(UPDATE: Not what I was expecting at all) Onai-Wolfwind

[chewsee.livejournal.com]

UPDATE 10/27/2010: I called her about 2 weeks before Halloween asking her if she had received her final check of $50 (bringing the total to $250 for a fursuit head) so that she could send out my head in time for Halloween. She explains to me that her and her mate are having some issues in which I will not go into detail with. She explained to me she would be staying at her mother's place for a while and would be shipping out my head this week around Wednesday or so (phone call was on Saturday or Sunday) once she returned to go pick it up. Wednesday passed... so did Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. My check had still not been cashed and her phone was off. Great. After calling her several more times on Monday she finally picks up. She explains to me she is at UPS with her mom shipping out my head. Great! She continues to explain that when she got back to the house almost all of her fursuit stuff was gone. No one knew what happened to it, and that she had to do my head all over again. She continued to explain that she had to send it only partially finished. She said the face was done, but that she put extra fur in the box so I could finish the back of the head, ears and neck.

WOW.

She's sending me a last second, slapped together head (which I am almost POSITIVE she didn't work on for the EIGHT months she was "doing it") that is only about half finished. I am getting it (supposedly) on Friday so that I have BARELY enough time to finish it myself, which I had paid her to do. She said she still needs my check to send it out and hopefully she wouldn't overdraw money from her account to do it. She also explained that she would later try to work out a partial refund when she was in a better situation. Well jeez, sounds like she is all kinds of screwed up right now and can't keep much straight. Needless to say I canceled her check. Maybe if she had been more honest with me I might have let her cash it. She doesn't deserve it at this point. I'm still paying $200 for a half finished head. I was charged a 20 dollar fee for canceling the check. I'd rather lose 20 bucks than 50. I would never do business with her again, even though she has explained to me that she is out of the business now, so to speak. IF I get the head (I was given no tracking number, as was promised) I will take pictures of me opening the box and show exactly how it looks when it arrives.

DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THIS PERSON. SHE IS UNORGANIZED AND COULD NOT COMPLETE THIS SIMPLE TASK. 

She did well in the past, but her new "work ethics" are just lazy. That is the only thing that her fursuit company lived up to. LAZY.

 

 UPDATE: Restored contact and resolution at last. Computer malfunction kept her from contacting me and now we are making our exchanges :3

UPDATE: Has been a week since last having contact with her. Email reads as follows:

"Sounds good to me then. I'll take current pictures when Cessna brings the camera back home tomorrow then. No big deal"

so much for tomorrow. It is a week later and I haven't gotten so much as an email or a picture of my head. Not even a " I'll have pictures soon". The deal is she seems to think it was supposed to be ready in 8 months when it was originally 5. She also claims she was only given $200 and not $250, I didn't pay her so I can't say for sure. She is supposed to send me the unfinished head after she shows me the pictures of it and I send her 50 more dollars. I STILL don't have an address and STILL don't have pictures. Until I see photos of this head I am only to assume there is none. I just want it ready in time for halloween since I have already missed 3 events I could have worn this costume to. If I don't have it the week before halloween (to finish it so it is ready for use) then I don't want it at all. Still very unsatisfied with the lack of contact.

UPDATE: Onai has contacted me and we are working things out :3

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let me explain. My boyfriend at the time (now husband) commissioned a friend of ours (Onai Wolfwind) to make a partial costume for me. She had always come through for us in the past, and even when we doubted that she would get something done on time, she did. She made a full costume for my husband (and on time). My husband was leaving for basic training and wouldn't be back until the end of July/ beginning of August. He paid her $250 cash (half the price of the partial) and told her to keep in contact with me about when I would like it completed. When I spoke with her about it I asked her to have it ready for Elliott's Spring Gathering, about a month and a half away. She told me she would be there as well and would be able to deliver it to me there. 

