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Yes its is not what I had in mind of an auction.
I am sorry Christian If I came off sounding grumpy. not my intention my friend.

Lars.

No worries - I never perceived you as being grumpy.

Christian

can't we all just get along

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Bobby Masten

I've already said more than I wanted to on this, but will just say that this was advertised as an auction that ends Wednesday and that the reserve price was $450. There was no talk of a so called "buy it now" price, the auction was ended early, and it was sold to someone that made arrangements via PM to purchase the item without placing a bid. If Mr. A wanted to purchase this at $450, why didn't he simply bid $450? If someone wanted to pay more, given this was an auction and it was not supposed to end before Wednesday, why should they not have the right to pay more?
Again, no complaint from my part as I had no desire to bid on the item, but Lars has a valid point.
Oh...and I have been to may real auctions as well. My experience is that they want to sell to the highest bidder...even if that's more than the reserve price!

c'mon...all this talk based on that crappy set. All those stripes, no way. If it was nice, I would have bought it, same as I did with the one before. (im almost serious here)

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Build log

Just to be clear, it was bought for the buy it now price, not the reserve. (Sorry about that... formatting error.)

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Like I said, I said more than I shoud have!

While I didn't pick up on it initially, the notice definately said "We will run bidding to noon tomorrow, or this set can be purchased for $550 with free domestic shipping. This auction has a reserve of $450".

Therefore, first offer of $550 wins!

Brock, sorry for further confusing things.

Alan

Hey just so you know I've been wondering the same thing. Nothing wrong if its not I am just curious as well

Indeed nothing wrong if its not, obviously the creators put a lot of time and hard work into it. Its just when on websites like this one that phrases such as "to help keep the site running" are used in regards to money I begin to wonder.

Agreed. Lance and Brock deserve to profit from all of the work it's taken to establish this site, and when they're able to bring goods to us, all the better because everyone wins.

James , yes might be true. BUT thats not the issue, is it ? Question "now" is . If thisis a forum built with profit in mind for the makers of the site, or is it a non profit forum. ?
Nothing bad either way, but its good to know as things like these comes up.So one does not have to speculate. If it is made with profit for certain individuals then I can totally understand costs etc. if not, if its more like a social club for members to share ideas & contructions surrounding guitars etc. then Its harder to understand ! . The actual building of this site is not really a big time consumer of lenghts or hard to do. "for those with webdesign php skill etc" that is. All depends on the reason for the site being what it is.

I went with a large 48 channel "AMEK" mixing console to this very nice person whom loved what he did, and charged me for what I thought it was worth. "he was a professor in sound-something and could have charged me like 8-10000USD or more for this but he askt me to come over and help him weld of the capacitors, and he would weld on the right ones. So I had the whole console made up as new for 1500 USD. He Is also hired from people in England to fix their Neve consoles so he is a well known person in the field.
NOW, if he would have been a person who though money were more important than his passion - sound-engineer-something, he would have said, Here´s the bill for 10 000. but he was not as this was also his passion, so money comes second.

Therefor the question is valid. is this site made with profit in mind or is it a passion amongst woodsmen .

Lars

I, too was sad to not get a chance at the Madrose set, but I thought that the point of these things is first of all to raise money for the OLF. It seems to me that this last round did that rather nicely.

Filippo. To answer your question with a question [quote]Heh ... have we run out of things to talk about on the OLF?

Filippo/quote] Do please ad a thread if you yourself have so much to say . Just joking my friend.

Randolph [quote] but I thought that the point of these things is first of all to raise money for the OLF/quote] well , yes, but what will it go to ? will it got to us all being able to buy a T-shirt for 19:95 or will it go straight into someones pocket, instead of back to the OLF. again I dont care,and that would be fine by me as long as I can benefit from all the wonderful craftsmen in here, who all have given me more than I could ever ask for, and whom I would do all in my power to go armsway for, just to give back what I´ve been given. But I am a curious bastard. HAHAHA.

Well I want to inform you all that I am not in a bad mood , just want to see if I can get an answer to the questioning. But as it seem, by the silence, I think we all got the answer to the profit/non-profit situation.

All good here. .


Lars.

Here, let me give you my login info for my bank account, all our books on costs/expenses and mine and Brock's logged hours with which we spend running this forum instead of building guitars and YOU and tell ME if its a profit or non profit.
FRANKLY I think its down right RUDE to even ask such a question. Its on par with asking me what I make at my day job.


We make no claims.

PLEASE!

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Lance@LuthiersForum.com

Yeah, I was sad I didn't get to bid on that amazing set of Madrose too.I got here too late.
I think the "buy it now" thing just takes some of the fun for me out of bidding down to the last second on these sets.
But,of course Brock and Lance deserve to make something
from this if possible. It's a ton of work to run this forum.

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Anderson Guitars
Clearwater,Fl. 33755

I agree with Lance, insofar as he and I really put a lot of energy into this forum. He and I talk every day about this and we spend time moderating, and we spend a lot of time planning the future of the community. We are really trying to take this community places, expand the knowledge repository, and help folks continually improve the craft. Threads like this really make you question whether it is worth it or not. Honestly, there really are days when I think this is a fool's errand.

