Time to evaluate the issue of replies in the classified ad sections.

Originally Posted by Ed Clark

I see your point, don't you think it would discourage any scammers?

Not enough to make it a requirement. I would say the ones it would discourage are the scammers that are new & really bad at it.

I vote Re-enable replies, without replies there is no chats, and without chats, this website is useless. A website has to be useful to stay in business.

Originally Posted by Leopard Gecko Guy

I vote Re-enable replies, without replies there is no chats, and without chats, this website is useless. A website has to be useful to stay in business.

Thats what the pm's are for.

The main benefit would be from weeding out the people the didn't use their real names; and even that wouldn't be 100% effective. While I think pay to play might fare better for the classifieds than it did for the BOI; I think such a move (especially at this time) would be counter to Rich's intended goals.

Well, there really isn't any overwhelming choice being made in the poll concerning any of the options, but the desire to re-open the classifieds to replies does appear to be more popular than the alternatives.

Quite frankly, it's disconcerting to me to see nearly 3,000 registered members logging in here every day, yet not even 10 percent of them will bother to post anything anywhere. What is lacking in incentive for the remaining 90+ percent to post a reply to something? Surely they have enough interest to have registered here and then come back to visit. Surely there must be SOMETHING they would like to talk about?

So my suspicion is that many are coming here strictly to view the classifieds sections. So perhaps it would be conducive to breaking the ice with them if they COULD reply to ads, and maybe that would lead to more participation elsewhere on this site once that ice has been fractured. The longer they are here, the more they might look around, and decide to just get involved in a discussion that they stumble on.

Will there be problems? Of course! But maybe it would be best if I just stay out of the way of what people want to DO here. After all, this really is a discussion forum site, is it not? So maybe I need to encourage DISCUSSIONS whenever, and where ever people may want to engage in them.

Thread (ad) starters will still have the capability to lock their ads if they prefer to NOT have replies, which can be easily done from their Classifieds Control Panel. So with this in mind, each author of every classified ad can manage the discussion themselves within their own ad. If a particular member is just being a gadfly with a generally annoying presence in the classifieds, then that person can be dealt with specifically.

Of course, no decision like this has to be permanent. If it appears to be causing more problems than it is solving, then I can always try another direction to try to make it better, overall. Wouldn't be the first time that I've had to flip flop from one decision to the other just to see which one seems better TODAY.

Oh yeah, as best I can recall, there is still code in place whereby the thread starter of a classified ad cannot reply to their own ad till someone else replies to it. This was done to try to limit the amount of rampant bumping taking place, and for now I don't see any reason to remove that code. Truth be known, has it really been much better with people just creating new identical ads instead of bumping old ones? Even though they will delete those ads, they are really only soft deletes, so they are still taking up a tremendous amount of space in the database. But I'll leave the anti-bumping code in place for now and just evaluate that when it appears I need to.

Will this remove the incentive for some advertisers becoming paying members so they can bump their ads easily from the Classifieds Control Panel? Maybe so. But I'm hoping the increase in traffic and just general interest in CONVERSATIONS in and about the classifieds will make up for it on the bottom line.

So there it is. Yeah, I know... Some people will hate the change and others will like it. Pretty much par for the course, but it's my job to try to look at the long term and try to do what I THINK may make things better overall for the majority of the people here. I am sorry there are no perfect answers for anything. Never have been, and probably never will be. But like it or not, let's just see what happens, OK?

I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed seeing these old ads hauled up from the depths so people can ask if the animals are still available...

Maybe it will bring the people back who originally posted those ads that haven't logged in here for a while.

But at least those people posting the queries aren't asking us why they can't post there or just scratching their head and leaving in frustration because they can't figure out why.

Indeed. How difficult would it be to either auto lock or delete classified ads after a certain period, like maybe a year? Just throwing that out there.

Originally Posted by Charis

Indeed. How difficult would it be to either auto lock or delete classified ads after a certain period, like maybe a year? Just throwing that out there.

AutoLock - I have no idea.
Deleting - The old answer was that those ads still brought traffic to the site by coming up in searches. Were that not the case; I'd be largely in favor of ads going poof at the one year mark...even though I leave a few of my old ads up as examples of my animals.

I know auto delete is possible aka Pruning. My forum has the setting to auto prune threads with no activity for a year and move them to another category. Where i can either reset it and move back to original category or just delete it