Even in RL the BBB is a scam. They only accept complaints against non-BBB members.
ConductorX, while I certainly agree that the RL BBB is not without its problems, some of which are HUGE, and almost none of which are not well known by the public, your claims are simply not true. I have no idea why you'd think it's set up the way you describe. As someone who's been a member, maybe I can clear things up for you.
First, the BBB absolutely does accept complaints against memebers. That's the whole point. If they didn't, there would be no purpose in any company ever joining. The entire reason for being a member in the first place is to show that you're someone who will respond to complaints.
Not only does the bureau accept complaints about members, they require members to respond to them. The whole idea is that if you're reputable, you'll choose to be a member precisely because you want to know what the complaints about you are, so that you can deal with them. If they didn't accept complaints against members, that couldn't happen, and then, as I said, no company would have any reason to join.
Here's how it works. When a complaint is issued against a member company, the BBB informs the member, and then they require that the member take reasonable action respond to the complaint. If the member fails to do so, that goes on record. If a company show a pattern of unresolved complaints, it may not be allowed to continue its membership. At the very least, the public will be able to find out about the pattern.
When a company is "a member in good standing", it means that they've done everything required of them to respond to complaints appropriately. If a company's standing is less than good, then you know they haven't been dealing with complaints as they should.
Either way, the bureau IS taking complaints against members. Say what you want about whether you think they handle them the way you might want, but to pretend they don't accept them at all is simply ludicrous.
Now, that's not to say the system doesn't have its flaws. Every system does. The mistake the public tends to make is in the common misconception that the BBB is a government agency. It is absolutely not. They are a private company like any other, and as such, are answerable to no one but themselves.
So the question is, how trustworthy are they? The answer is we just can't know. Maybe good people are running it with honesty and integrity, maybe it's as corrupt as could be. Nobody on the outside can know.
When I was a member, I personally felt the organization was a joke, which is why I'm not a member anymore. The general public, though, tends to trust the BBB, for better or worse.
If anyone's interested in a quick story, here's one of the reasons I didn't like being a member. In the sales & marketing business that I was in for the first 12 years of my professional life, the manufacturer I represented required that all distributors be members. The manufacturer paid the membership dues, which was nice, but I still had to abide by the bureau's rules, whether I agreed with them or not, and whether they made any sense or not.
The biggest problem was that no matter how well intentioned the authors of the rules might have been, there was just no way they could have understood how my particular business worked. In many cases, rules that were presumably designed with the intention to make things more transparent actually served to make things infinitely more murky and confusing to the public than they otherwise would have been.
This was particularly true when it came to help wanted ads. The bureau enforced this "Standards of Advertising" garbage upon us, which prevented us from wording our ads in a way that would make clear sense. We had to use the wordings invented by some pencil pusher at the BBB, rather than by those of us who actually understood the business we were advertising. Often these wordings would include really strange abbreviations for things, which practically nobody in their right mind could have been expected to understand.
For example, if you're looking to hire an appointment setter or a sales rep, and you plan to pay that person a commission for each appointment they set, you have to put the phrase "base appt." in the ad. Check your local paper right now, and you'll see at least a few of those. Now, pretend I hadn't just explained what "base appt" means, and you just happened across it somewhere. Would you have guessed its meaning correctly? From experience, I can tell you there's at least a 90% chance you wouldn't have.
I can't tell you how many times people called my office and said, "If I get this job, do I really have to work in a basement apartment?" or "What's this basic aptitude thing you need for this job? Am I gonna have to take an IQ test?"
Man, that was frustrating. Heaven forbid they would have just let me flat out say "You will be paid $_____ for each appointment." No, that would be too simple. Those pencil-pushers wouldn't have been able to justify their jobs if I did that. I had to say "base appt.", and confuse the hell out of everyone.
For years, I tried to convince the manufacturer that this kind of thing was hurting us, our perspective hires, our customers, and everyone else in between. I many times suggested we withdraw from BBB membership because of it. But the powers that be insisted that having the BBB logo on the front door was somehow worth all the headaches and the lost business. And since I had no choice but to deal with that particular manufacturer (no one else made the products I was marketing), I had no choice but to keep letting the BBB walk all over me. That really sucked.
What I just described is a small example of where the danger lies when the public puts its blind trust into any privately run "watchdog" organization. Where these so-called "standards of advertising" were concerned, the public's best interest was not the bureau's interest. For reasons for known only to the bureau itself, they went to pains ensure that certain types of advertisements would always be confusing.
Now, let's say I'd been more of a maverick, and I had decided to violate those ridiculous standards of advertising. Let's say I dared to make my ads actually be crystal clear to the public, instead of so cryptic and so potentially misleading. If they'd noticed it, I could well have lost my "good standing" because of it. Anyone who inquired about me at that point would have found that my reputation with the BBB was not good, when the only thing I was actually guilty of was trying to run a more honest business. In that case, would the BBB have been giving the public an accurate picture of who's "good" and who's not? Absolutely not. I suspect there are plenty of other cases where they get it just as wrong. As I said, they're a joke.
On the brighter side, now that I'm a professional artist instead of a manufacturer's rep, I don't have to deal with that crap anymore. I've been very happy not to have been a BBB member for the past several years. They can keep their silly rules. If someone has a complaint, they can bring it to me directly, and I'll deal with it as I see fit. I certainly don't need to have the letters "BBB" on my door for that.
If you join the BBB you automatically get a good ranking.
Well, of course you're in good standing when you first join. If you've only just arrived, there hasn't been time yet for anyone to have filed a complaint. You're making it sound like you think a company should start off with a bad standing, and then somehow jump through a series of hoops to earn a good one. Think about that prospect for a moment, though, and it's plain to see how fundamentally unfair it would be. You can't rightly penalize someone if they haven't done anything wrong yet. Everyone must be assumed good until proven bad.
The point of the bureau is to encourage you to respond to complaints in order to MAINTAIN the good standing you were entrusted with from the start, not to assign you tasks to perform in order to "score" somehow. You start out with a good standing, and then if it turns out you're bad news, it won't take long before the complaints flood in. If you don't work to resolve the complaints, you've then rightly earned a bad standing.
That doesn't mean they don't have their problems. As I said above, they certainly do. But the things you've listed are not among them.
To get back on topic, I'll say this. Lana, while I'll agree that a BBB type organization in SL is a good idea in principle, I just can't see it as a good idea in practice. The RL BBB has enough flaws of its own. Try to build a similar organization in a virtual world, and you're all but guaranteed to expand the flaws a million fold. It would be great if it could work, but I just don't believe it would.
