I didn't get a clear sense from her side on what happened. Or maybe I did?
She ordered something and it was lost during delivery? Some system flagged fraud and then as penalty for this she lost access to essentially everything LEGO. Later she found out about this ban via an email that closes all communication without any path to further followup. Now she can't shop or use her LEGO Account for anything.
Aus post (australia post) is the worst, especially this time of year.
I have had that happen twice with Amazon (book) orders, they get lost, then only to arrive 2 months later (after Amazon has resent a replacement order)
I have to disagree. AusPost is pretty good. It's not perfect but given the stories you hear about USPS from the US, AusPost is undoubtedly doing a better job.
EDIT: I should've said "postage in the US", not USPS. My response was in relation to someone saying that it is "the worst". I've had much worse experiences with private shipping companies like StarTrack.
I don't work for Australia Post. A cursory glance at my comment history or searching my username online would show you that I'm a software developer in Sydney working for SUSE.
I haven't run a company which ships packages with AusPost, but as someone who receives packages fairly frequently and sends packages occasionally, I've never had any significant issue.
What stories? Most stories I hear about USPS are complaints about waiting in line. Otherwise USPS ranks pretty high, internationally, for quality of service.
In the Universal Postal Union’s report for 2018, US ranked #8. Australia ranked #26.
And it's not like the USPS lines are meaningfully longer than Fedex or UPS, even in a city.
I think it's just anti-government hyperbole to pretend that taking an envelope from your hand to a farm house on the other side of the country for 55 cents and having a line for such an amazing service is too big an ask.
It would take just as long at Fedex or UPS. They're private. They don't mail anything for 55 cents. They're usually more expensive for packages even.
USPS definitely has/had a reputation, but your post made me realize, I haven't had any negative experiences with them in as long as I care to remember. If I had to complain, it's that sometimes packages say they're delivered a day before they actually arrive.
USPS is one of only two couriers I'll actually select if I get a choice. They put my packages in my mailbox (I realize others legally can't) or if it doesn't fit, they bring the packages to my door and knock. UPS is the other.
Other couriers place packages on my driveway, halfway down my stairs, or in other weird places. Occasionally one of them will actually come all the way down the stairs, but they won't knock.
Aus post doesn't even bother to knock on your door. They just toss a card in the slot. Even if you see it happen and grab them, they'll probably tell you they don't even have the package; don't bother to actually transport them. None of them work for AusPost. In big cities like Melbourne, they're almost all contractors. In far off places like Emerald, it's all you got, because DHL doesn't deliver out there (or if they do, it's a lie and those packages get handed to an AusPost contractor anyway).
I've caught them not delivering stuff before (opened the gate at 7am to go catch the train and an AusPost fella was just putting the card in our mailbox - those gates were very loud when they opened up + I was in the kitchen getting ready to go, so there's no way we missed them)and they didn't even apologise, just looked sheepish and got my parcel out of the van.
That said, the current AusPost delivery driver assigned to my neighborhood is a nice African (Sudanese?) chap who always at least tried to deliver stuff, will try and hide it from the street if it's marked safe to leave by the door, etc. and if you go to a post office they're usually pretty good.
If they treated delivery drivers like human beings I'm sure auspost's customer satisfaction would greatly increase
Characteristic story: postie piles 10,000 pieces of undelivered mail in his house. Nobody notices until he chucks some in the bin and a neighbor spots undelivered mail spilling out of a trash bag.
I had a set of injectors sent from Sydney to Perth the other day, and they arrived in three days with Aus Post. They SMS'd me in the morning that they were being delivered, and let me specify whether to leave it at the door or collect from the post office.
They've definitely improved a lot in recent times.
The AusPost SMS thing is a bit weird. Sometimes it'll be "You didn't reply in time" even if you reply immediately, and from my message history it seems there's no acknowledgement if you do actually succeed.
