Thank you to http://jinx.tv/tbux buyers

Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick! I just wrote this whole post up and then IE decided to crash just as I was publishing it.

After posting "tbux.com: my story", and having it mirrored on the There Voice, plus emailing people who have bought/sold from me in the past, I was very pleased and all warm and fuzzy inside from the overwhelmingly positive responses I received. So, thank you to all you wonderful crazy shop-aholic and developer-type Thereians who have been soooo sweet!

I did receive a few emails that disturbed me. One member said they understood what it was like to be obsessive compulsive. What? Who?? Me??? What, just because I obsessively spent a couple of years compulsively checking sales on tbux.com? haha...okay, they have a point, but it's not all bad to be obsessive-compulsive as long as you channel those tendencies into something productive...like, not washing your hands 100x a day but maybe building up your business. I would never have been the first There developer to reach 1000 submissions if I hadn't been so obsessed with the There developer program. I wouldn't have made a living buying and selling virtual currency if I weren't obsessive.

What really did disturb me were the half dozen or so emails I received pledging to buy ThereBucks only from me, as if I were right and tbux.com were wrong. What??? I didn't know there was a right or wrong here, and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. While I think the sentiment was sweet and the intentions were good, I don't really see it as me against them and I think you'd be foolish to try and choose between me and tbux.com. Discount ThereBucks are a sellers market...because there are ultimately always more people wanting to buy them than there are discounted ThereBucks available for sale. So rather than pledge fidelity to ONE reseller, I think it's far more sensible to cover all your bases.

Now, if more than one place is listed as selling at the same time, by all means buy from me! ;) I do deliver in less than ten minutes if you already belong to my club, and while we're talking about speed, you'll probably get your PayPal payments the fastest if you're selling to me, and I'm grateful for your loyalty. I just don't think anyone should limit themselves...just go for what works best for you at the time. That's what I did! :)

tbux.com: my story

Recently, I was removed as a member/seller from the site tbux.com. I had been selling ThereBucks there for 3 1/2 years. I was also removed from all the related clubs on There.com. I get tired of secrets and gossip and I thought I'd just talk honestly here about why this happened, at least from my point of view.

Tbux.com has maybe a dozen members...I don't know, recently the numbers changed after being the same for years...and those members have the privledge of listing themselves as selling ThereBucks on the site. Anyone else with ThereBucks to sell can put in a sell request, which generates an email that goes out to all the tbux members (although the email part was broken for quite a while) letting them know someone was selling and they can all race to "claim" the transaction. Whoever claims it first then has the right to email the potential seller and ask them to send the ThereBucks.

In my opinion, this system is very inefficient. Also, smaller sales requests require a lot of work for a very small amount of profit, and it wastes the time of anyone who is trying to claim the request but doesn't get there first. It also wastes the time of the person looking to sell, as they have to wait to see who claims their request to be able to send their ThereBucks somewhere and then receive a PayPal payment.

Honestly, if I were setting up the site I would have just claimed all the sale requests myself, instead of having all the sellers squabble over them or selectively only claim the larger transactions or whatever. Of course, I never would have said that while I was a member of the site, because if that suggestion was actually taken seriously I'd never have been able to claim any requests myself.

Another inefficiency is simply the number of sellers on the site. Recently even more sellers were added, so if you are a member-seller you have to compete with other member-sellers for sales. The more sellers they add, the more they have to compete with each other and the more uneven the sales and the longer it takes each of them to sell out the ThereBucks they have. Also, the site doesn't really tell you how much they are selling or take note when a larger transaction comes in, so they need to build a lot of padding into the amount they are selling or risk not being able to fill the orders received, which is always a hassle.

I don't mean to bash tbux.com. I sold there for over 3 1/2 years and it's been the best thing out there for that whole time and has helped me make a living. I'm only pointing out the flaws that bothered me more and more over time but certainly not enough to leave the site or even really complain about it. Kittenkat runs the site and asks almost nothing from the other members, and it's been great selling there and I think she was really visionary to build it in the first place back in 2003.

