. Well, this past week, some stranger invaded the Yahoo group, slinging accusations at him, claiming he'd defamed her (he names no names, remember) and saying all sorts of nasty and innaccurate things about him. What's worse, at least one (very vocal but not very knowledgeable) member of the group added her voice to the attack.
Having been with this group almost ten years, I immediately leaped to Bob's defense and so did a number of other people. Unfortunately the damage was done. Bob was so hurt and so astonished, he's resigned from the list. He did it with a huge amount of grace, saying he didn't want to muddy the waters for the 800 other subscribers. But he's left.
I'm so angry about this I could just spit. There are few enough people on the list who know what they're talking about, and to lose one of them is an enormous loss to the community. He'll still maintain his site, of course—one I highly recommend—but the group has lost someone who has been unfailingly generous over the years. I hate it that one vicious stranger with one nasty e-mail can poison an atmosphere like that. I just hate it.
One of the things he does on his site is track Disney EC eBay auctions. Occasionally, if someone is posting coins with suspicious conditions (for example, grossly overpricing them or asking an extremely high shipping fee or doing any of those two while displaying almost no buyer feedback), he'll make a note of this occurence without naming names. Usually he'll just note on his site that a new seller has appeared on eBay and that buyers should be cautious. It's a service that we in the EC community have all appreciated for quite some time. Well, this past week, some stranger invaded the Yahoo group, slinging accusations at him, claiming he'd defamed her (he names no names, remember) and saying all sorts of nasty and innaccurate things about him. What's worse, at least one (very vocal but not very knowledgeable) member of the group added her voice to the attack.
Having been with this group almost ten years, I immediately leaped to Bob's defense and so did a number of other people. Unfortunately the damage was done. Bob was so hurt and so astonished, he's resigned from the list. He did it with a huge amount of grace, saying he didn't want to muddy the waters for the 800 other subscribers. But he's left.
I'm so angry about this I could just spit. There are few enough people on the list who know what they're talking about, and to lose one of them is an enormous loss to the community. He'll still maintain his site, of course—one I highly recommend—but the group has lost someone who has been unfailingly generous over the years. I hate it that one vicious stranger with one nasty e-mail can poison an atmosphere like that. I just hate it.