While I certainly understand the requirement of weeding out spammers and scammers, I feel as if I'm forced to spam the forum with useless posts in order to request the services of a developer. Is there a way around this, a way to have my identity verified by a member of the moderation team perhaps, so I can post a job/services ad? I assume any developer would be intelligent enough to verify my identity and payment/down payment/escrow before performing any work on my behalf, and that a couple of weeks membership and a handful of posts wouldn't make me any more trustworthy. I guess I don't see how 14 days of membership and 25 useless nef posts lends to the legitimacy of my post looking for services, which is my primary motive for joining this forum (i.e. not to hang out and shoot-the-sh*t, at least not at present).
I'm glad you're looking into a future solution for this Shawn. I agree with the OP and you and I spoke about it a couple months ago too. I really like DP's Buy/Sell/Trade area. In fact I think its one of the best areas on the Internet for this purpose. It works well, is very active, and seems to have the right balance of moderating going on. The only problem I experienced was that to participate in that section I had to wait the two weeks and reach the 25 post minimum. I hope you don't take offense at this but as hard as I tried, I just felt that those 25 posts that I was making were mindless non-contributory drivel at best, and spam at its worse. The rest of the site really wasn't for me and by requiring my participation in it, I felt like I was contributing to more useless posts on the site; I was reducing the quality of the site rather than improving it. I don't like complaining without trying to help solve the problem and I wanted to suggest a system where new users who are in a hurry to do business in the Buy/Sell/Trade section can leapfrog the time+posts requirement by doing one of the following: --paying a fee $10 or less to DP (cost of doing business quicker) --submitting a picture of valid ID along with a piece of paper showing date/time to marketplace mods (privacy vs expediency tradeoff) --require payment to be transferred by the new user first before product is delivered/received (higher risk for new users but quicker access to marketplace) These are just some ideas I came up with off the top of my head. You may have already considered them and maybe they're not feasible. But I did want to just throw them out there and get your feedback on them. Could something like this be incorporated into DP? I want to make DP better and just feel that I made it worse with my first 25 required posts. Thanks for reading.