Appreciate your input. I can imagine the marketplace being a headache to maintain when it comes to scammers, downvotes and whatnot. I believe we discussed this in a different topic a while ago also. I imagine it's important for a solution to not only be reliable but also ideally be low maintenance and not too difficult to implement. Would probably have to deal with some sort of legacy feedback system to preserve current user ratings however, which doesn't make it any easier.

Maybe there are better solutions today, like embedding some type of escrow service. Will look into this and open to ideas.

I know of a national (Dutch) marketplace platform that embeds an escrow service and unfortunately this seems to be even worse than using Paypal with purchase protection. You tend to run into the same issues but with higher fees and at a larger scale. What happens a lot is that buyers claim that they received a brick or some other worthless item instead of what they purchased. You can however often not dispute any claims as a seller because the escrow service practically always favors the buyer without any meaningful proof or any investigation. It's just easy money for the escrow service without providing any real value. The worst part is that the escrow service is entirely independent from the platform that hires them. They make their own decisions and disregard any proof provided by the marketplace staff that could prove a seller to be legitimate and honest.

There might be more reliable and better curated escrow services out there, but my assumption is that their fees might not make it worth using their services.

The voting system, the other headache: it is far from perfect but better than nothing. And also as a seller you can look at the votes. Which, I am aware, give you another illusion of security :(

I agree. It's a start and while it's not flawless, it's much better than not having any system in place.

What I think could be of value is to require both parties to identify whether they bought or sold an item from/to the other user, along with a textbox where they can write their experience. You could then further expand this by having a separate rating for purchases and sales for each user.

A way to verify a transaction would be ideal, but I think that this could take a significant amount of work and probably also be costly.

I'll explore some ideas today and post here if I feel like I have something worth considering.

First of all, don't take this the wrong way. I get why it's there and the intentions are good. However, I want to give some insight on how it affects me as someone who not only regularly buys, but in particular, frequently sells modules here on MG.

Ever since the buyer protection disclaimer was put up, I have noticed a significant increase in buyers refusing to buy any of my modules unless I agree to them using Paypal's purchase protection. The fees are for the buyer, that's not the issue. The issue lies in the uncertainties for the seller that apply when agreeing to Paypal's purchase protection terms. The worst part is that Paypal's purchase protection was designed for brand new retail products, with return windows and factory warranties. Not for used products on marketplace websites.

The buyer gets at least 30 days, up to 180 days to file a claim against the seller for an item they bought. Yet as a seller, you get to deal with up to 180 days of uncertainty whenever you sell a module using purchase protection. None of this is reflected in the disclaimer.

In case of a claim filed by the buyer, the seller is required to:

• Prove that the module was exactly according to the description, fully functional and properly shipped at the time of sale.
• Prove that the internal components were intact prior to shipping it (impossible without disassembly).
• Defend themselves against any claims over cosmetic wear despite clearly disclosing this in the item description.

If the buyer is dishonest, they can:

• File a claim for any damage to the module that they caused themselves weeks or even months after the sale took place.
• Fake their own signature and claim to not have received their purchase.
• Regret their purchase and initiate a refund claim, regardless of them returning the module or not.

What this results in is a double standard where a seller's positive feedback is disregarded by the buyer, yet a buyer with zero feedfback expects the seller to trust them to not file a claim for whatever reason they may have. It creates an illusion of a safe transaction for both parties, which is far from reality.

I don't know of a direct solution to this problem, but I do think that it's important for users to know that purchase protection does not go both ways. Paypal very heavily favors the buyer in any transaction, which many users are unaware of. For the vast majority of claims made, the seller is out of luck and often even has to pay additional fees on top of losing their money, or they risk having their Paypal account terminated.

EDITED Sunday April 19, 22:19

Something like 2FA will come but it has to be done in a way that won't annoy anyone. For most people MG is just a database to dragdrop modules around, they won't like to give away their mobile phone numbers or fumble around with 3rd party authenticator apps.

I totally get that, a user friendly platform is very important. Better password requirements unfortunately have been proven to often not be effective, because complexity results in users either forgetting their password or recycling their password frequently.

My take would be to require 2FA only for users who intend to sell on MG. This is a common requirement for any modern marketplace platform and I don't think it would be out of place for MG to also enforce this.

I personally do not sell anything without being 100% in control of what happens to the money I receive when selling modules, or anything online. There have been far too many instances, not just on MG, but worldwide, of people abusing the buyers protection system. There is a reason why sellers on Reverb only sell items "as is". If they don't, they risk having the money they received refunded to the buyer, and they will never ever see the item they sent them back.

