Mike, the truth is I'm really quite upset by this thread. (In fact, not just me, as your posting really hurt my staff yesterday afternoon.) This experience is actually making me seriously question my continued participation in Xmarks at all. Please be assured I'm not directing this at you personally, as I do see where you are coming from and know that your venting your unhappiness was not intended maliciously. But I think it's only fair to be upfront about this. And I'd value any other members' thoughts here too.

You may well have cause to complain if as you say telephone messages were not recorded. I have no way now of even looking into this. But your general points I feel are quite unfair, partly as I've said because you're criticising us for things that are far beyond our control or are entirely irrelevant, and partly because otherwise you're extrapolating from your own individual experiences (in the way that people always do) while we can only base our decisions on the laws that apply to everyone and on aggregate evidence of what is best for most customers. In a situation where the rules are applied haphazardly and everyone's experience is different, human nature dictates that I'm never going to convince you that yours is not the only way to see things. And the more I try, the more I'll simply dig myself into a hole where we come across as the loser.

My real problem here is that I'm afraid that the recent management changes to this forum may mean it's no longer helpful for me to take part here. This would be really sad for me, as I've both greatly enjoyed being involved in this great community, and found it really useful as a source of direct and frank two-way interactions. I'd like to emphasise that I've no problem with complaints, in fact I value them. But I do have a real business problem if this forum simply becomes a 'knock Scotweb' forum where we become the Aunt Sally for anyone to sound off about their individual love-hate relationship towards different courier companies, or a bunch of gripes about taxes, government, corporations, and the fact that shopping overseas involves different calculations than shopping locally. And frankly I think that's what most of your points amount to.

The previous moderators used to do an excellent job of ensuring that detailed service complaints directed at individual companies were first sent to those companies themselves, I think to try to ensure their supporters and advertisers got fair treatment for just this sort of reason. If Steve's policies in this way are different (and I'll be bringing this question to his attention) it will very much change the flavour of these forums. I have a small child and a business to run and frankly I just don't have time to spend endless hours taking part in a lose-lose argument about international shipping law that has already been done to death countless times before on xmarks, and doubtless will be again. (BTW one detail I failed to mention is that the national carriers do 'lose' consignments far far more often.) I've given you the facts as we see them, and tried to explain why we use the services we do in our customers' best interests. And as I've said, if there was a better alternative we'd take it.

But that's not the main problem. My concern is that if the very act of participating in xmarks becomes more negative than positive for our company, I may have no choice but to back off. I'm really not sure where I stand on this right now. And I won't be stomping off into the sunset in the heat of feeling hurt or based on just one such experience. But it's certainly woken me up to the possibility that Xmarks may have changed in a subtle but important way. I'd really value other people's thoughts here too.