I've been reading with interest the threads about BFT here on FlyerTalk. Like others, I've always considered BFT a super reference. However, I have now come across what seems to be an ethical issue, which leaves me kind of scratching my head asking "why?".

I just posted about half an hour ago on BFT something along these lines:

"I work at a large law firm and I'm somewhat known as a travel guru. This week a colleague contacted me to ask me about the legitimacy of a purchase she made on EBay from seller "in31122". I examined the receipt for her "hotel purchase" and the chain of emails, and turns out, this EBay seller is simply re-selling Priceline rooms at a high mark-up. The chain of emails reveals that the EBay seller is simply 'commercializing' Bidding for Travel information. In fact, the lists of 'promised' hotels are obviously just cut-and-pasted from biddingfortravel.com! See:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...EBWA%3AIT&rd=1

My friend is worried that her booking might be in question as clearly, the re-selling of Priceline rooms violates the Priceline user agreement (against commercial uses and resales) and also violates state law on travel seller licensure. Further, the listing would appear to be against EBay's 'choice travel listing' policy and also, the seller does not list his or her "'tate seller of travel license number' in the disclosure, as is required by EBay. However, my colleague's emails to EBay's Safe Harbor division have, so far, gone unanswered.

This worries me on several levels, not the least of which is the legitimacy of this community. Can we allow people to harvest the information here for commercial purposes on EBay? Is there anything the members of this community can or should do in this situation to protect our community?"

About ten minutes after this was posted, Sheryl deleted my message and posted "your post has been removed as inappropriate subject matter for posting at biddingfortravel.com."

About five minutes after that, she completely deleted my entire thread, and sent me this email:

"Information like this should be sent to me privately through the
Contact Administrator link. For various reasons, we do not want
postings about Ebay on BiddingForTravel.com.

Sheryl"

I asked for more clarification and received this response:

"As noted in our Posting Guidelines, we reserve the right to remove links to any website.

We do not promote Ebay on BiddingForTravel.com. If anyone has an issue
with Ebay's rules being violated, that is between the user an Ebay.

Sheryl"

This makes me very suspicious of the motives of BFT. Why in the world would BFT rush to delete a post with valuable information trying to help out the BFT community as a whole?

Is BFT harvesting all of the information we put there and selling Priceline rooms through EBay themselves? Is there any other reason people here can think of that Sheryl would have rushed to censor me so quickly???

I'm sure I will be banished for questioning her, but this seems very weird to me, and I'll risk my BFT membership by asking what people here think about this situation.