Im curious as to the actual reasoning for bumping being against the rules. I tried a search to see if I can find out why, but maybe my search words were incorrect or something.
Ad bumping had reached such a level that LOTS of people were complaining about it. And it appeared to be increasing daily. This was particularly a problem in the ball python classifieds section, which because of it's high traffic level, apparently people were just parked there bumping their ads every few hours. So you would have the ad thread, and then 10 or more replies with nothing but "*bump* in them, or perhaps some inane comment designed just to bump that ad.
Then there was another problem with people hounding and antagonizing advertisers (usually their competitors) for one reason or another, which resulted in LOTS of reported posts for the mods to have to spend their time looking into and trying to sort out what was going on. Apparently a number of people were creating new *false* accounts for this purpose as well. Heck, they were free, so why not? Just make it APPEAR that multiple people are bumping ads and antagonizing targeted advertisers.
I warned people quite a few times over quite a lengthy period of time that this needs to cease or I would have to take steps to "cease it". Which, of course, was completely ignored.
So I "ceased it". I was literally going through the member groups permission sets removing the capability for ANYONE to reply to classified ads, when I made a snap decision to leave this capability in place for paying members. And even then only on a contingency basis that the ad bumping and rancorous disrupting replies to classified ads not continue. If it were to continue to be a problem, then that privilege will be yanked from the paying members as well.
Incidentally, when I made that change to halt classified ad replies, the TOTAL replies per day here for this site dropped by HALF. So that will give you an idea of how much ad bumping was actually taking place. Any site wants to have traffic, but in this case the type of traffic involved was actually becoming detrimental to the health of this site.
Yeah, it does sound quite illogical to deny replies from everyone for classified ads, yet allow everyone to CREATE such an ad, but the way this all came about was how it is described here. So the logic is there, just not immediately apparent to someone looking at the surface face value of what they can see.
Hope that explains things a bit.