We've all been hearing complaints about the rampant use of ad bumping in the classifieds sections, even to the extent where some members will bump all of their ads one or more times per day in order to keep them on the front page. Obviously this pisses off everyone else who gets pushed off that front page, and I've been tasked with trying to come up with a reasonable solution.
Of course, there are multiple concerns that need to be addressed here. I have run this by my programmer to see if he can come up with a solution that doesn't kill the utility of the Classifieds Control Panel that paid members can use to bump ads, as it certainly would not be in this site's best interests to lose paying members. But honestly, since so many non-paying members are bumping their ads manually anyway, I'm afraid that just ignoring this problem is going to wind up becoming a big mistake in real short order.
So as a temporary measure until my programmer can get back to me with hopefully an elegant solution, I am making a rather inelegant bandaid fix to this problem until something better can be implemented.
Effective immediately, non paying members can no long respond to their own ads that they start in the classifieds section. Unfortunately this cannot be limited only to blatant bumping, as the program has no way of having that sort of intelligence to determine the context of the reply in order to determine if it is a legitimate follow up reply, or simply a bump of the thread to the top of the forum. But in any event, I felt that SOMETHING needed to be done, even if it is by no stretch of the imagination even close to being a PERFECT solution to the problem.
Yes, other members can certainly bump someone else's thread, but to circumvent that problem, blatant ad bumping will be come an infraction for whoever does that sort of thing.
The whole idea of this is to try to keep as many members as possible able to keep their ads in prime real estate as long as possible without being bumped to the back pages by some people being overzealous about their bumping efforts for their own ads.
Please bear with this while we are working on a more rational method to deal with this problem. I certainly wish we didn't have to address something like this, but with it being evident that some people are simply abusing this bumping capability, there really isn't any choice in the matter of doing at least SOMETHING to address the problem rather than nothing at all and allowing it to become worse over time, and therefore frustrate at least the paying members who have to watch the non paying members circumvent the perk they have for being a paid member when others simply manually bump their ads for free.
Hopefully this is temporary, and I do apologize for any inconvenience this causes anyone.
WebSlave
