Suggestion: Delete all ads from banned members.

Originally Posted by nickolasanastasiou

We would not be able to use them as leads (for various reasons and goals including scam avoidance as well as historical animal source discovery) if they become hidden. However, the classified thread necromancy gets really annoying (to me) when someone decides to bump an entire page worth of old ads to ask if something from like 2008 is still available in 2015. It would be cool if those auto-locked after 90 days. Then they would still be searchable content and prospective customers could PM and email the ad creators rather than knocking a group of advertisers with currently available product off of the main page of a given section.

This!!

Ad necropsy rarely happened when registered members couldn't post replies in the classifieds. Ah, the good ol' days.

Information being searchable by the mods isn't really relevant to this discussion, because we don't/can't investigate every ad. It's the people contemplating a purchase that need the information searchable.
That said, sometimes I do delete ads when I ban people - it's situational, as Rich stated.

I guess I just don't understand. If someone responds to your old ad, isn't that a bonafide sales lead that you should follow up on? You've got someone nibbling at the bait and you are complaining because the bait is old?

Originally Posted by WebSlave

I guess I just don't understand. If someone responds to your old ad, isn't that a bonafide sales lead that you should follow up on? You've got someone nibbling at the bait and you are complaining because the bait is old?

Not at all. Oftentimes, the bait has long since been eaten, so it has a higher probability of not being the bait of a person currently seeking to sell the type of product within the advertisement. If a person was actively seeking to catch fish, he would cast bait actively. Those who pay for the benefit of bumping do this pretty often. Those who do not pay and prefer to use the post-delete-repeat method do this, too, as their way around it.

It displaces a large number of current ads when an individual bumps a swath of very old ads. One is no big deal, but the orgies of bumping that some people commit to mostly serves to kick valid ads out of immediate view and a lot of customers are really bad at looking for what they cannot immediately find. Bumping an ad via intra-ad reply posts is not the only means of contact anyway if either PMs or emails are still valid and active in a seller's settings, so displacement of the current ads by the old ones is not necessary for a prospective buyer to make contact with a seller from days long since gone if he or she wishes to inquire with the past seller about the seller's possible current inventory.

Oh well. I guess I'm pretty glad I didn't promise anyone that it would be a perfect world in here..............

I doubt perfection would be achievable, but I think this is just a discussion on sharing perspectives which may differ on the proposal made and that these differences may all be valid and are appreciated simply for being considered in that light.

Originally Posted by WebSlave

Oh well. I guess I'm pretty glad I didn't promise anyone that it would be a perfect world in here..............

It is a good thing, however anyone expecting a perfect world, will always be disappointed and never be pleased.

I actually preferred when the only ones who could post replies to classified ads, were those who are paid members.

A few days ago, I saw an ads for an animal I have been looking for, I was disappointed when I realized the ad was 4 years old.

It is annoying, but not terminally so.

Heck, I dunno, but I would think that if I were looking for something and someone had it 4 years ago, I would certainly give it a shot to check to see if they were still working with them today. What's the harm in that?

That sort of thing with old ads DOES bring new members to this site, which are new potential customers for people selling here. Again, what's the harm in that?

As for the bumping issue, heck, I would think people would be glad that the classifieds are so active that it's actually an issue keeping YOUR ad on the front page. That sort of thing is what brings people looking to see what is new in the classifieds. Quite honestly, the BEST thing to do would be to just limit the number of ads any one person could post each day and stop bumping completely so only NEW ads would be posted more often. Do people REALLY want me to put in severe restrictions like that? Only to have half of the people like it and the other half hate it, as per usual around here?

Oh and as for the contacts and attempted contacts via replies to the ads themselves, I need to remind everyone that this is, in fact, a DISCUSSION forum. Even to the extent of being related to a classified ad. This, too brings, eyes into the classifieds section, and while those eyes are there, they likely tend to look around at other things. Including YOUR ads. That was one of the main reasons that I re-enabled replies to classifieds. A public vote was held on this change, and the reason you see it as it is now is because that voting block won out. I believe the discussion is still here in the Feedback Forum if anyone cares to recap that issue when it was being considered.

All very good points, Rich.

Exactly why you run things, aside from the fact that this is your website. Your wisdom far outweighs mine.


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Thank you for hearing me out.