I think it could attract new members - and if they turn out to be capable of intelligent discussion, we could even let them live.
I always browse via “New Posts” . What would happen if this takes off, will the threads show up or is there a way to exclude them?
Same here.
Does it have to be a business you’re connected to? Or can anyone just post links to sites they like or are partial to? How would you stop every ebay vendor from joining, as a guest, to post to the vendor forum? What about personal ads?
Put me in this category. It’s a forum I’d never visit.
Paying members only, per the OP. Still need a way of stopping enthusiastic paying members from dominating, but I’m sure that could be achieved with the right kind of rules, since the stake for repeatedly and wilfully breaking rules here is generally banishment.
This will.
Fewer scammers, presumably.
As others pointed out, only subscribers would be allowed to post in that forum. They still might get a rush of pure-vendor posters but they would make money off it.
I’m not sure I get the point of being “permitted to post links to a post in the Marketplace forum in their signatures.” On the face of it, I would think it goes without saying so am I missing something?
It might be a better idea to allow only subscribers to start threads but allow everyone to post in them, otherwise they are basically just ads/announcements. That way sellers could field questions from all possible buyers.
On the topic of models, Opal’s fathom had a “Marketplace” forum as well that I believe got trimmed out recently. Not to be negative, but iirc Bosda was the only guy who ever posted in it.
I guess it’s a method of advertising the fact that you have something to sell to the wider SDMB membership, regardless whether they visit or search for your wares in the marketplace forum.
It’s not any different technically from linking to your favourite MPSIMS thread in your sig - I think it was mentioned simply because it is a departure from the ‘no commercial links’ aspects of sigs as they exist presently.
I suppose, though a real departure would allow people to link to their point of sale. I have a feeling that might up the policing of “one sig per thread” rule.
Regardless, I look forward to selling my suitable-for-framing poster-size Tub Girl decoupage artwork in this image allowed forum. 
Yes. Deciding on what is and is not acceptable content could be interesting - I can think of at least one subject area where two different segments of the membership would find each others’ material deeply and mutually offensive.
We have no particular model in mind. People approach us occasionally asking for permission to promote their projects, so we think there may be some pent-up demand. But we don’t really know; this is an experiment. You could promote either goods or services.
This is a free service to members. Obviously you could post both places. Since people here presumably know you, they might be more receptive to your pitch.
That makes sense. Perhaps there are issues I’m not seeing, but tentatively let’s say yes.
This is a valid concern and it’s something we’re going to have to work out. If you’re promoting a number of similar products - books, say - we may ask you to put all the postings about them in one thread. Clearly we don’t want people monopolizing the first page or repeatedly bumping their threads. Then again, the ability to link to Marketplace posts in your sig gives you wide visibility and is under your control, subject to common sense guidelines. That may be more important than exactly where your thread shows up in the Marketplace.
Off-board disputes should stay off-board. However, if purchasers aren’t happy with a product or service they obtained through Marketplace and want to make their views known, we’re not going to want to tell them they can’t do so. At the same time, we don’t want to get caught in the middle of a lot of commercial disputes. If we do, we may conclude this whole thing wasn’t such a good idea.
Don’t have a good answer. We’ll have to look into it.
Offhand I don’t think we’d object to posts about products you liked. We don’t expect much if any spam; only subscribers can post. We doubt we’d get people subscribing solely so they could shill on behalf of commercial entities; however, were that to become a problem we’d have to take appropriate steps.
Nah. This is a money-making venture–if paying member end up dominating, it will have been successful.
My husband runs a message board that has a marketplace forum within it, and he found the only way to manage this issue was to create a separate member group and give that group read/write access to the marketplace forum of the board. It was quite a pain to do, to be honest, and his message board is much, much smaller than SMDB.
Thanks for the answers but I haven’t seen the personal ads thing addressed?
As in “Single white female seeks part time tryst, yada, yada, yada…” How do you keep this from taking over your forum?
Just to be clear, you know that Craigslist is mostly free too, right?
You might get more useful feedback here if you gave a general idea of what your goal is. Do you think it will drive up subscriptions? If so, then this
shouldn’t really be seen as a problem. In fact, selling the ability to post images to people like that might be the way to go. If you are hoping to up revenue by selling “stickies”, you might want to re-think it, as that would get unwieldy pretty darn quick.
As far as elbows concerns go re singles ads, maybe subforums could be made for different categories. Maybe make some free and others for subscribers only.
To make it more like a classified section, you could turn off the bumping of threads and display by OP date. Pretty sure this can be done forum specific.
I think you are overestimated the power of sigs though, imho. The width of visibility is limited to once per thread you participate in and people ignoring or turning them off completely.
I think there’s some interesting networking potential in that. Would things like unemployed Dopers looking for work in their local area, or people with a litter of kittens to give away also be welcome?
I just want to point out that the first sentence in my post was “I’d avoid it completely.” This was followed up with several people pointing out that if I didn’t like it, I didn’t have to visit it, which is precisely what I said I would do.