I agree and fully accept that some people will never forgive my past actions, and personally feel that they are entitled to that resentment.
I expect the road to be hard to travel, and while I of course am not fond of that, am grateful that I have a road to traverse at all at this point.
I’m not interested in dealing with Heath in any capacity. I don’t have the bandwidth to monitor this and make sure it doesn’t become another problem. It’s a variable I just don’t have the time or interest in dealing with.
Besides that, PurpleYoYo is not actively soliciting funds right now and is currently requesting that anyone wishing to donate to us instead donate to Crisis Text Line (which serves the emergency help number you see immediately on our website and FB page) as we’re really only trying to raise awareness of these issues and the donations we’ve received so far will more than take care of our needs for the next couple of years.
I’m glad to see that I’m in good company.
That being said my work here is done.
Good luck y’all don’t say you were not warned.
So I was super pumped for this release until I looked into the history here. I wasn’t yoyoing when all this went down. The part that gets me is who is paying for the five Heath gets because it sounds like he is getting five and paying for one for his mom if I remember correctly. That means everyone who buys one is kinda giving him even more free yoyos. I know it’s his design but that’s five that could be sold for charity. I am questioning withdrawing my reservation. Their are 100 other great yoyos I don’t own.
That’s a good point. I have no issue writing Jeff a check or PayPal for the charity decided on for the value that those yo-yos would raise for charity.
I’ll post a receipt when those numbers are decided by Jeff if that helps, but that won’t be for a bit of time as the yo-yos are still in production.
Word up bro
Thank you for the response Heath and understanding my point of view. Helps me trust the project.
I also wanted to thank @jrodriguez who really personally stepped in and brought things to a reasonable conclusion back in 2012. The more I looked at the topic, the more this became clear. Major props and you handled it 100% professionally.
Ideally, yes, people would behave like grown ups without having to be chastized into doing so. Total agreement on that.
That said, I do have some objections to a few specific things that were said:
“Heath stole the donated yo-yo charity money for personal stuff” is wildly different than “Heath inappropriately used the donated yo-yo charity money as a loan towards operating expenses for his extremely popular yo-yo company and sponsored yo-yo team” which is what I believe the evidence currently supports.
“Heath was gone for 6 years” isn’t true. It was 3 to 3½. And I’d argue people wanted him to take a hiatus, understandably so, given what went down. Hiatus was the right call.
“Heath strung people along about the charity auctions for 2 years” isn’t… quite… true. Sure, the announcement of the charity auctions was early, but it took a year for the auctions to even start, and auctioning off / shipping 50+ random donated yo-yos is hellish from a logistics standpoint and certainly would take 6+ months realistically. And this is someone who presumably had a full time job plus the yo-yo company on top of all that. Yes, it was a bad idea to do this on multiple levels, but logistically it is nightmare mode.
The time between being called out and full resolution / restitution was less than 3 months. Yes, I completely agree that you should not need to be called out to do the right thing, but once it happened (and again, props to @jrodriguez I did not understand how pivotal he was to this whole thing) the correct resolution was arrived at fairly quickly.
On the whole, two conclusions, speaking only for myself:
It was resolved properly. Yes, you could argue that the right thing should have been done without anyone intervening, and that is totally fair. But it was resolved properly in the end. All the money (and a bit more) made it to the charity as promised. After that, a sincere and honest apology was made, and a penalty hiatus was taken.
It’s been about 8 years since this started, and 6 years since the hiatus. I believe that is enough “penalty” time for someone to get another chance, unless you don’t believe in ever giving anyone more chances, which… is fair, if you’re an old testament permanent wrath of God kinda person. That’s a valid personal choice.
I think a lot of good points were made here by both sides especially @codinghorror, @jrodriguez, and @edhaponik . I also feel that this discussion has been going on for too long. Enough information has been provided here for people to start forming their own opinions on the matter.
So, I’m going to refrain from reiterating what has already been said. Instead, I want to ask the community a couple of questions: What kind of community do we want to be? What kind of image do we want to project to the rest of the world? Are we a community that doesn’t believe in second chances, a community unable to forgive past transgressions regardless of any proclaimed desires for change? Or are we something beyond that? What kind of message do we want to send here, knowing that future generations might visit this topic in the years to come?
@codinghorror – I’m happy to roll with whatever time frame you research and come up with – you’re doing way more research on this than I’m interested in doing or have time to mess with. For everyone reading this please read my posts with this disclaimer – I have not gone searching the forums for dates or times for historical accuracy. Take everything I write here with the caveat that it’s based on my memory of incidents that happened a long time ago and that I haven’t, until this week, spent any time thinking about.
I’m also not interested in debating semantics with you or being put to trial for the wording of my internet posts. Read all of this history however you want. What I know is that a good number of people had to put in a fair amount of work to expose that Heath had not donated the money he told everyone he had donated. His options once caught were to say, 1. Yeah, I’m a thief, or, 2. I always intended to donate it, I promise. Which would you choose? None of us know what was or is going on in Heath’s head. None of us can ever know his intentions. But I do know, and you can verify yourself, that even once he was caught, he continued to be deceptive. Call all of this whatever you want. I’m calling it theft.
Your presentation of the options here about how to move forward isn’t even close to exhaustive. Either 1. you accept his hiatus as penance or 2. you don’t believe in redemption aren’t the only options here. Now I’m doing to you what you did to me. This is ridiculous and a waste of time. Like Nathan, I’m gonna take a break from the forum. I’ll return when this has all blown over. Best wishes to you all.
All of this has put a serious damper on the whole Ti Vayder project and is seriously upsetting some very long standing members here.
It looks like it would have been much better not to involve Heath at all.
As I said in my post
I’ve bolded the relevant bits. Everyone has to draw their own conclusions based on the data presented.
And just to clarify, I didn’t bring this up in the original launch post because I thought it was mostly behind us (from 2010-2012, it is currently 2019), and all the history is visible in the old forum topics if you care to dig enough. The whole new followup topic is a direct result of other people (not me) saying, yes, it is still an issue for us and warrants further discussion.
I am reacting to their desires and wishes.
Not really, as others pointed out – don’t involve Heath, “you stole his design”, do involve Heath “how dare you involve a criminal who stole from a charity”.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
I personally prefer the path of redemption, based on the evidence I have seen. Others may make different choices. That’s how life works. The world keeps spinning regardless.
I was thinking that exactly. People where on your case when he wasnt involved, and now others are that he is. I personally am very grateful to you and all the work you have done for this project. Thank you!
I also think Heath has put him self out here and taking the negatively thrown his way very graciously. We all make mistakes. I forgive you (not that it matters) and more importantly hope you forgive yourself. I respect very much you wanting to do/be better.
At the end of the day, a hater is gonna hate. Sucks that people are wanting to leave the forum but it is what it is.
As others have stated though I think the best course of action would’ve been getting his blessing without his involvement. I’m sure some people would still have issues about the project but I think it would’ve been to a lesser degree than the other 2 options. Would’ve been a good middle ground
Right but how involved is he? I’m basically doing everything. Literally the only thing Heath is doing is boxing items up and shipping to the fulfillment center. The yo-yo arrives in trays from FPM assembled and they do test them.
Jeff, none of this in anyway reflects on you. All you were trying to do from the outset was to allow the community to purchase a highly sought after and all but unobtainable yoyo. This is really cool!
All the controversy about it is from Heath showing up. It surrounds him, not you.
I got a bit of this impression too, but would it have been possible to license the design and leave the testing/boxing to someone else?
I think people are referring to it being an “official VsNewton release.”