"Since the Merchants forum is locked to all but merchants, and the merchants are forbidden to tell the rest of the community whats going on there." Don't worry, the Merchant forum is boring, only things such as, "can you change the product name", "how nuch is the upload queue", "my check is lost", etc, etc. Time to time something happens, this one only I knew today and had to browse several pages to discover what was going on.

Stupidity also evolves!