The quality of the Buy, Sell or Trade forum is currently very low in my opinion. People are selling their avatars, signatures and even their location. The same lyrics database is sold for $2 by one person, for $1 by another and others offer it for $5 with 10GB of other illegal crap. There are users auctioning all of their invites they get for every website in private beta, or their 20-days-left premium account for a $10/mo service. There's even a guy out there who offers to add MySpace friends for free - that's nothing to buy, sell or trade. I bet you aren't interested much in the monetary return of your community, but if you'd just ask like $5 for each post in the BST forum, it would be a lot cleaner and the user experience is greatly increased because users don't have to search through 100's of crappy posts that didn't even go through a spell checker to find interesting offers. I hope you guys see the problem, here is my solution but there are probably plenty of others.
Eh... fees would reduce the people using the forum by about... 100%. Unless sitepoint started charging.
I think the BST section is what makes DP so appealing, I have to agree with Joshua that making profits off BST posting would lower the amount of visiters coming here.. Maybe we can do something less drastic such as making it more strict for new users to post there...
I think shawn will not go with the fee thing, maybe he'll just make some ajustments in the posting rules, probably add more waiting days and more posts before beeing able to open a thread in B/S/T. The posts there also shouldn't count for the post count, we see lots of "Pm me more info" kind of posts...
I agree, those post counts should be removed too.. along with the introduction section if infractions aren't preventing people from copy paste responses.
I know how shawn could get alot of money from me if he were to look at my infractions I say charge $1.00 to be able to bump your thread to the top Shawn would make about $100 a thread from me
BST is getting flushed by some shameless people..they start a new thread selling same stuff over and over again with a little modification.. i did report them but seem useless as the same guy keep starting new thread. charging a fee might not work..but certainly a time limit between thread start in a forum should be set..
Don't allow anyone to sell until they have two iTrader points (maybe even more), or a certain number of rep points. Still a little more drastic, but it could work.
That's a really good idea, there should be X amount of hours before you can start another trade (prevents spamming...) and hopefully make users post up more quality stuff up for sale.. ALONG with that should be the rules for a specific # of itraders and reps as mentioned above. That should be strict enough for now
I think paying would be good, but it couldnt be aton like sitepoint. Maybe like $5 per thread for every subject instead of like $20 for sitepoint
I dont think a fee would be necessary. Just make it so you need 50 posts to even post in the BST section. There are many many people who join and post "offers" to get their post counts up and never have intentions of buying.
What makes DP so great is the " Freedom " we have here.... If you want to be charged visit sitepoint.... If you want to only be allowed one post per day...Visit dnforum.com Its a free marketplace.....Thats what makes dp so special
Charging fees in that section would see a mass exodus. DP's popularity would drop like a 10 tonne lead anchor and DP would no longer have the monopoly on forums greatness. Shawn has it all figured out, makes slight adjustments here and there to best suit these forums. However, many people have found out every day that Shawn is an extremely clever site owner. The ones exploiting BST are weeded out if they don't follow the rules. Remember guys!! There's RULES to follow. Even I have strayed from them occasionally and felt the wrath of the mods and admin and even from Shawn. Just sit back and enjoy whatever business you can get a hold on and stop complaining about whatever money anyone else is making and concentrate on your own money making. My sixpence Col
I dont think Shawn will ever charge Fees for opening threads in B/S/T . However,its true that quality of B/S/T is kinda going down but Link Sales is kinda okie tokie .
Thats why so many people stay members here on DP.They can actually make some money here where on other forums/sites they dont because of forum/sites fees and paypal fees If your happy with this forum and you have money to spare then you can always donate to it >> HERE << Cheers
There is no need...to reply The forum has 60,000 members and growing by the day Alexa rank 104........ I think the forum works just fine OH WAIT........ " Sorry not going to happen " There you feel better