AusPost aren't the sharpest. I had a mail redirection in place while i was travelling. I sent a bunch of items home. Everything good. Months later I let the redirection expire. Suddenly 90% of my mail failed. I contacted a bunch of senders who said my address was invalid. At the time I didn't make the connection between the mail redirection and delivery problems.
I logged a ticket with AusPost. They couldn't figure out the problem. I still lost mail. They said some guy had gone on holiday. This issue went on for months. I logged another ticket. This was suburban Melbourne not some remote town with a auspost agency only contactable by llamas by the light of the full moon.
No better response. Both tickets auto-closed with no actual resolution. All the while some letters/packages got through and others didn't. A bunch of online sellers had to resend my stuff to an alternate address because the relevant portion of AusPost for my address were too stupid to sort this out. Every courier not connected to AusPost delivered perfectly.
Then all of a sudden around a year later my problems disappeared.
Moral of story: something fishy was going on. Auspost can't debug their own redirections. Delivery problems can really mess up your reputation. Get some kind of workaround from your side operational ASAP.
Yes I had a lock on my letterbox. Yes I was home when packages were delivered. It got so hilarious we'd sit with laptop on front porch. The guy would turn up with the "You weren't home card" then would have to go get the package out of his van.
How do you get banned from an online store? Can't you just use a different credit card and they'll have no way of knowing? Seems quite pointless to me, unless your goal is to make your best customers your unhappiest customers, which seems like a pretty bad idea.
"we've decided not to accept any further orders from your account", not necessarily the human being behind the account.
In the US at least, there are loyalty points you earn when making purchases (it used to be effectively 5% off), and those would have been lost when the account was banned
I thought about that, but people move, people can live in apartment buildings with thousands of neighbors, and people can have packages delivered to their work address or a convenience store. None of those are even corners cases.
I just find it baffling that someone would write a letter that boils down to "We are punishing you!! But there is no way to enforce this punishment, so, uh... umm..." Seems like a huge waste of time if you ask me.
Also LDraw.org[0] (open-source digital lego community) still has no official word from LEGO Group members to LDraw Ambassador about acquiring of BrickLink, as BrickLink's Stud.io app use LDraw Parts Library.[1]
FTR, Ten members of the LDraw core met at the LEGO headquarter in Billund on May 22-26, 2019. (...) they also had a meeting with people from the LDD team and other compartments of the company. A request for a dedicated information channel when it comes down to part numbers, meshes or colours was forwarded.[2]
Good thing he only got banned from LEGO and not, lets say, automated grocery stores all owned by the same company and associated with your Amazon account...
Maybe speculating, but possibly he ordered too many (free) replacement parts from the LEGO store?
I had to do this once and there seemingly are no checks in place to prevent abuse. (You don’t have to prove you own the set where you are missing pieces from)
Also the OP bringing up Bricklink (which doesn’t use Lego account for login) is a bit dramatic, which makes me thing the poster is skewing or omitting some facts.
This is why I personally tend to refer to people on the internet as 'them/they/their', or by their username, limiting any possible pronoun specific arguments or the chance of offending people.
Yep. Gender-neutral pronouns is the way to go. It's about more than just offending people. It's also about (mis|under)representation and subconscious biases.
More like one assumption snowballs. If I see someone else refer to an individual as "he", and I don't know their gender, I'm not going to dig into it without cause. It's not a big deal.
Use of "he" when the gender is unknown is very common (especially online) and has lots of historical precedent. It's not as common as it used to be, but that doesn't make it wrong. "They" is also correct.
I mean, "he" is "wrong" because it's factually incorrect. Sure it's common and I basically agree that it's amusing more than malicious.
It's a pretty gentle reminder that it can be offputting to misgender people, and while you may not care, the author might and it erases their gender from view in the discussion. It is inferior to assume that everyone you talk to is a guy, it may not be the most important thing ("no, she's a great coder, that's why I follow her" or whatever) but it colors the way you think about the world to make the default gender male.
