Thanks guys, I appreciate the responses and much respect to you both.
I agree
I'll try to be brief so as not to hijack RJ's thread.
but Too Late!
Guys you are talking about a very difficult thing that has been talked about over and over. The problem is until you are on the receiving end of the complaints and are the one doing the work, not to upset anyone but, "its easy and this is all you need to do".
Lets go over a few of the point and recommendations.
1 - We should pre announce the coops so everyone knows when they will be.
Ok, sounds great, what time will we launch our coops knowing some will close in hours? If we do it at say 8 pm E.S.T then most west coasters are still at work and by the time they get home their is none for them. Then the mad pm's begin to me about doing that. 12 hours later the overseas people begin to pm me to tell me how unfair I am for doing it when they are sleeping in the middle of the night. If we do it as the last coop manager did in the middle of the night for E.S.T. then we have the complaints I got this time about doing it late at night.
I have tried each and every way and almost not one time have I not upset some group. I have a couple of pm's from people complaining about the current Express coop. That was announced months ago and ran for a week.
I once got a pm from a person upset telling me he had tried to get into an express coop for almost a year and a half and missed everyone of them. That it was not fair the way I ran them and he should be allowed to put in a reservation to reserve some. When I explianed their had been at least 8 coops in that time he said he knew but always missed out. Then I asked him how often he checked the forum? Once every three to four months!
Is that our fault or his? It is clear he is not a very serious member so should he be given special consideration over those who are here almost daily?
2 - We should not allow coops to close in such short amount of time.
Ok lets think this one out. Since I have no control over demand and have limited resources of people doing the work, and have no say in the numbers of parts the warehouses stock, this leads to a big issue. If we do this I must tell coop managers that they can not decide how much work they are willing to do and if they open a coop it must run some period of time no matter how much work it piles on them. I think we can kiss a bunch of the coops managers goodbye. I know Dad would not do anymore coops if I told him that. We have had Express coops that I think would of hit 1000 units in the past if we went by that rule. Who can handle this for free in their spare time?
Then the other issue comes to be part supplies. We had approx 100 LEDS available for the Aether II coop. The lead time is 10 weeks on them. If we let as many as they want order not one person would receive an Aether II in time to use it this year. Before you start saying well ship the 100 out then make the others wait. Think of this, who gets the 100, the first to order? Oh wait they would have mainly been the west coasters since it was late when it was posted, here comes the mad pm's at RJ again from east coasters and overseas people.
Continuing on this coop, Their is a limit we try to keep new coop managers to of $5000 dollars. We do this to protect the members and the new coop managers. This is for the gun ho manager that has never done one and does not truly understand the work involved. They will jump at running a coop like the 600 unit express ones dad do, but often not understanding the work, they get into trouble fast. If you look at other sites that have had failed coops this is a common theme. Some of our Halloween members can talk about this in clear detail with some of the issues they have had because of sites that just allow anyone to run a coop of any size. The 100 unit coop was a little over this already.
Take note that we have never had a failed coop, This alone should speak for itself.
3 - We should have qty limits on the coops to make sure as many users as can get them.
Ok I like this and have done it on items that have been out on coops a number of times. But when you look at the first coop where no one has any yet and think of needing 5 Aethers to do your show, but you can only get two on the coop. Yes we end up with more people getting them. But they all can not use them in the show this year as none have enough. So maybe a few people have enough to do their shows makes more sense than a bunch having not enough to do anything with.
4 - We should let people run off site coops for things.
Not going to happen, Why would they want to run them off site? To avoid our coop rules? why would we make rules to protect the members and then allow people to start off site coops that do not abide by them and allow people to point our members there from our forum? If they want to avoid the rules it means that one of the following is likely.
1 - They are not within the rules for being a coop manager which means they are fairly new to the site and not been an active member. So the risk to the member for someone to take their money goes way up. It also means the admins on DLA also not have information on the person running it.
2 - They do not want to be limited to only making a coop fee on the coop, if this is the case this is not really a coop but someone running a business that is being disguised as a coop.
3 - They do not want to be a part of DLA just want to use it as a advertising media. Since I am not interesting in advertising income and do not want advertising on DLA then why would I support this?
The fact is the only and I do mean ONLY people that should have any complaints about any coop that has run at DLA is the coop managers who work hard to save the others a lot of money. Then as for just one example, have to deal with a user sending them a pm complaining that had he sent it in a different box his shipping would have been about $2 less. This of course would have required much more time and effort on the poor Coop Manager who by the way just saved the same member who is complaining approximately $80 then if there had been no coop. That is the people that I should see complaining but they never do, They ignore the few, for the good of the many, and line up to do another coop to help out.
The coop managers are the "Man in the Arena" in this case and the true heros of this site. They have saved our members many 100s of thousands of dollars over the years.
I do not think we do a bad job with the coops and think if that was the case I would not have been asked by a non lighting forum for input on how to run coops on their site successfully.
Remember DLA is not about coops, They are just a side that we do to benefit the members.
This is not meant to be a nasty post but because of my writing style it will be talken that way by some, it is just cold hard facts since these comments come up every time there is a coop that people did not get want they wanted.
RJ
