eBay Quietly Kills Tech Issue Community Pinned Post As Sellers Raise Transparency & Communication Concerns

eBay has quietly ended practice of posting alerts for ongoing technical issues in central community forum post, raising transparency and communication concerns.

The change was recently noticed by a longtime community member who tagged eBay community staff and asked:

Pinned Post On The Report Technical Issues Board

What happened to your pinned post on the Report Technical Issues Board?

Devon@eBay responded that the dedicated pinned post for ongoing technical issues had been removed, but alerts about individual issues would still be shared in other places:

We removed the pinned post but we still share ALERT numbers within individual threads when there are issues that are being reported.

The original poster expressed their disappointed and another seller chimed in with concerns that not having issues reported in a central location will lead to information being dispersed and not easy to find or reference.

yep......doesn't make sense to reply on individual threads........there will just be more questions, chasing down answers on the one thread where there "might be" an answer/acknowledgement and no one central place to look to see if problems are ebay issues or our own....... We fought long and hard for that thread and very discouraging it's gone...........with no discussion with the people who used it.

This is just the latest move to degrade the eBay community experience, following the end of regular chat sessions with eBay staff, discontinuation of the eBay for Business podcast, and a general retreat from official forum participation over the last few years.

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Sellers had hoped that last month's announcement of previous US General Manager Dawn Block moving to a new role as VP Global Customer Experience signaled that eBay was putting a new emphasis on improving the customer experience, including seller engagement and community participation - but instead it appears eBay is retreating even further from the community while handing even more of the customer support experience over to AI.

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Removing a central resource for tracking technical issues could also be an effort to stifle wider reporting on the near daily glitches and problems that continue to plague eBay.

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Almost 7 years after Elliott Management's infamous activist bid to push for change at the company, it's shocking just how much of Elliott's "Enhancing eBay" plan still rings true today - particularly critiques around glitches constantly plaguing the platform and lack of leadership prioritizing operational and technical excellence.

Ex-CEO Devin Wenig infamously said at eBay Open 2018 that technical glitches are unacceptable and really pissed him off.

eBay has since removed the video they had posted on YouTube of the event, but the interviewer asked:

There've been a lot of site glitches recently on eBay. What are you guys doing to get rid of them?

Here's the simple answer - unacceptable, unacceptable. And we're making a lot of changes. When you make changes there are times that things happen but that's not an excuse and it's not ok with me and this summer in particular there have been a number of issues that directly impacted sellers like people not being able to see their view counts and a few other things and it's just not ok.

I'm extremely proud of a lot of things we've done, I'm not proud of that and in fact I hold my team accountable and it's not important, it's an internal matter but, we made changes to people and teams because shipping product that isn't ready is not ok. It's not ok with me and it's not ok with my team.

So the short answer is it's not like we don't get it. We are making a lot of changes and I want to make those changes, we need to make those changes, but making changes and then having to back up and fix things is not cool and I totally get it. Most of the issues from this summer have now been remedied but I was pissed off.

Mazen Rawashdeh was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, but somehow managed to escape the wrath of a "pissed off" Wenig.

He was then promoted to Chief Technology Officer in 2019, after a brief period where he co-led Core Product & Tech along with Mohan Patt when Steve Fisher was being shuffled from CTO to SVP Payments "in order to focus on a personal matter."

Patt and Fisher both left the company, but Rawashdeh remains as CTO while the site continues to be plagued by technical problems and operational challenges.

Mazen Rawashdeh was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, but somehow managed to escape the wrath of a "pissed off" Wenig and was promoted to Chief Technology Officer, a title he still retains today despite the fact the site continues to experience near daily business impacting "glitches."

What do you think of eBay removing the Ongoing Technical Issues pinned post from the community forum? Let us know in the comments below!