There are several issues at play here. First, the online community you are invested in has been sacked, torched, bulldozed, and replaced with a puppet that provides AV123 with a useful marketing tool. Second, the "nice guy" you've known for seven years now has lied to you regularly for all seven of those years. He's been stealing from raffles since October 2004. None of that is your fault, but all of it impacts you and how you interact with your hobby.
1. Simple-- I didn't have the whole story from every side. And frankly, I don't have the time to go search down everyone to find out. A few I tried, and was denied. The forums are a hobby-- some days I have more time, some days (lately) I have much less. I liked many of the folks that I saw leave, but as most people would agree to, this is a side hobby and not to hurt anyone's feelings, I was not about to track down everyone that left to get their side of the story. Right or wrong, I had "better" things to do.
Nhan mentioned patterns. There's no need to personally track down every person who disappears. AV123's forum has been a travesty of a site for almost a year now, ever since they re-opened. Deleted threads, deleted posts, banned members (permanent bans - and quite a few of them), and suppressed topics are everywhere. There's no need to have the whole story to know that the company is doing some weird stuff.
2. I didn't like the approach. But I have heard of many other forums (including AH) that have deleted posts and threads. Even back in the "good old days" of AV123 forums, the "regular scandal" was always regarding AVS Forums moderating so heavily against anything pro-AV123. Forum moderation in my mind became something of a norm. No matter what forum I was on, it was moderated towards a certain look-and-feel. Regardless, I had many friends on that forum. So naturally it was easier to overlook such moderation. I was happy with AV123, so why bother with the folks that weren't? Seems pretty simple logic to me. I had no experience with AV123 that told me to believe the nay-sayers. Maybe that's because I had a single large purchase in late 2003 and ever since then just considered the AV123 forum the place to share my life events with the world.
Sure, most forums experience some level of moderation, and there's usually someone who is dissatisfied with it. What they are doing is a whole different level, though, and I sincerely think that you saw some threads and posts (most of them either at TCA or in this thread) that spelled out exactly what was happening. Heck, you posted in my "Open for interpretation" thread last fall (before it was deleted late last year), where I pointed out exactly what was wrong with their policies. You sent me a PM at the time (9/15/09) according to your post, but since I'm banned I have no idea what it might have said.
Honestly-- I was always hoping that folks would return to that forum --why? Because I didn't want to have to be the one to move, after so many thousands of posts... AV123 forum has "my story" in their database. To abandon that (the physical forum website) was to give up on all I'd built (friendships, history, record-keeping of family events in my life, etc). It has nothing to do with the company-- though I can fully understand why people see my actions in a different light. That's why I'm here now explaining myself-- so that people's wrong impressions of who I am and what I represent can be made more accurate.
I can understand not wanting to leave a familiar site, but the harsh truth is that Mark set fire to that familiar home and burned it to the ground a year and a half or more ago. Those friends aren't coming back, some because they are sick of Mark's lies and some because the company has permanently banned them for asking important but inconvenient questions. Pieces of your story are already gone - all of the hundreds (possibly thousands) of posts that Mark started are gone, as are lots of other threads that were too hard to explain.
It would be nice if people considered what 4,500+ posts in one forum means to a guy, where most of said posts are about his own personal life.
Again, I can understand that (one of my forum homes is Outlaw's site, even though it is a comparatively quiet place). I can also understand why it would be hard to turn the corner and accept that the community you embraced has been destroyed by Mark's actions and AV123's moderation policies. You can still post there to talk about what's going on in your life, but you need to realize what the environment is now. You also should realize that there's no guarantee the forum will exist next week, next month, or next year. Mark's mis-management hasn't just hurt his customers and his forum's community - it has also hurt his company.
3. Leaving all the raffle issues aside for just a moment (more about that below), when it comes to shipping delays and product quality, as an engineer I understood those things. Rarely is a product available when the original marketing deadlines are created. I always wrote that off pretty easily-- Mark is a marketing person not an engineer, and assumed things could be designed, built, tested, modified, rebuilt, retested, and released much quicker than actual.
It's one explanation, but at this late date it's a hard one to build a case for. After decades in the business and years or promises to reform, Mark never showed signs of either A) wanting to find out about project timelines or B) caring if his promises were impossible.
My wife has a degree in psychology, which is pretty far removed from a technical major like engineering. She worked in the banking industry for just over ten years (branches, online banking, and credit cards at various times) before moving to a large non-profit a couple of years ago. She manages IT projects, and she has to keep close track of the schedules. With a good bit less experience than the multiple decades that Mark has, she can spot an unrealistic deadline from across the room. It doesn't require an engineering degree to do that - all it takes is intelligence and a willingness to do a good job. Mark, meanwhile, consistently adhered to Douglas Adams' view of deadlines:
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." Of course, that whooshing sound was accompanied by a cash register in Mark's case, as his impossible promises kept customers from buying elsewhere and even convinced customers to hand over cash up front.
Regarding monetary issues-- There's no excuse for lingering unpaid debts, whether they be product or monies. If necessary, privately work out with that person agreed-upon terms of payback. I understand a company pulling the plug on product development after having spent a whole lot of money to get it started-- I think that type of thing happens to design companies more than most people know. In such circumstances payment terms could always be worked out as 10% of the money every two months for 20 months or something to that effect. It's doable. I told him that many times. But who was I to tell a man how to run his company? I still told him my thoughts, but he had to make his own choices in (all) those matters.
His choices were consistent: screw everybody else. He probably wrote you back or talked to you on the phone and assured you that he was determined to make things right. The timeline of the raffles disproves that with painful clarity. Take this single example from that years-long con: He ran four raffles for Derek, and he stole from all of them. If he were an honest person who made a bad choice once - stealing from the first raffle with plans to pay it back later - he would have steered the later raffles' funds straight to the intended recipient. He didn't do that. He just wanted the money, and Derek's situation made really good bait. Re-payment schedules would involve actually paying back stolen funds, and it was much simpler to promise to take care of it all "soon."
