No, you don’t have it straight. It’s like this:
Some people use the Straight Dope Message Boards without paying. That’s fine. We can still keep the boards going from ad income, so guests are helping keep the doors open.
Some people become paid members. They put up cash directly to help support the SDMB. We appreciate those people and we want to give them extra perqs. One of those perqs is the ability to post your stuff in the Marketplace.
Is this a money-making venture? Do the board owners get a cut of the action?
If, by “this,” you mean the Marketplace, then no. It is not a money-making venture for the SDMB. Just an additional service offered as a bonus to our members.
The Straight Dope does not take a cut or percentage, charge a fee, facilitate payment, act as a middleman, or in any other way get involved in the transaction between buyer and seller. If you want to do your deals via PM or email and not even tell us, that’s fine. You’re also free to barter and trade. We’re just giving you a place to talk about it.
My wife sells some wonderful art on Etsy. Can I (assuming I were to renew my membership) open a thread about her work? I’m not sure whether this forum is literally “members only” or more like “members and close personal friends and relatives.”
Can’t edit my posts on Marketplace, contrary to what I was told.
Pending consultation with Rico and Gary, I’d say no problem as far as your wife or someone else in your household is concerned. As the relationship gets more distant, we’d have to think about it. If anybody else has a situation where you aren’t the owner or provider of whatever it is you’re selling, give us the facts and we’ll talk it over. After we’ve had a little more experience we’ll try to come up with better guidelines.
Hm, checked all the settings I know about, seems like it ought to work. I take it you don’t see an edit button on your posts, next to the quote button?
Nope.
I’m inquiring, will let you know.
No rush.
Are legitimate charities that we may be connected with fair game? Say for example, elephant hospitals or Burmese-refugee medical societies with websites and transparent operations? Or should this be solely for commercial sales?
Charities are fine.
Thanks! I may mention a couple.
Thanks!
hey I know one of those Burmese ones! can you PM me the one you know about?
Hm, little problem here. The idea was to allow unlimited editing of your own posts in Marketplace, but retain the 5-minute edit window everywhere else. However, it turns out the length of the edit window is a global setting - you can’t make it unlimited in one forum and five minutes everywhere else. So we can’t do this as originally proposed.
The rationale for allowing editing was to permit sellers to modify their OPs if their offerings change. An alternative way to accomplish that is to allow OPs to close Marketplace threads they start and start a new thread with a revised OP. That could be abused if people used it as an excuse to bump threads frequently, but I dunno, let me ask Gary and Rico.
Kudos to management for trying something new.
Let’s say our poster is promoting Acme Widgets. I read the thread and am inspired.
Hypotheses
If I want to say “Widgets suck!”, that might belong in IMHO, GD or the Pit.
If I want to promote my own brand of widgets, I’d start a new thread in marketplace.
If I want to compare Acme Widgets to Zeta Widgets, I would do that in IMHO. Although if I owned Zeta Widgets, I’d do that in Marketplace (under the watchful eyes of presumably wary moderators.)
Separately…
This has to be the cheapest advertising on the internet. I wonder whether we’ll see a number of new accounts opening up solely for the purpose of pushing their business. That could be interesting; it might even fight ignorance.
Let’s take this a step at a time. If you have a complaint about nondelivery of Acme Widgets by the OP and the OP doesn’t respond to your PMs or e-mails, you can post about this in the OP’s thread. Please keep such posts calm and factual. We want the transaction process to be transparent and self-regulating but we don’t want to get into allegations of libel, threats to sue, and all that. If you have concerns about the quality of Acme Widgets, as distinct from some failing of the OP, my initial suggestion, which I make without having consulted with Rico and Gary (the mods), is that you start a thread in IMHO and post a link in the Marketplace thread.
Talk to Jerry about this. From what I know of vBulletin this may very well be a one-line of code “hack” to fix (in Version 2.x where the edit code was, it was easy to insert essentially “&& if (forumid != X)” in the check for time constraints. I know you don’t want to do that, but it could be so trivial a fix that it might be worth it.
FYI, there is a hack for this at vbulletin.org:
For the SDMB’s version of vBulletin (3.7.3), it looks like you’ll have to use version 1.3, which you can get from the attachment to this post.