Daniel said:
I am not sure why so much bad press happened and most did not even give us the benefit of the doubt and went for the jugular other than maybe some competitors are cloaked as members. We have seen this online. It has been a very common theme that whoever does get our bike, absolutely loves them and impressed with the level of quality so when we seen the bashers, we were like, "What's up?"
There are reasons we are in general very leery of posts about commercial ebikes and ebike parts: many of them are obviously spam for the companies, with a few real customers here and there--usually it's reasonably easy to tell the difference, but not always.
If you poke around old ES posts about such bikes and bike parts, many of the "customers" of various commercial ebikes that post are doing all of the things that most commercial ebike manufacturers or dealers do: wildly inflating the abilities of the bike, praising every tiny detail, and finding absolutely nothing wrong with the bike or the company...yet if you do a google search on the same bike, you find lots of reports of problems with it, often specifically about areas that are most highly praised in the "review" of it. When we ask detailed questions about those things, either there is never a reply, or it glosses over any negative stuff we ask about, or ignores the questions completely, or simply makes stuff up (like when it comes to numbers for range and power, especially when we ask about a no-pedal test on a specific kind of course, or we ask them to test using a known wattmeter and provide pictorial results, because the numbers they provide are either physically impossible or unbelievable for the given equpiment/conditions).
Some of these "reveiws" have been removed as spam, because they were shown to come IP-wise from the same places the companies themselves did. Or a whole slew of "customers" of exactly the same kind of bike suddenly show up, every single one an unbelievable promoter of them. Usually a bunch show up on the same day, with none before and none after--that's pushing coincidence a bit far, pointing to someone planning them all to come by and post, or a single person doing all the posting (via IP rerouting, perhaps--it's certainly not unknown).
There are possibly legitimate customers that just seem like shills, that get treated badly, and when it happens I feel bad about it--but it is because of the shills and spammers doing stuff like the above that we are so very skeptical of almost anything commercial.
It doesn't help that last summer, a person came in and bought out the forum out from under it's actual creator, sold by the person who hosted it (who probably didn't really have any rights to sell it), and this person intended to commercialize all of our years of open public postings and our work, comments, technical achievements, etc., and earn himself a profit on it, even though he had no right to any of it. That's made many of us much more touchy about commercial interests of any kind. The one "commercial interest" that we do trust is Justin LE of Grin Tech / http://ebikes.ca , because he's not out to make a buck, he's out to change the world, in the way most of us here are. That's why he now "owns" the forum. If we didn't trust him, there wouldn't be much content left here, because we would have deleted it rather than see it be used to earn someone else profits off of it. Petty, perhaps, but it wasn't created for the purpose of earning money for anyone--simply to share information, and archive that for others to use for themselves as they run across it later.
So, apologies if we appear to be hard on commercially-aligned members, or newly-joined customers of commercial ebikes. It's just our nature to be highly skeptical, even of each other. "Pics or it didn't happen" isn't an uncommon phrase.
