Suggestions

C O L L E C T O R S  . . .  all over the world are a community. I know whenever I meet a collector, I have some very special feelings. And of course it is a real pleasure to meet another collector, there are many reasons for it. We want to share news, experience and stuff of course. We like to see the other collections. We always seek opportunities for mutual benefits. But it rarely happens. We don’t see someone face to face most often. So a lot of collectors today depend on internet. Many of us prefer to seek those opportunities abroad away from their own country because they can get many coins this way what they think would be lot more difficult for them to get from their own country.

Contrary to it, the behavior of majority of them on websites like wgc and colnect is quite opposite. Here sometimes they treat newcomers like if they are aliens. So the opportunities for these freshers to communicate sometimes get scanty. No doubt it is in benefit to the existing senior collectors on the site. But yet the crooks make their way through. My emphasis here in fact is on how to block their ways. I have concluded that making a fresh air for the collectors is not possible unless we have strong intra-country association of collectors. I see that such associations may be functional in some countries but yet they do not seem to be giving that outcome to protect collectors in this regard.

I see that the newcomers are often trying to penetrate the shell of the community. Almost all get through, and the crooks no doubt know this, so they go along. And I am very much confident that they do it very conveniently. May be a true fresher would be more jittery signing up a new account than a crook. So it is how they all get a start; disguised with no fear at all. And when a crook is recognized, he suddenly vanishes but at the same time or within a short span, another newly born “fresher” joins the community. Recognizing and verifying these freshers by someone in wgc or colnect is almost impossible. So I may say that these websites are also responsible to some extent for exposing the collectors to these crooks.

Even though colnect offers a ratings system to differentiate between the good and bad collectors and no doubt there is no other better way to do it. But if we see the negative ratings list, it clearly shows the failure. Such a big heap of crooks is there and no doubt some of them were “produced” indirectly by colnect somehow and nobody can deny that they are not here anymore. Most of them are still present with a new colnect face and they will go on obtaining newer ones. How to stop them? How to protect the community? How this should be done? There would be many people of course with different frames of mind here.

What I speculate is that the collectors should be recognized in their own region (country) first before they show a face outside. This is really very much necessary to protect the community I think. I foresee that if there are strong (but friendly) regional associations, this won’t be this difficult. I am in Pakistan, I see there are many regional gatherings where collectors (mostly professional collectors) get together periodically, and often the newcomers too get acquainted here. But either most of these regional gathering are strictly commercial or they have hidden benefits for certain people or groups. So a considerable fraction of collectors may not prefer to join these.

And this is where wgc and colnect help them. New collectors sign up and start stumbling. They have to sacrifice everywhere and have to wait for a long time to get that privilege for themselves. But the real heck is that there is no other option to give a positive rating in return because colnect gives only positive and neutral rating in such case. Here I would add that neutral is considered in colnect as almost negative. So where is the difference between a good swap and a very good swap? Confusions and betrayals are always there but they go to the newcomer’s part mostly. What a senior collector did, it hides under the heavy load of Positive Ranking. So the senior members may get that extra benefit. The premium members are not even challenged in some cases. Nobody can fight this discrimination. So in my opinion there is a room for something better.

There are websites to let the collectors decide to swap to whom, there are also few like telling about good and bad swappers but yet the collectors are not safe. So I think steps must be taken before more of them are deceived. First of all I think there must be a forum in every country where the collectors are recognized before they get a membership on any website.

And I think the solution to this heck is not the reference system or the points system, we need to step ahead of this, why do not we monitor the thieves? Why do not we go to a monitoring system? I think I may have an outline of such a system. I think the thieves are always looking for breeches, they are looking for easy-swappers actually and they attack swappers by “proposals”, so I think first of all, we need to “monitor the proposals”, this may not look that easy for many of you how they can be monitored, but of course all swaps start by proposals and this is a critical point where thieves can be filtered by monitoring them.

Nobody knows how many proposals do a thief might have been made before being successful, but it is very easy to understand that those number of proposals must be much more than the proposals made by any other swapper in general. So we need a swapping website here where all the collectors get acquainted and get membership like they do in case of other websites mentioned earlier. Then they use it to make proposals to other members, this website automatically records these moves, like how many proposals a person had made, how many are in progress, how many were turned down, and how many were accepted (considered), the ratio of acceptance and might be more such statistics if needed.

Then these phases of different swaps running in progress can be shown in there. And above all I think there needs to be a more precise and detailed points system in this, because I see in colnect sometimes 1 person does not come upto the satisfaction of the other swapper, but unwillingly he just gives him a positive rating, so I think there should be a more detailed system, like awarding the satisfaction points system, these points may be from 0-9, 0 being the worst, and 9 being the best. And these points are shown in a person’s profile by a color band.

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    0           1                 2                 3             4              5                6               7               8             9

Whatever the points he get, he gets a color band that is shown in his profile with the total number of rankings, like in case of  good swapper, it may look like this:

……..………………..…….. …….. …….… …….… …..… …….. …….. …….. 11

And an average swapper with the equal attempts will look like this

………..…………..…………..………..…………..…….. …….. …….. …….….. 11

I have also observed that there are a few people who have been in many good swappers list for quite a sometime but now they are not, when I looked into the details, I realized that many of them were the people who had actually been cheated in fact before this time. So that incident could have been transformed their positive attitude into bad. I personally have been through this experience.

Another important and critical factor in this regard are the easy-swappers. These swappers readily agree to get squeezed when they are deliberately and “emotionally” forced by the crooks. Even most of them know it before that it may not bring them anything in return, but these easy-swappers do not think twice prior to making that weak decision. The community pays collectively for these individual weak decisions. Most of these easy-swappers are the enthusiasts with the beautiful minds and attractive smiles. They might have experience these setbacks repeatedly but few of them are so humble, they may go for it again and again.

I have been in the air for quite a sometime. Screwed by some earlier, I went to cheat some people too. No doubt the cheating is a very serious concern among the collectors.

Another very important factor in the making decision about a swap is the behavior of the Postal Service of a country, where somebody is going to swap. I see that many of the South American swappers are often making this excuse, even it be a problem sometimes in a few European countries. And most of the new comers don’t even have an idea of it when they are committing to somebody. And I see that there is no such a place over the internet to demonstrate all this at 1 place for the ease of the coin collectors. So I think there is some need to gather all this information and bring it to the front for the coin collectors. It can be done by taking opinions from the locals. It must include how the incoming and outgoing letters are treated by the Post Office. It must include a conclusion derived by taking the opinions about how much chances (like in percentage) are there for a letter reaching the destination safely or that it leaves the country safely in both cases and under which conditions. What could have been the specific precautions if any for some specific country? How the Registered and Unregistered mails are handled in that country. It must offer the other vital info about the post offices like their web links. So that the collectors get all at 1 spot rather than spending time each time when searching for this vital info.

Still Working, Not Finished Yet!