Possible marketplace forum

I might or might not visit the forum, I do know I have nothing I want to sell at this time. I do have a couple thoughts I want to raise about this proposed forum:

1. How about extending the time for a poster to edit their post in this forum only? Is this a possibility for just one forum?

2. The ability for guests to post, honestly, I think if this is to be successful, then you should limit paying member to being able to post a new thread, but a guest should be able to reply. However, if this is done, make sure there is a rule about hijacking a thread in the forum.

3. Is it possible to allow members the ability to close their own treads in just that one forum? If not, it might be too much trouble to be worth it.

4. I am slightly concerned about spill over from the marketplace into the rest of the board. Would you allow price checks in IMHO, debates about a product in GD (especially if started by someone selling and linking to their thread). GQ questions about a product being sold, or Pit threads about a seller? What about CS or GR threads about a product (movie or game) being sold, specially when posted by a person selling the same product?

5. Y’all just started allowing people to make their own custom titles, what if someone wants their title to be a link to their thread selling something, or putting something like “trusted seller”, or something along those lines?

Well, those are the major things I can think of right now. I’m not against the forum itself, I honestly think it is a decent idea. I have no interest in it personally at this time, but if it helps the SDMB community, that would be a good thing. I just want to make sure that everything is thought out before hand, so there are no major complications after someone looks for and exploits some sort of loop hole.

ETA: Oh, and what about those current “worthy causes” that are posted in MPSIMS? Would you no longer allow them, and move the threads to this “marketplace”?

To be honest, I think a product review forum would be a better idea. I think that it would be less repulsive to the membership at large and to my guess, might look more attractive to advertisers. I don’t know the internet ad business* much at all, someone feel free to educate me.

In line with that, a variation on what I mentioned in some long ago thread that they should make a “Book Club” child thread of Cafe society. Have them vote on a book to do each month. Easily targeted ads there too.

*eta: or any ad business for that mater. I couldn’t even get in to “Mad Men”.

A quick link for you.

I suspect that the stickies would be for a limited time only, which would help prevent such a build-up. In the same vein, I expect that the duration of stickie-ness would be a day or a week, depending on how popular it turns out to be.

I think the new forum is a good idea, but I really have no dog in this fight. This just seems like a common sense solution to the problem you raised.

As I implied earlier, a more common sense idea would be to not sell sticky threads at all. Even with your ideas, they could clutter things up quick and take attention away from official stickies. Paying extra to post images would be a better way to make money off it.

Agreed.

You could try an experiment in pure capitalism, and let the price of stickies fluctuate with demand. Decide on what percentage of the first page will be paid stickies, and then price accordingly as the sticky section ebbs and flows.

Does vBulletin support a sticky tier system, so the forum rules and announcements can be given a higher priority and always appear above the member stickies?

I have to be blunt: the whole idea is kind of stupid. If you want to sell a half page of static ads, a ton of stickies in a message board format is simply not the way to do it. Every other place where you buy an ad, it’s right there, stickies you have to click and look inside.

And unless it’s a recent update, there’s no priority system for the stickies, as I’ve noticed mods bumping stickies here to maintain the preferred order.

Dunno. Not sure why you would need more time to edit a post in this forum.

Good point. The idea, as you surmise, was to eliminate commercial hijacks by guests, but we don’t want to make it so hard to post that there’s no traffic. I think we’ll do it this way.

I think this came up earlier. I believe the software allows us to do this; if so, we will.

We’ll have to work out the policy over time. I can see an argument for steering commercial discussions, product reviews, etc., to the Marketplace forum.

I don’t think it’s possible to put links in titles. At this point I don’t have an opinion on people giving themselves a title like “trusted seller”; I’d be concerned if newcomers put unwarranted faith in such a title.

I think we’d judge these on a case-by-case basis. Commercial ventures we’d likely steer to Marketplace; the remainder would probably stay where they were.

You’re right, paid stickies might not be practical. We don’t currently plan to charge for images, but that’s subject to review.

No reason product reviews couldn’t go in this forum; I think it’d make a lot of sense.

I ran the Marketplace idea past our marketing guy and he’ll have to give the OK before we do it. I agree there are risks. Sleazy ads are a potential problem. I doubt Viagra marketers will pay $15 for the privilege of advertising, but we’ll see. My inclination is to refuse any posts about adult services, hookups wanted, etc.; apart from the impact on the tone of the board, way too much could go wrong.

Vendors would have to part with their anonymity. It’s either that or ask permission for a marketplace sock account, which would kind of defeat the purpose, since they would lose the advantage of being known. I suspect that permission would not be granted anyway.

Smart vendors would include a link to an off-site location or email, so that buyers could approach them without revealing their SDMB username.

Might I suggest that the proposed forum be subdivided into:

A subforum for people explicitly selling or touting some product or service
One for reviews of products/services people have already bought (or should this just go in MPSIMS?)
One for requests for recommendations on a product/service (or should this go in IMHO?)

