Position is -if you shill will have your public image damaged, and that's all.
There's a thread going on with buying of forum accounts for god's sake.
The truth is that it is almost impossible to discover a shill bidder unless a the cheater makes a mistake (like Garr255 did by posting with his sockpuppet account by mistake).
If there's no incentive in being honest and ethical because unethical and dishonest behaviour is tolerated, then the honest folks with principles get ass-raped by the unethical guys doing their thing.
I strongly disagree on "shill bidding" being a "secret reserve", ebay for example forbids this and in my opinion they rightly do so.
Forum policy: No matter how many times you do this, you will never get a scammer tag unless you have an explicit agreement which says otherwise. Auctions are only devices to assist in price negotiations.
Personally: I might forgive someone if they do this kind of thing once, but probably not twice.
Clear enough.
I have to say I've been surprised by things going on the auctions subforums. We constantly have:
a) People pumping up price through PM that cannot be verified
b) Bidders that do not honor their bids
c) Auctioneers that did not set a reserve price and then decide not to honor winners because the price is not good enough for them.
I have to say that for me that's utterly amateurish and disappointing. I'd like to see some serious business going on, and not only jokes and scams. In this sense, I think the new trust system will help a lot. People can RATE other folks, and this is a huge improvement that also makes mod's life easier.
That said, I think a clear set of rules should be stickied to the auction subforums: for example, we should say that shill bidding is allowed. That not honoring the winner is OK unless the auctioneer signs a contract that obliges him to do so (which is kinda contradictory, because the whole point of an auction is
to be binding, but I guess we have our very own system here). We should say that auctioneers have the right to constantly change their "reserve price", and that they can say they received any offer through private messages. And so on... I really think this will improve
a lot the current auction subforum, so every interested part won't believe they are participating in a "real" auction, where a set of basic rules are implied (first of them is that the winner will be honored, if not, what kind of auction is this?), while on these forums ANY rule and condition has to be stated on beforehand, including: no shill bidding, honoring winners, no artificially pumping price up by "accepting PM offers", etc.
This will make people wary that ALL THE CONDITIONS must be stated in the OP.
Who could hope for mere? 
Guess i've sopped up enough knowledge to start trading on this forum 
