[genesmasher]

Originally Posted by Yorkiemom1

I submit this is sooooooo incorrect. Puppy mills, byb's, brokers, resellers try to get away with as little overhead as possible...not many have an advertising budget and those that do, certainly do not want to be subjected to reviews for all to see. They fly low and slow and under the radar,,,,they are much more likely to come to sites like YT and post their litters for sale (we have all seen those "breeders" that you hear from once or twice every couple of years, JUST to list puppies, never contributing to any other posts with information, etc)....and oh by the way....breeders are being watched by local law enforcment, AKC, PETA, HSUSA, etc...to be certain they do not have an excess of breeding dogs, and that they are not producing over the limit of puppies....dishonest breeders are busting these closely watched parameters and therefore they want to remain as non descript and "invisable" as they possibly can. Reality is, THESE are the people that will drop off this ad site....not the breeders that have nothing to hide. I think we have a rare opportunity to actually work with people that are trying to do this correctly, and we have the opportunity to help them develop their site where it will actually benefit breeders as well as people looking for ethical, responsible breeders with integrity and accountability.

Yep, this is our view as well. We will just have to wait and see if it is actually true.

Originally Posted by theporkieyorkie

I do like the fact that the owner of the site has taken the time to come here and listen to suggestions on how to improve the site. I also like the idea of having a forum on the site so people can ask questions to the breeders, like they do on here.

It would be cool to have a standard questioneer/profile that breeders could answer...with questions like...

Are your dogs Registered?
Do you have a spay/neuter contract?
Do you do home visits?
Do you require fenced in yard?
Do you ship??
Do you do genetic testing??
Do you have...dogs that you show~obedience dogs~agility dogs~dogs that hunt~working dogs~ etc etc
Why do you breed?

Right now, it just shows the name and the website of the breeder. It would be cool to have more info in that area....to help people decide if they want to further look at that particular breeder.

It would also be cool to have an question/ answer area under the review section for each breeder to individually answer on their profile, as well as a place in the forum section where every breeder has a chance to answer.

I also agree that one bad review shouldn't necessarily result in the banning of a breeder...but if there are several problems with a breeder, then hopefully Vadzilla will look into the situation.

Actually, breeder CAN add all this information in their listing. They can include upto 400 characters of text in there, and many of them do have descriptions (just look at Rosehill Yorkies listing). But it requires them to login and spend a couple of minutes actually typing these things in (yes, what a chore !!!) - we cant do it for them. The issue with the questionnaire you propose is that there is no way for us to verify any of the information provided...

By the way, breeders also already have an option to provide a "reply" to every review given, right under each of the reviews.

One of the few things we are considering right now is displaying "Breeder of Merit" badge for breeders that received this award. This is something that we can actually verify with AKC. The problem is, we are not sure if this is actually a good measure of breeder reputability - we actually have a poll on our home page right now - it would be great if some of your voted there:

Find a Breeder, Dog & Cat Breeds, Kittens & Puppies for Sale, Pet Articles & Forum - Vadzilla

Originally Posted by Nancy1999

I agree and about the "review" section, the breeder is actually allowed to review themselves.

Nope, the breeders are NOT allowed to review their own listings (the system automatically checks against that). Of course, they can create a new user account and leave a review as someone else... We haven't thought of an effective way to catch these yet, but adding additional information to the review (like a date of transaction, details about the puppy, etc) may not be a bad idea. Ultimately, it is a question of how much effort someone would want to make trying to falsify data, just to raise their reported breeder "rank" on the site. One other thing we were thinking about was sorting "by ranking", but decided not to do it in the end. For now, our breeder search results are completely randomized, and a breeder with no reviews can still be on top of the pile, when users run a search. We don't think it is unreasonable to expect users to do their share of work and look through all the listings carefully.