Rather than complain about the limitations of the site, I simply tried to adapt. I wanted to claim as many sales requests as possible, so I set up primitive systems to help me claim them before any other tbuxer. I kept a laptop right next to my bed, I set an audible alert for sales emails, and I really never went anywhere or had a life because I didn't want to miss a single sale. Seriously, I was afraid to go to the store and run errands because I didn't want to miss a big sale that might make the difference in whether I could pay rent or bills that month. I bought a treadmill so I could exercise without leaving my apartment. I was obsessed, and I was really good at claiming the sales. My day would be ruined if someone else managed to claim one. And of course, they probably wouldn't bother if it was a smaller transaction, those they would sometimes just leave for me. I never thought that was right and never did it myself until finally I saw Kittenkat herself blatantly do it, so then I decided I was justified in doing it without guilt.

I was pretty miserable having no life, my biggest thrill being claiming sales requests on tbux.com before anyone else, so I decided I needed to automate the process. It took me about a year to find someone to do this for me, but I ended up with a really great system that even might occassionally pass a turing test. I was soooo happy! It wasn't foolproof, this system of mine, because it was still possible for someone else to be there at the right time and claim a request before me, but it did a better job than I did and I could sleep soundly at night or go get my hair done in San Francisco, go on dates, find a boyfriend, work out at a real gym, go away somewhere overnight etc. My quality of life improved about 1000%, and I believe it was better for those selling to me as well, since they didn't have to wait for their transactions to be claimed, or only had to wait maybe 15 minutes no matter what time of night or day.

Okay, so far so good, but obviously things didn't remain that way or I wouldn't be writing this right now. After more than a year of automated bliss, at least one member of the tbux.com site complained that they suspected I was using a bot and it wasn't fair and was in fact immoral. I was contacted and asked that, if I was in fact automating the process, I stop immediately and if I wasn't that I leave some transactions for other members, and eventually an email was sent out to members of the site informing us that using a 'bot was now against the rules. Well, I don't want to break the rules, but I also have gotten quite used to actually having a life, so following this new rule meant to me that...

1. I would either have no life once again, or I would keep my life but lose at least half the money I was making or more from ThereBucks reselling, plus if I go back to the "no life" option I'll probably just look like a 'bot anyway...I'd probably get told to stop claiming so many of them even if it's manually, because other members have decided it's not fair. Too me this is really silly, and it means that each time a sale request came in, I'd have to go to the sale request page and evaluate whether it was appropriate for me to claim that particular request or not. Maybe wait 15 minutes to see if someone else would like to claim it instead so I don't get chastised again. What a big waste of my time! Plus, it's just not...well...who is going to voluntarily take a cut in income like that, especially without a cut in time spent on the activity, at least without a fight? Or...who is going to take a cut in quality of life like that, especially after spending a year trying to automate the process in the first place?

2. I still felt the whole claiming of requests by some random person manually was inefficient, and it seemed like a step back in quality of service for the people that "we" bought from.

So I sent an indignant email back to Kittenkat, not admitting to using a 'bot, but protesting that I hadn't done anything wrong. She still wanted me to stop using the 'bot, so I simply stopped responding to her emails. I didn't know what else to do, and it seemed like the best way to buy time while I set up a new system. Eventually, she kicked me off the tbux.com site, and so I started up my own site...it wasn't really what I wanted to do, the whole thing made me really sad, but it seemed like far and away the best option.

The silver lining is that now I can run a ThereBucks selling site the way *I* want, and fix the little things that have bugged me over the years. I can claim sales requests instantly, I can pay buyers within ten minutes, people can see how much is for sale and I don't sell more than I have. I'm actually starting to get excited about it, because I think it's a good system and people have actually been using it! So thanks, and if you haven't tried it yet, it's at http://jinx.tv/tbux

Well, glad we have that all sorted! Be sure to read the above with the thought that this is just *my* side of the story, and each person involved is sure to have their own version.

See you in There! (or IMVU, or somewhere.)