Onai moved about 2 or 3 hours away from where she used to live, and so I was patient. I understood she was in the middle of moving her stuff and that it would take time... I get that, life happens. The week before Elliott's Spring Gathering arrives and I call her, asking of the progress. She tells me it will be done and so I leave her alone. I get a phone call from her as I am driving up to Elliott's. She tells me that since she hasn't had internet since she moved, she was misinformed of which weekend Elliott's was. She explained to me she thought it would be the NEXT weekend, and that she can't come up, or deliver my head. I was very disappointed, but sometimes things like that happen.I told her that I decided I didn't want a partial but a head, and  she told me she would need 50 dollars more (bringing the total to $300) which is what the price of a head from her was. I explained to her that I would then wish to have the head at Megaplex (which she said she would be attending) and that I would have $50 for her. This gave her about another month to complete it (if it wasn't already).

Megaplex comes and I realize that I don't have enough money to go. I arranged to have a friend of mine give her the $50 and to receive the head for me, I just asked Onai to have her phone on her so I could tell my friend when he could pick it up. I called her... and I called her.... and... well, you get the idea. I called her (and she will agree with this) 42 times. After Megaplex, we are both angry. She tells me she left her phone in her boyfriend's car. She tells me he could have just come in the hotel to pick it up and that she had it. Afterward she tells me that the head was ready, but just needed the eyes glued on. She told me she had made two sets of eyes and wanted me to pick one out. But what its funny is, I still haven't seen ONE progress picture in what is now a 7 month long ordeal. I asked her time and time again (patiently) to send pictures of the progress. My husband has sent her notes to her furaffinity, which she hasn't responded. She has not responded to the phone calls I have left her (which she claims is not working, though still rings). I have messaged her here on Live Journal and she asked me for my email address. I gave her my email address 4 days ago, and I still hear nothing. Her fursuit making account (http://www.furaffinity.net/user/lazywolfcreations) has not been updated since APRIL.

I really hate having to do this to get her attention. I hate it. I like Onai, and she has been a really cool person in the past. She has done great things for me and my friends. Like any person who posts here, I just want what was paid for. That's all. I am still trying to send her 50 more dollars so she is paid in full, and can send it to me. Onai, if you are reading this, please email me right away at chew_fox@bellsouth.net ... as soon as this is resolved I will take this down and speak well of you again.

 

Comments

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

I approved this, but understand you are not allowed to delete posts. The whole point of artists beware is to leave behind a history for people to research. If everyone deleted their posts just because their particular case was resolved, that would make the whole thing worthless. Deleting the post now that you know the rule will get you permabanned.

When it is resolved, you are free to update the information by adding an edit to the top saying so (do NOT delete the rest of the text of the entry to get around the no deleting your post rule, this will also get you in trouble), and we will tag the post as resolved.

[marlinkhylacat]

Does anyone save posts made to here in case they're deleted? On another now-dead community, we had problems with people deleting posts. So the mods started saving each post as it was approved, and would often save "updated" versions as comments were added in case there was more to the story. If the post was deleted, the mod would repost it to the comm, with comments intact if possible, so it couldn't be deleted again (I've no idea how they formatted comments so it didn't cause a lot of broken thread links).

I didn't know it was a problem here before, but it seems like I've seen half a dozen complaints in the past few weeks about people going back and deleting older posts. Though archiving posts in case of deletion is something that would take time and storage space if used, so I can understand if no one had time to do such a thing here!

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

I did have an idea to do a simpler version of that, but was told to ask the other mods first, and I simply haven't gotten around to it yet.

The archiving entire posts thing isn't a bad idea, but I don't own my own website, and have no idea where and how we would even do such a thing while still keeping in mind that we're all volunteers with our own lives. If you know of a quick and easy way to do so, I would LOVE to hear it, I really would. I really hate it when people delete their posts.

[genkigami.livejournal.com]

The easiest way would be to just Screengrab the whole shebang, downside is it's an image you'd have to update constantly to keep the comments accurate and you'd need a Firefox add-on to expand all the comments.

That's the only idea I got to bring to the table.

[leahtaur.livejournal.com]

Really, the mods shouldn't HAVE to do that... You already warn people on the community profile and often in the comments of posts themselves. What else can you do?