We have lots of ideas... OLF U (a scholarship program for hands on instruction), a complete redesign of the site, a more formal program for physical face2face get togethers where we sponsor (or partially sponsor) the event, automation of many of the tedious aspects of running the board, a real stand alone development server, a hot site to roll over to in case of outages, and a very long list of other stuff. Most of this requires investment ... a lot of it is programming development, some of it is server space, we spend a lot on bandwidth.

The forum owes both Lance and I personally many thousands of dollars. Money that we have invested in the forum when it was short on cash and it will likely be years (if ever) when we see that returned.

But all that being said, I would classify the OLF as a small business that can pay its bills but struggles to find the capital it needs to make core investments or expand. Neither Lance nor I take a salary, but there are occassions where we do get small compensations for our efforts. I can tell you that both of us would make a lot more building guitars than running this forum if we spent our time building (and we all know how profitable THAT is. )

In everything we do we try to look at this from the member value side of things as well as the business side of things. I know that not every initiative is going to be popular with every member but I really don't see any reason why such a fuss has to be made over something that isn't for you. Just take from the forum the stuff you like and leave the rest.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Brock. Thanks, well thats All I wanted to know, no harm in that, and no I dont think its rude Lance as I an others are the once paying for some of these things, so I think its valid to ask how thinks are done. ?? As I have said before, My questioning was never ment in a harmful way. Guess its my Swedish personallity that shined through . And as I did not get a decent reply to the question me and others askt ! I re-askt it and now Brock gave me the answer. No disrespektful in any direction I feel. Thank you for a nice, polite and thural answer Brock.

I think its good to question things, how else are we supposed to know things we are thinking about ? The bad thing is that no one can see the faces, so at times we tend to bring in what we "think" the other person feel, ment etc.

Lance, what do you make in your daytime job ? Why would this a rude question ? we all know those working with our passions -wood, are not making "Trump" sallery.
"This was a joke for anyone missreading me." .

Sincerely Lars.

I agree 100% with you Lance.
It's a dang nice service and it's none of my bussines if you make a profit.
If I'm not mistaken all your "profits" are DONATIONS.
I wouldn't have the know how or the time to put together a service like this.
Ya'll need to get bck to guitar building

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Say what you do, Do what you say.

Dave I agree. It was by no means my intentions to be rude or start a fight. I agree totally on that it is a real blessing to have this site and such fine creators/moderators. I was simply curious because so many things on here are viewed as donations and usually a donation is to an organization that is non-profit, that is the reason I wanted to ask. My intentions were harmless. Once again my apologies, this was not the time nor the place. I am a huge fan of this site and the last thing I EVER wanted to do is to offend anyone on here, especially the management.

Regards,
Edward Taylor

We're cool Edward.

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Say what you do, Do what you say.

Well, I have to admit I was a bit "grumpy" about it when I saw it too (the buy now option) as it was instituted. I agree with Dave, the way its done on ebay is that the buy now option winner pays a "premium" for it to just end. The "buy now" prices seemed too low to me (based on retail). They should be higher. Finally, once someone bids at the "reserve" price, then the buy now option should disappear. You have to have a reserve price or someone will come in and bid $10 to just to get rid of the buy now option.

Buy now should not be an easy option. It should end in the buyer paying a premium for the luxury of using it.

This is all very complicated, and perhaps the straight old fashioned bidding is the only way to go here.

Mike

I understand the point you are driving at, but some members have asked for solutions to the time zone problem and I thought this might be a good solution. What I hope is that we can find a fix where in the end this ends up being a good deal to the buyer too.

We will continue to tweak on this. I just put today's up, but on the next one I will make the BIN price closer to market value and see how that goes.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Brock, here's another suggestion to fix the time zone problem. As it is now, you still (potentially) have one - if you post the auction in the afternoon, our European friends may already be in bed, and once they wake up, somebody may have used the buy-it-now option.

What you could do, is have every auction open for - say - 48 hours. Every forum member has one bid, which is submitted non-publicly (e.g., through a pm to you or Lance).

That way there's no advantage to submitting a bid early on, or later in the auction. Everyone has one shot - whatever s/he is willing to pay for the tonewood - and there's no way of sniping in the last seconds or stuff like that.

You could still protect high-value items like the MadRose through a publicly announced reserve price (a reserve price might be a good idea anyway, so you don't get 100 $1 bids )

The final price could be determined two ways:
1) The highest bidder pays whatever his/her bid was
2) Like eBay: The highest bidder pays the amount of the 2nd-highest bid + some increment (e.g. $5)

This type of sealed-bid auction may be not as exciting as a public auction, but it gives everyone a fair shot. And it may be more fun than the buy-it now.

cheers, Christian

This is silly. Brock, Lance, you will never make everybody happy here. You did not start this forum to deal with auction issues. My last suggestion is this: Use private auctions on Ebay. So what if Ebay makes $5 (or whatever). Make it the policy that WE pay the Ebay fee. I am good with this. This is $$ to support the site.

With private auctions, you can set it up so that only OLFers can see it (and anybody else that you want who might want to remain anonymous). It would not be visible to normal Ebayers. And, as a result, all the headaches are handled for you. And, no time zone problems.

As for snipers and sniper software, this is a relatively small community. We should all be willing to shake hands and agree to not do that. And if one does it (often) it will become obvious. But, do not confuse automatic bid promotion at or near the end of an auction. It can look like sniping and still not be sniping.

Use Ebay or the like. Let them handle the headaches.

Mike

I say we have dueling dreadnaughts at sunrise and settle this like men !!

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