I never noticed that you could get to the forums through anything but the bar at the bottom of the various pages here: home page, shop page, search pages, etc. so I didn’t even know anything had changed.
The problem with this is, we have no power here. Sure we can tell new sellers where they can go to find things or that messages are scams, but if they have a real issue, we can’t evaluate their problems internally or flip any switches. We’re kind of like an instruction label on a life preserver (since someone else brought up the Titanic, lol), useful, yes, but not really worth much without the life preserve itself. Since Etsy’s actual customer service is the life preserver, trying to cut more access to it is going to leave a lot of sellers drowning and not just newbies. The serious problems—the ones the forums can’t help with—can hit any shop, even very well established ones.
And, this is a community, but Etsy’s been trying to erase that. When everyone gets together and makes jokes and laughs, while trying to keep on topic and remain business-like, of course, it’s a community. Etsy can try to erase that, but competitors or not, ways to chitchat or not, you can’t really take the uniting force of this boat we’re all in away from us. I’ve worked several retail jobs in my life, and let me tell you, even if you don’t always like all your coworkers, you’re still a team. Competitors or not, we here on Etsy are a team too, sort of. There might be those who aren’t willing to help even their competitors, but a lot of us are. Even from around the world, and I think that’s wonderful.
