Should Escrow be Required?

I think it should be up to the buyer to decide that. If a buyer is skeptical of a seller, then he should be the one to require it.
By the way, positive feedback is absolutely no guarantee of a good seller. It is very easy to fake a good feedback rating, as Audiogon (and Ebay for that matter) have no way of truly verifying that the buyer actually paid the seller any money. (Although, since Ebay takes a "cut" of the selling price, theirs is slightly better).
A better suggestion is that the seller should be required to give a phone number so that the buyer can speak with them directly, as opposed to only via email corespondance.
And as far as the poor English is concerned, I do not sweat that too much either. I work with enough foreign born "Americans", (not to mention that non-English speaking people also use Audiogon), that if their english is not perfect, I do not hold that against them. Having a good command of the english language does not preclude a person from being an audiophile.

These are my thoughts on the matter anyway.

PS Don't flame me for my poor grammatical sentence structuring and spelling errors. (I was born and raised in the USA, and I am an engineer, so naturally I couldn't spell my way past a 2nd grade spelling bee!)

NO, buyers and sellers should have freedom to negotiate their own terms.

I don't know about "requiring" escrow, since AudioGon, like E-bay is "only a venue." A good start,however, would be a valid credit card (that is cross-referenced with the billing address and telephone number of the holder) in order to register, buy and sell.

Secondly, I agree with Mike. I personally only buy with a credit card through PayPal or COD. I know that these payment methods are not full proof, but there is at least some form of protection from scam sellers. COD with a bank money order actually works very well. If the seller sends you a box of bricks, you can open it in front of the courier and then refuse it. If the product looks good, you still have a few days to make sure it works and the condition is as advertised, because you can put a stop payment on a bank money order as a last resort.(Don't try to scam someone with this method if everything is as described, because you will go to jail!)

Most important, try to get as much info about the seller as possible....address, home and work #'s etc...Call the number to make sure that person really lives or works there. I use the reverse phone directory or check out the address with his/her countys' property records through the recorders office online. Of course, not all counties have this on-line info available nor does everyone own property, but every bit of information helps to confirm the seller is legit.

Finally, as we all know, if the deal is too good to be true, it's not.

How does escrow protect the seller? I have never used escrow, but it seems like the buyer has all the control in the matter. Aside from the fact that the money is in place, there's a number of things that could go wrong, and now the person that owns the gear (the seller) has less control than the buyer. I like to ask for a phone number, call them and ask all the questions I want. If everything sounds good to me, I go online and do a reverse lookup to verify that the phone number they gave me comes up registered to the same name and address that I'm sending the money to. I'll also confirm everything the we agreed to (on the phone) in writing via email just to be sure that everything is understood by both parties. It's no guarantee that I won't get ripped off, but neither is escrow.