?

What will you do when someone gets scammed? Sent money, no merchandise forwarded, or wrong merchandise sent?

Because if I post a list of 100 DVD titles I want to sell, it’d be a hell of a lot easier to continually edit the OP as I sell discs off piecemeal than adding a list of 93 titles, then 87 titles, then 86 titles, then 83 titles, etc. Sounds like you might need a bit more time to think this through, Ed.

I wouldn’t expect any intervention at all - I’d imagine TPTB will disclaim responsibility for this from the start - after all, it could already happen - I say I make widgets in my spare time, you PM me to enquire about buying one, I take your money and run. What would they do about that if it happened today? Nothing much, I suspect (although it’s more likely to occur if there is a marketplace forum).

However, unlike other marketplaces, the scammer and the victim here may continue in membership - so it will be important to work out whether and to what extent either of them will be allowed to discuss/accuse/defend (and obviously TPTB can’t just side with the person claiming to have been scammed, because the claim could be false).

It could be that the first such incident marks the end of the experiment…

Ah, you mean unlimited time for an OP to edit his OP. Judging from a quick look in the back room, we can’t fine-tune things to that degree. However, here’s what I think we can do:

1. Allow OPs to close threads they started. Makes sense, we’ll probably do this.

2. Permit only subscribers to start threads, but allow anyone to post. Also makes sense; we’ll deal with spam the same way as now.

3. Allow subscribers to edit their own posts. I don’t see a way to limit this to an OP’s OP, but that probably doesn’t matter; we’re not expecting acrimonious debates where somebody is going to want to go back and revise an earlier argument. I can imagine problems arising over disputed commercial claims, but what the hell, I think we can start off allowing editing.

This is definitely a danger. We don’t want to get embroiled in commercial disputes. The eBays of the world have figured out ways to deal with such problems, but commerce is their core business, whereas for us it’d be a sideline. The software isn’t set up to allow buyers and sellers to rate one another. I’d hope problems would be few and that we could deal with them informally, but that remains to be seen.

If you are really set on a classified type thing, you should poke around the vB forums, since obviously, you aren’t the first guy to think about adding one to a forum.

iTrader Version for vBulletin 3

Photopost Classifieds

So maybe you could set up one of those and have a consumers review forum attached to it somehow.

What do you mean by “registered business”? A legal corporation? And why wouldn’t you allow someone who knits custom sweaters advertise their service? (Personally, I received a very nice pair of a warm fuzzy socks from a Doper last year, don’t knock our craftspeople)

If you’re in business you’d want to advertise as many places as you could afford to do so - it’s not “instead of”, it’s “in addition to”.

Also, as I am selling my writing at present, being able to advertise to the people here who have read some of my writing and like my style could be mutually beneficial to all. Broadcasting on general marketplaces - not so much, as I don’t at present have a large general following.

I think we do need to limit how many threads a subscriber can open, otherwise we’ll have a mess. As it is possible for someone to have more than one business venture we might not want to limit it to just one, but definitely there needs to be a limit. It might be better to handle this via moderation than by software.

As an example - someone might offer used books and web design services. Or perhaps editing services and their watercolors they paint as a hobby. It would make sense to separate such divergent endeavors, both for the sellers and the buyers… On the other hand, editing services and web design might make more sense combined into one thread.

Why? Don’t you buy things from outside your geographic region?

Some services sold via the internet don’t even require you to be on the same continent for instant delivery, much less locally.

I think you are underestimating the “power of sigs”. Currently, that is my main form of advertising and while it’s not perfect it certainly is having a positive effect.

I’d like to see things of this sort, too. “Looking for work” would be of great benefit to unemployed Dopers, and there are already threads that have made suggestions to the unemployed as to where to seek work I see no harm in give-aways. It would also be helpful for, say, an annual seed exchange for gardening Dopers.

No one is forced to buy or sell anything here. If you don’t want to give up your anonymity don’t participate. If you do want to buy or sell, well, sorry, that’s how it’s done.

What stops Dopers with a vested interested in a topic from doing that now? Someone who sells Macs now can easily say “buy a Mac!” in any computer thread.

Really? If I have a MacBook on craigslist, and make a post on the SDMB about how awesome MacBooks are and why you should buy one, I increase my chances of selling that MacBook by about 0.000000001%. If I have a MacBook listed for sale on the SDMB and make a post on the SDMB about how awesome MacBooks are and why you should buy one, those chances are increased quite a bit more, because I’m talking directly to the market I’m selling to.

What sells more Depends - a commercial airing during MTV’s Jersey Shore, or a commercial airing during Matlock? Or more analogous - what sells more Depends - an ad display at Toys R Us or at Walgreen’s?

Are you talking about some other forums where you can have big sigs and use them every post? Because you are clearly not talking about your sig here.

adds one vote in favor