Anyway, this is getting waaaaay off topic. Apologies.
People can get upset at literally anything, that doesn't mean it's reasonable. The solution here is to not get upset when you are accidentally misgendered - then there is no problem.
> it colors the way you think about the world to make the default gender male
Yes, that is what was said. I have never seen a convincing reason to believe that this is true, however. Until then, it is making much ado about nothing.
Ok, well I disagree. I go to a lot of effort to make sure my fiver year old daughter doesn't get the impression that she is somehow the less important gender.
I have made active efforts over many years to train myself to be careful about this and I am telling you that my experience of life is better now than it was when I was less aware.
If you do not want to try the same experiment I am not sure what reason could ever convince you to do something you do not want to try.
If you're in the practical personal impact camp, it's not so relevant online but it can have repercussions on your ability to keep employees, build collaborative teams, or notice great ideas.
To broaden it just a bit, why should the person who notices a mistake (whether the subject of the mistake or just an observer) be responsible for also making sure people making the mistake never know they made it? This seems like a bizarre position to me. I see people pointing out a mistake who are maybe or maybe not upset (I am not, this is a common problem) and a small number of people getting defensive about the mistake being noticed.
It's also worth bearing in mind not everyone is a native English speaker. In languages that have gendered words, a lot of languages use the masculine subject forms by default, for example when referring to a mixed or unknown gendered group.
In French for example:
il - he or it in the impersonal form (e.g. it is nice outside today)
elle - she
ils - they, referring to a group of men or a mixed or unknown group
elles - they, referring to a group of women
Some languages, such as Swedish, are trying to introduce gender neutral forms to work around the issue:
That would require clicking thru to the profile, only to find a "her / princess" pronoun suggestion, which seems like a joke.
Obviously with enough digging you can find out what anyone's gender / preferred pronouns are. The point is more that the actual content being consumed does not indicate a clear gender, so using "he" in lieu of that is not a big deal.
I'm kind of sad 'gtst' (from the C.J. Cherryh books) didn't catch as a gender neutral pronoun. Also in my family we still refer to social capital as 'sfik'.
Or we could just use tradition and proper english. And if we don't know, use a tortured "they" or just pick something and move on. No reason to get fancy - if gender isn't an issue, then ... it isn't.
Does it really matter? I'm a huge, non mistakable guy, and have been told 'thank you ma'am' to my face. You know what I do? I say you're welcome, not launch an internet campaign against them. In their case it was just force of habit, mind somewhere else, etc. But in the end, it makes zero difference, unless you want it to.
The increasingly common pattern of corporations issuing ultimatums without apparent explanation, justification, or any other kind of due process is really terrifying. How do we fix this?
"Due process"?? Buying Legos from the official store is not some kind of inherent human right. They can sell to whom they want. No doubt this person was breaking the terms of service. Explaining why he's banned would likely give away something about how they know he was cheating the system, which makes future fraud easier.
Seems like it's new reality of online services, for example Instagram just rolled out "offensive captions checker"[0], that's look like beta-release of Orwell's «Thought Police».[1]
Nor is it an inherent right to operate a business to sell Legos in any given country.
Instead, they operate in countries that allow them to do business there. The people in many of those countries, whether due to "inherent human right" or because they fought for it, have the right to vote and elect representatives to make laws.
So if those people decide that companies can't just ban people from doing business with them without "due process", they can put that into law.
I don't personally buy into the idea that anything is an "inherent human right," it's all social contract from my perspective. Businesses are subject to it as well.
At this point until there are regulations on how you can be banned and how you can litigate bans from websites etc.
Maybe they have a policy limiting people from purchasing too much lego either to prevent reselling or from stopping people from becoming whales like in mobile games.
To be honest the community should have already abandoned bricklink when it was sold to the nexon founder. It is their own fault for continuing to support the website. People always make the mistake, the first time a small company sells it is usually good afterwards but the second time it sells it is rarely good afterwards.
