Quote from: solstice on March 06, 2012, 10:05 pmOf course Stealth helps sellers, but what about the buyers? And how does it help the Silk Road marketplace in general? Stealth as implemented now is akin to a store becoming a member's only club. And you the buyer don't get to be a member unless asked! So yes, for the seller and his select list of preferred buyers, stealth is a wonderful thing. It's a way for sellers to collect up a list of preferred buyers quickly, then leave the community and use SR as nothing more than a shopping cart to run their private store.I can see stealth as becoming THE PREFERRED way to go, with more and more of the best sellers leaving. As the top seller gets too much business and eventually goes stealth (taking with him maybe 30% of his best buyers), his other 70% migrate to the #2 seller and the cycle begins again. Before long, the #2 seller is overwhelmed and goes stealth. And then #3 and #4 and so on.The losers here are the buyers. Both new SR buyers and established buyers (whose only fault might be that they didn't buy enough product often enough to qualify for some arbitrary preferred buyer's list). Good sellers disappear and buyers lose choice in the marketplace.The obvious question that arises is, what does a buyer have to do to qualify for a seller's preferred buyers list? Obviously a seller will want to make the maximum profit with the least amount of work and risk, which to me means he seeks out large quantity and/or frequent buyers, so as to minimize the number of orders. So the ordinary legit buyer who isn't a dealer himself doesn't make the seller's preferred list. In reading seller profiles, the complaint I see voiced most often is that sellers can't handle the endless barrage of needless messages. It seems logical to me then that, rather than giving sellers a way to become ghosts, SR needs to develop more robust seller account management tools that enhance efficiency and productivity in managing buyers. I am not a seller, so I don't know what is currently available, but I am a professional web developer and could probably make a few suggestions. I guess that another question that SR Staff needs to ask themselves is "what type of philosophies do we want to promote here?"With that said, I completely sympathize with an overwhelmed sellers needing some measure of control, lacking full featured account management tools.For me, even though I don't ever plan on taking my account into stealth (just the occasional really sweet fucking deal for my best buyers), the biggest thing that would drive me to it is the messaging system. If there were more management tools, bulk messaging and contact selects (for my special offers, which are FE-only, I have to manually click on each username, open a new window with messaging, and manually copy and paste my "ready to go" message in there - and this is just one example of many), it would at least help my sanity...