From a very cheer for Envato attitude, I went down heh, kinda stuck with it as some of the authors I do value sell exclusively with them, be it plugins, themes or other stuff. It used to be and feel like a community, now it feels like every other corpo-greedy-ignore-the-end-user business.

There are some brilliant themes on TF, there are some abominations as well.

Envato does not handle constructive criticism well, over the years I've been around, the general level of coding has become rather 'ugly'. Was wondering the other day, if the reviewers actually get paid or is it volunteer work. At times they will neat pick single lines but demonstrate rather limited knowledge themselves and once confronted with arguments they tend to fall back on automated responses. Other times, it seems they don't even bother to unzip the package, just flag it and get it over with.

But what bothers me the most, is that they are quite happy to keep on selling items who's authors are nowhere to be seen for months. As a buyer, it's quite frustrating. On more then one occasion I had to resort to rather threatening emails to get a refund on an item bugged beyond reason. Strangely enough, the mention of Australian equivalent of OFT, seems to have done wonders towards their attitude.

And one more thing, in Australia, it is illegal to refuse a refund directly to where it came from - that is a credit card/payment system. The little Envato funds trick is at the least cheeky. Most of us can't be bothered to insist to have the money return to the card and they are taking full advantage of it.

It's a little sad - you build something awesome, provide a first class platform for devs and clients, you grow it, and then instead of continuously improving, you lower your standards and milk it as much as humanly possible.

Sometimes I do wish I had a similar mindset - though on the other hand, I'd rather treat my customers fairly, have less money, and no trouble sleeping ;)

All this attitude does, is encourage authors and buyers to work together behind the scenes. Wonder if they ever stop and think there might be people that use them as a meeting place, only to take their business out of their claws at first chance.

Additionally, considering the sheer volume of available products, lack of certain quality of life features is quite surprising - proper search on all market places, proper forums and a searchable comments system which results don't just take you to page 1 of 1000. The recent not so fortunate redesign of the website, that would probably not even get by their weakest reviewer in the state it was released in, just boggles my mind - you have access to hundreds if not thousands of very talented developers and designers - how do you manage to screw up your own project that much?