Also this would not be as much of an issue if antitrust were enforced. It is absurd that Lego can own the secondary market of its own product.
80 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadHe doesn’t even know why they’ve banned him. And just like Google, there is no appeal or ability to get more info.
These types of policies are bad for customers. They should be banned.
She ordered something and it was lost during delivery? Some system flagged fraud and then as penalty for this she lost access to essentially everything LEGO. Later she found out about this ban via an email that closes all communication without any path to further followup. Now she can't shop or use her LEGO Account for anything.
Surely I missed something.
1) her order was lost by aus post
2) she told Lego it never arrived, they made a replacement order
3) aus post found her lego after being prodded
4) some anti-fraud system decided she was trying to scamaz
5) their fraud dept doesn't care about false positives
I have had that happen twice with Amazon (book) orders, they get lost, then only to arrive 2 months later (after Amazon has resent a replacement order)
EDIT: I should've said "postage in the US", not USPS. My response was in relation to someone saying that it is "the worst". I've had much worse experiences with private shipping companies like StarTrack.
I haven't run a company which ships packages with AusPost, but as someone who receives packages fairly frequently and sends packages occasionally, I've never had any significant issue.
In the Universal Postal Union’s report for 2018, US ranked #8. Australia ranked #26.
I think it's just anti-government hyperbole to pretend that taking an envelope from your hand to a farm house on the other side of the country for 55 cents and having a line for such an amazing service is too big an ask.
It would take just as long at Fedex or UPS. They're private. They don't mail anything for 55 cents. They're usually more expensive for packages even.
It's really pretty amazing.
USPS is one of only two couriers I'll actually select if I get a choice. They put my packages in my mailbox (I realize others legally can't) or if it doesn't fit, they bring the packages to my door and knock. UPS is the other.
Other couriers place packages on my driveway, halfway down my stairs, or in other weird places. Occasionally one of them will actually come all the way down the stairs, but they won't knock.
Other than that, I've never had a problem except for waiting in line and being served by an intentionally slow employee.
That said, the current AusPost delivery driver assigned to my neighborhood is a nice African (Sudanese?) chap who always at least tried to deliver stuff, will try and hide it from the street if it's marked safe to leave by the door, etc. and if you go to a post office they're usually pretty good.
If they treated delivery drivers like human beings I'm sure auspost's customer satisfaction would greatly increase
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/australia-post-m...
They've definitely improved a lot in recent times.
I logged a ticket with AusPost. They couldn't figure out the problem. I still lost mail. They said some guy had gone on holiday. This issue went on for months. I logged another ticket. This was suburban Melbourne not some remote town with a auspost agency only contactable by llamas by the light of the full moon.
No better response. Both tickets auto-closed with no actual resolution. All the while some letters/packages got through and others didn't. A bunch of online sellers had to resend my stuff to an alternate address because the relevant portion of AusPost for my address were too stupid to sort this out. Every courier not connected to AusPost delivered perfectly.
Then all of a sudden around a year later my problems disappeared.
Moral of story: something fishy was going on. Auspost can't debug their own redirections. Delivery problems can really mess up your reputation. Get some kind of workaround from your side operational ASAP.
Yes I had a lock on my letterbox. Yes I was home when packages were delivered. It got so hilarious we'd sit with laptop on front porch. The guy would turn up with the "You weren't home card" then would have to go get the package out of his van.
In the US at least, there are loyalty points you earn when making purchases (it used to be effectively 5% off), and those would have been lost when the account was banned
I just find it baffling that someone would write a letter that boils down to "We are punishing you!! But there is no way to enforce this punishment, so, uh... umm..." Seems like a huge waste of time if you ask me.