[uozlulu.livejournal.com]

If you wanted something that only archived the opening post, you could screen grab the post upon approval, save the picture, upload it to LJ scrapbook, and then there would be a gallery of entries.

I mean I know people would want comments too but that might be too time consuming.

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

It would be way too much to expect the mods to spend all day taking screengrabs of all the posts and comments to keep things updated, considering we're all adults and mostly employed with other things to do. We're not exactly getting paid to do what we are now, and we already have trouble finding time to do backtagging. So yeah, it would be way too intensive to do that.

Also, LJ only gives you so much space in the scrapbook. We would run out pretty quickly, I imagine.

My original idea was to have a post in the moderator comm that just had the date and the name of the person who posted the entry, as well as a link to the post. This way, we could occasionally go through and check on the posts. This wouldn't prevent people editing their posts, however, but usually members notice when the post has been edited.

If there was a practical way to archive entire posts, I would be up for doing that. But it would have to be something that only took a minute or two and we would need somewhere to put it.

[uozlulu.livejournal.com]

Well another option could be save the entry URLs somewhere and use the Way Back Machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php)

I think there's a wait when requesting the webpage, but as long as the entry isn't f-locked it should be able to find the original entry and the content within.

All you need to work it is the URL of the entry, which could be kept in a special entry with a special tag.

[nounbeast.livejournal.com]

Someone running a Windows machine could occasionally run HTTrack (http://www.httrack.com/) and archive the entire comm, I'm pretty sure. It's a manual process, but it would catch all of the comments and save html files to their harddrive, individually dated. I used to copy my ancient weblog from freeservers doing that.

[frazzled-niya.livejournal.com]

Would setting up a separate group to copying to HTML to that and have everything set as private be too much?...o_O Since we all have lives outside of the net??

[marlinkhylacat]

I really wish I still knew the mods from the old community to ask how they did it. I'm not sure, but I think they just made a "secret" community that only the mods could access with all entries made private, and they would cross-post everything from the main comm to the archival one as soon as they approved each post. That way, LiveJournal was storing the posts, not someone's personal hard drive or website. The mods could just grab the post from their archive comm and copy-paste it to the main comm if things went wobbly-shaped.

The only big sticking points with that are if the OP edited their post before deletion, and comments that add to the discussion. Keeping track of which post edits and which comments should be copy-pasted--that's no easy task. And it would be terrific if someone had a solution to that. Screengrabs are good, but they do take up so much more space than simple text.

Dang, wish I could be more helpful. It annoys me as much as it does everyone else when someone tries to cover tracks by deleting posts and comments.

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Making a separate comm to store posts in isn't a bad idea. I think I'll bring that up to the other mods.

That said, I think people will just have to deal with the fact that we won't be storing comments and might not catch edits. There's no practical way around that, and it is just far too demanding for anyone to expect us to sit there and copy and paste every single comment that comes up. That is simply not something I would be willing to do, and I highly doubt anyone else would be, either.

But having an archive of just the posts and the name of the person who posted it would solve the majourity of the problem, I think.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I wonder if a program like ljarchive works on communities? I use it to keep a backup of my journal, and it automatically saves every post and every comment to every post each time I update it.

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

How does it work? Does it save it as a file? This comes back to the problem of where we'd put it.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

It saves it to your computer. But although I haven't done it, there's some way to upload the whole thing to a mirror account. The intent, after all, is to have it as a backup in case your account gets lost or deleted, so you have to be able to re-upload it. But I've never done so, so I"m not sure how that part works.

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

Thinking more on it, though, what would be the point of saving comments if we were then putting them up on a comm the general public couldn't see anyway?

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Well who says the backup has to be private? It just needs to be un-editable by anybody but the moderator, is all

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

I dunno. It's not fully up to me in the end regardless, I'll ask the other mods what they think and see if any of them know anything more about the program you mentioned, too.

[marlinkhylacat]

That said, I think people will just have to deal with the fact that we won't be storing comments and might not catch edits.

