The classifieds

98Navi · #1 10-10-2006, 06:14 PM

This is a suggestion, so don't take it personally webmaster. I love this site,and spend way to much time here, but the classified section just sucks. The classifieds end up being nothing more than a place for scammers to slum around and send you a bunch of crap email. The sections on like stangnet and corral.net allow the users to interact much easier, and make quesitons and answers available to all so the seller doens't get 50 questions of which 47 are the same. Just a suggestion, but IMO it would be better to make the classifieds an open forum.

webmaster · #2 10-10-2006, 06:56 PM

98, thank you for the feedback, however I've addressed this about 12 times on the forums as to why they don't belong on the forums. Feel free to search to find my very specific reasons why they are where they are. As a sidenote, nearly every complaint that people have come up with as to why they would be better in the forums have subsequently been addressed by added functionality over the years, including more categories, keyword alerts, etc. And, as I've said many times before, classifieds are one-to-one transactions and interactions and simply don't belong on public forums. I don't plan to or ask my moderators to police classified ads or have them take time to remove expired or invalid ads...which would ultimately clutter up the forums and be of no use to anyone. As far as the scammers go, they will come to the forums, too. (I block about three people a day from the forums for posting ads) Since they became a greater problem, I added a "report" feature to the ad responses, so if you receive scam replies, use that feature and I will be notified and subsequently block the scammers IP addresses from future contact. If you receive scams, report them, or I have no way of knowing where they are coming from. No system is perfect, however, but based on the feedback I have received about positive experiences with our classifieds, I think they work pretty well.

98Navi · #3 10-13-2006, 01:42 AM

Thanks for responding sir!

Patman03SprCrw · #4 10-13-2006, 10:19 PM

yah when i brought this up a while back, got same answer, but i was also concerned with the spam emails, b.c i know there will be someone that falls for that garbage, and i want to keep the forum as a whole a clean environment, and what not...
At the time, there wasnt the spam options, it was just an "oh well" kind of deal.... Glad to see things have improved

-Patrick

Riken · #5 10-15-2006, 07:19 PM

my post just disappeared. o well.
i totally agree with the origionator of this thread!