Also LDraw.org[0] (open-source digital lego community) still has no official word from LEGO Group members to LDraw Ambassador about acquiring of BrickLink, as BrickLink's Stud.io app use LDraw Parts Library.[1]
FTR, Ten members of the LDraw core met at the LEGO headquarter in Billund on May 22-26, 2019. (...) they also had a meeting with people from the LDD team and other compartments of the company. A request for a dedicated information channel when it comes down to part numbers, meshes or colours was forwarded.[2]
[0] https://www.ldraw.org/
[1] https://forums.ldraw.org/thread-23768.html
[2] https://forums.ldraw.org/thread-23439.html
I got a reply addressing me with the name of my mum which they surely got from a Lego-database, since my mum is probably listed as a customer there.
* amateurs.
Well, no need to worry ahead of time!
June 2020: lead found in all LEGO bricks ... how does lead even get into non-metal toys? Life finds a way.
Edit: She ...
And hey, it's never too early to learn.
Edit: Seriously, what's so horrible about working around a clearly unjust ban?
I had to do this once and there seemingly are no checks in place to prevent abuse. (You don’t have to prove you own the set where you are missing pieces from)
Also the OP bringing up Bricklink (which doesn’t use Lego account for login) is a bit dramatic, which makes me thing the poster is skewing or omitting some facts.
I've corrected my comment since you've informed me that gender is relevant in this context, but it is more pedantry than correction.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-ye...
It's a pretty gentle reminder that it can be offputting to misgender people, and while you may not care, the author might and it erases their gender from view in the discussion. It is inferior to assume that everyone you talk to is a guy, it may not be the most important thing ("no, she's a great coder, that's why I follow her" or whatever) but it colors the way you think about the world to make the default gender male.
Anyway, this is getting waaaaay off topic. Apologies.
I'm not sure I see how "not getting upset" has an impact on that specific problem.
Yes, that is what was said. I have never seen a convincing reason to believe that this is true, however. Until then, it is making much ado about nothing.
If you do not want to try the same experiment I am not sure what reason could ever convince you to do something you do not want to try.
If you're in the practical personal impact camp, it's not so relevant online but it can have repercussions on your ability to keep employees, build collaborative teams, or notice great ideas.
To broaden it just a bit, why should the person who notices a mistake (whether the subject of the mistake or just an observer) be responsible for also making sure people making the mistake never know they made it? This seems like a bizarre position to me. I see people pointing out a mistake who are maybe or maybe not upset (I am not, this is a common problem) and a small number of people getting defensive about the mistake being noticed.
In French for example:
il - he or it in the impersonal form (e.g. it is nice outside today)
elle - she
ils - they, referring to a group of men or a mixed or unknown group
elles - they, referring to a group of women
Some languages, such as Swedish, are trying to introduce gender neutral forms to work around the issue:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/04/hen-swedens-new-gen...
It says "her/ princess". It's not clear to me if that's to be taken seriously or not.
Obviously with enough digging you can find out what anyone's gender / preferred pronouns are. The point is more that the actual content being consumed does not indicate a clear gender, so using "he" in lieu of that is not a big deal.
Just ask or look it up or something.
[0] https://twitter.com/instagram/status/1206637381224259584
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Police
Was there more information outside of the linked twitter thread?
Instead, they operate in countries that allow them to do business there. The people in many of those countries, whether due to "inherent human right" or because they fought for it, have the right to vote and elect representatives to make laws.
So if those people decide that companies can't just ban people from doing business with them without "due process", they can put that into law.
I don't personally buy into the idea that anything is an "inherent human right," it's all social contract from my perspective. Businesses are subject to it as well.
Maybe they have a policy limiting people from purchasing too much lego either to prevent reselling or from stopping people from becoming whales like in mobile games.
To be honest the community should have already abandoned bricklink when it was sold to the nexon founder. It is their own fault for continuing to support the website. People always make the mistake, the first time a small company sells it is usually good afterwards but the second time it sells it is rarely good afterwards.
Also this would not be as much of an issue if antitrust were enforced. It is absurd that Lego can own the secondary market of its own product.