Seriously. This community is just FAR too active for anybody to watch its every move. I agree that the original main post itself is going to be what people care about about 95% of the time. Comments and edits are nice, but...yeah, I think anyone who tried to track every change to this comm would end up in a mental hospital inside of a month. :D

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

I think if Kerstin went crazy and told me she expected me to copypasta all the comments to every entry somewhere, I would be like PEACE OUT and run away screaming.

Fortunately, I know she wouldn't do that!

[datadust.livejournal.com]

If you have a PDF printer/creator, you can just print the page as a PDF. You can download these programs for free, and I think there's a Firefox add-on for it too. That way, you can save the whole screen as a PDF file as it would look in a printed version. Saves the entry and all comments on the screen with the same amount of time and effort that it would take to print (though you'd have to print it again to save updated comments). :)

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

Whoa, no offense, but I wouldn't be doing that unless someone was going to be reimbursing me for all that ink!

[datadust.livejournal.com]

Oh, you misunderstood me. You wouldn't actually print the journals with paper and ink. You just save the journals as a PDF file on your computer, and the file just looks like printed pages. :) You don't physically print them.

[lurkerwisp.livejournal.com]

Would it be possible to copy/paste the original entry text into a different entry so that the OP couldn't modify it instead of approving what they write? Just throw something like "posted by: [ljuser]" as the first line or something, and their name is attached to the post but they don't have the power to delete anything. Might be too much work, but might also solve the deleting issue while not having to worry about screengrabbing comments.

[kayla-la.livejournal.com]

It would be possible, but we aren't going to do that because then people couldn't edit updates into their posts, either.

[lurkerwisp.livejournal.com]

Ooh right. That makes sense then. Sorry! :C

[sirithduriel.livejournal.com]

Other than screencapping or copying the post, you could also look at the firefox plugin Scrapbook. With that you can save webpages quite easily to your harddisk. It does take up quite a bit of space, but the process of saving a page is just a few clicks.

[chewsee.livejournal.com]

You are absolutely right, sorry about that. I will make sure that I update this as soon as it is resolved (knowing Onai she will be good to her word).

[lichdog.livejournal.com]

Onai's a nice girl. I don't think she's trying to give you the runaround. She's probably overwhelmed right now, especially with what you mentioned her not updating her account.

I'm not excusing the failure to meet 2 previous deadlines--not at all. But I'd rather her not update anything and just kind of be AWOL-ish than have her update her accounts constantly and giving you the run-around.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I disagree. All it takes is ONE contact, saying "I'm sorry, this is going to be late, please give me a few weeks" and then the OP wouldn't have to spend all this time and effort, and the artist wouldn't have to feel harassed.

In the art world, no news is BAD news. I'd much rather hear an artist honestly tell me they've missed my deadline than have them refuse to return my messages.

[sophie-manx.livejournal.com]

This, it takes five seconds to pick up the phone or shoot a quick note or email.

[chewsee.livejournal.com]

Onai is a great person. I have seen her go above and beyond in her fursuit making to get things done on time. I would very much like to recommend her again, but I think she is about done doing the whole fursuit thing. I can understand how it gets to be a lot of work after time, and it can drag you down if you get overwhelmed, I've known many fursuit makers with the same problem (Nataya and Furbrications). I really did think Onai was better than this. I still think she is, but I just want a response.

[sophie-manx.livejournal.com]

Wow I could kinda understand complete strangers (commissioners) but blowing off a friend, wow. Not justifying this or an take the money and run fursuit makers, but a friend? Thats kinda low.

[pariahsdream.livejournal.com]

The only thing that concerns me is the fact you admit to calling her 42 times in one day. Was that honestly necessary? If I was her, I'd consider that to be bordering on harrassment. I'm not excusing her work ethic, but I think you might want to consider that that might not be a good idea next time. If she's not picking up after, say, the 5th time, she's probably not going to and leave her a voice mail.

