Sam Goldwasser writes:

Comments welcome!

I'm sorry to hear you're having these problems. I assumed you had some
tale of a fraudster victimizing you, but apparently your problem is
eBay's fraud detection false-positive'izing you.

All I can say is the eBay as an service and as a corporation has been
degrading significantly for years. It started with things like
"protecting" us by censoring email addresses, and then things like
hiding bidder IDs, and now the recent feedback changes. Bah.

It's really sad. Technology seems to be marching backwards in a lot of
ways. Aside from portability, our grandparents had better telephones
than these portable things we carry around today. It used to cost money
to talk on the phone or send mail, so incoming phone calls or email were
generally worthy of your attention. Now I spend significant time daily
attending to worthless phone calls and spam, coming from instrusive
idiots who have no possibility of profiting from their nuisance. Cheap
communication not only explodes into time-wasting frivolity, it empowers
the foolish to "get in touch" with you personally. When it cost money
to talk, the foolish didn't have any to waste.

I actually feel better about being bum-rushed by panhandlers on the
streets these days. At least they're limited by space, time, and my
appearance in a public place, limitations that don't apply to electronic
gooks, and one gets at least a little human interaction of a lukewarm
sort.

The "fall" of the Internet from the crime-free 1970s-1980s to present
day just confirms the doctrine of original sin.

If Ben Franklin has proposed a postal system where 98 percent of the
traffic was spam and frauds, he'd be laughed out of town.