Who in their right mind would agree on selling something to a stranger with the condition that if the person you sold it to can simply revert the transaction with very little effort, WITHIN 180 DAYS? That makes no sense to me.

I know we have recently had a few cases of a user having their account hacked and buyers getting scammed out of their money. However the only two things that really allowed for that to happen were 1; bad account security by the user and 2; bad account security practises by MG.

It is beyond me why we do not yet have 2FA implemented on MG. A marketplace with this many users really needs more security features to keep their users' accounts safe, because it is common knowledge that the majority of people have a very poor sense of what makes for good account security.

EDITED Dec 25th 2025, 03:08

Buying a module carries much less responsibility than selling a module.

There are scam possibilities from both sides. I am dealing with lot's of requests to delete unjustified downvotes which is annoying because I don't want to interfere in private conversations so if someone comes up with a better, easy to implement idea I am all ears.

-- modulargrid

I've been thinking about a system to replace the current up/downvote options with and I think I have a pretty solid idea here. Besides being more reliable, I think this system will also reduce the amount of requests to remove negative feedback.

Whenever a user has bought or sold a module and decides to up/downvote to the other, the user on the receiving end is sent an automated request to return feedback to the user that initiated it. The catch is however, that only after both parties have submitted their feedback, the score is shown. Neither user can change their feedback after placing it.

This approach eliminates any worries about receiving retaliatory downvote simply because a user is dissatisfied with another user. At the same time, if a transaction didn't happen or if a user is being unreasonable, a user can decide to not leave feedback and thus not getting any in return either.

An optional one-time opportunity, in the form of a single non-editable comment, could be given to any user receiving the downvote as a way of explaining themselves. This comment would be shown as a comment on the users profile, for example when hovering over the username of someone who left the feedback. In any case, comments can not be replied to or edited after placing them. If a solution has been agreed upon by both users, there will be an opportunity to change the negative feedback into a neutral feedback and with that also removing the comment from the users profile. In no way however, will negative feedback be allowed to turn into a positive feedback unless submitted by mistake.

Since there are several aspects to this system, implementation can be as simple and straight forward, or as elaborate and complicated as desired. Simply withholding information about the type of feedback left by one user to another creates a far more reliable system than is currently in place and completely eliminates any fear of retaliatory feedback.

I know this system is not entirely fool-proof, but it would be very difficult to pull that off without enforcing transaction verification.

The current feedback score for users can be held in the form of a legacy score in order to smoothen the transition to a new system.

The thumbs up/down feature could really use a rework.

Currently, the incentive for a user to leave a thumbs down on the profile of a user they had a negative experience with, is practically zero. Why? Because the other user retaliating with a thumbs down on your own profile is practically guaranteed, and you can't do anything about it.

The current system inaccurately represents the actual reliability of a user. Not only because of the above, but also because there is no way to distinguish whether a user has only ever bought modules, or has also sold modules. Buying a module carries much less responsibility than selling a module.

I have yet to come up with a concept that would work better as MG transactions are based on mutual trust between users, rather than having MG be the middleman, which would not be a solution either for various reasons. Perhaps we can come up with some ideas as a community.

(On a side note, are these suggestions ever being read or considered? I have posted several suggestions and have yet to see anything come from it, be that a reply or implementation of some sort.)

I would like to see an option to get a public link for a private rack, along with a menu showing currently active links and the ability to revoke access for each link. Possibly with a few options to generate links set to expire in 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 30 days or simply a custom timeframe. Similar to how Discord invites work.

Currently, I either share my rack with the rest of the world, or with nobody but myself. I do want to others to see my rack, but only those that I want to show it to. When I sell or trade a module with someone, they generally get to see my address in one way or another. This is fine, but I do not like the idea of someone I don't know being able to see what kind of equipment I own, unless I specifically choose so.

I know screenshots are a thing, but those are quite limited compared to the full MG experience.

Does it come with a belt attachment for on the go?

I would like to see a feature for manufacturers (or perhaps users) to "give weight, or rating" to each function of a module that is present on a specific module. Essentially, what I'm asking for, is a way to be able to filter modules on their main purpose. The purpose they are/were being marketed for.

Currently, if I am looking for a module that mainly functions as a VCA, or any function for that matter, I will get flooded with modules that have a VCA, but have about 10 different functions and just happen to also work as a VCA. It is not their main function, and is often far from the results I was looking for.

For example. Any given module could have a primary, secondary and tertiary function listed. These are factored in for the search results. Any other functions can also be tagged for, but only show when the page of a given module is loaded, not within the search results.

Perhaps there is a way to make the search function a bit more user friendly this way.