[chewsee.livejournal.com]

I would have been happy to leave her a voicemail, but she doesn't have that option on her phone. I couldn't leave a voicemail, and I would have been happy to do so. All I could think was that she was ignoring me, and I will openly admit that I called her that much out of frustration. I later apologized to her afterward. After all those phone calls, she STILL didn't call me, I called her.She knew I was trying to reach her, and she didn't give me a call back. I was also mad because my friend was waiting on the go-ahead from me to go pick up the head. She knew I was going to call her at the con, but didn't have her phone with her, regardless. That is bad service, for a second time. But yes, it was not a good idea to call her that much. We all do stupid things sometimes when we are angry or upset.

[pariahsdream.livejournal.com]

I understand that (although I didn't know about not having a voicemail). I'm glad you recognize that it wasn't necessarily a good idea to call her that many times at least.

[onai-wolfwind.livejournal.com]

I must admit, I'm pretty upset about this. I sent you an e-mail just now. We will get this straightened out. I'm if sorry I upset you in any way.

But I must put this out for everyone. This was not your commissions. It was TomCat's, and it was due 2 months from now as a surprise present for you, that you found out about. Then you asked for it 4 months earlier, when I have other commissions due before yours.

[spiffystuff.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a whole 'nother spin on this...

[mialattia.livejournal.com]

It'd be great if you could elaborate, since it'd be helpful for the community to have both sides of the story on hand.

[onai-wolfwind.livejournal.com]

As sent to Chew Fox:

"TomCat commissioned me 6 months ago for a partial suit for you, as a surprise. He gave me $200 up front. (he gave Brio $50 for a hoodie at the same time) I asked when he wanted it done. He said he was going away for basic training and that he'd like it in 8 months mailed to you as a surprise gift. He asked me specifically not to tell you about it, or talk to you about it.

Somehow the surprise got slipped to you, possibly my fault. You asked if you could have it by Elliott's, and I said I would do my best, since it would be 4 months earlier than expected and I had commissions ahead of yours. I did get dates messed up, and missed the event. You asked for it at Megaplex, and I again said I would try my best. I got the head done and brought it with me, with 2 eye sets for you choose from. You called me while I was on the way to the event, and I told you I had it, and that your friend could come get it from me. I forgot my phone in Cessna's car, but you insisted on calling me and calling me. I figured you'd just send your friend over, since I talked to you a few hours before."

[genkigami.livejournal.com]

Well this is certainly a turn of events.

I really can't be the only one who quirked an eyebrow in "wat" at asking that a surprise gift be made earlier and getting involved in your own surprise gift rather than waiting and pretending to be surprised when it's delivered on the pre-arranged deadline.

[mialattia.livejournal.com]

Oh, Chewsee is ChewFox? Hello, context.

This whole wanting a suprise gift earlier than was agreed-on is a stupid big mess, if that's the case, then.

[chewsee.livejournal.com]

It seems this whole thing has blown way out of proportion. Everything got mixed up, due dates, the amount paid, everything. We are working something out right now so that I can get something worth the value of the money that was given to her. There are no legal documents and everything was word of mouth, so in the end it is one persons word against another. No one wins, feelings are hurt, and everything got screwed up. Unfortunately, I have learned my lesson to never do business with anyone unless there are legal documents and it is a legitimate company.

[truekaia.livejournal.com]

She just defaulted on me too. Sent me this big email saying that she had to give me a refund, even though she said i'd have it done by Anthrocon, and then said 2 weeks after anthrocon, and then definitely by furfright...

and now, not at all.

she promised me a refund two weeks ago, and I haven't seen anything yet. 400 dollars....

[chewsee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she has given up. She took on to much and unfortunately is no better than Brio right now, who also owes Tom Cat a hoodie that is still no where to be seen. Onai doesn't care anymore about who gets what, and she still has Kyle Foxalope's head which has been 75% done for over six months and is just to lazy to finish it up and send it to him. What a joke.

[truekaia.livejournal.com]

still waiting on the refund.

[oceandezignz.livejournal.com]

Chew, please remove the strike text from your older updates and instead simply DATE the most current update so as to avoid confusion, and break out of A_B's rules were we do not allow posters to strike-out portions of their posts.