Buy, Sell, & Trade... Money Walking Out The Door

I agree completely, people lowballing for practically free products is annoying, begging isnt allowed in most other forums, if it's not stated " x number free or reduced reveiw copies available " in the post then people shouldnt ask for review copies.

 

There has been some sudden spike in the number of "I wanna review free plz!" posts. I admit I have done it, and was given a review product (I respected that member's decision to pick me, so I gave a decent review and purchased it later). The point is, why don't you just earn your way to purchase the product? The stuff I sell took me a long time to produce, and I'm not going to give it to you for free and write a one line review and make $ without buying it.

A few months ago, I was making decent $ on DP, but now, it is a lot harder. Even trying to hire respected forum posters or coders is no longer easy. I'm willing to pay good $ for good services, but I don't get that big of a selection to pick from. Why? Why?Q@#

/ends rant.

*Good post by the way integrity

 

I gotta agree almost all the BST sections are infested with garbage and scams. Things like selling Ebay, Paypal and various other accounts is against those company's terms of service.

I think the web hosting one is particularly ugly with it's offerings of $15 one time fee for life time hosting. 3 months later you got 100 people complaining about how they got scammed. It continues to happen with no repercussions from the users taking money and running.

 

Interesting argument....I have to say I am guilty of posting $1-$3 threads.....but I feel like my items are quality....I tried to sell some crap for $15-$25 and it didn't sell...maybe I should be rearranging my idea about selling...

I have a domain going for $5 because I just want part of my investment back it was one of those things where I woke up in the morning and went "OH #$@#$ What did I DO last night!?"

haha

 

I am sure someone has already outsourced you in the B/S/T section for 1/4 cents and is willing to put it on a blog network.

Yup I would have to agree. I have seen this happen for about a little less than a year now. Anything to outsource what they think is their competitors. And knowing people will pay for cheap labor versus paying the proper amount.

Which pretty much covers my sentiments. And you have done a fine job of posting what many feel and have seen happen here at DP.

Other than teaming up with others to bring up quality? What other things do you think can be done?

 

You still gotta use common sense.

And with people working too cheap, there is nothing you can really do. World-wide economies are different and $5 in India has a much higher value than $5 in the US. But there are major quality differences too so if you want to charge higher prices then make sure you are offering more value to your customers.

 

I still believe we require categories for products, for example website $500 or more, $100 or less etc, I havent visited the section in around 3 months because its just a waste of time, sitepoint is much easier IMO.

 

totally agree with you. +rep!

 

And if even so. Those who are from India and outsource for $5 instead of $15. Can they only imagine their economic position if they raised their self worth to $15 instead of $5. Someone will eventually come along and outsource them by $1 instead. Than since people will sell for $1 will come buyers who ask for freebies if the price runs so low. It devalues the work that writers, programmers, SEO people et cetera do. If they just keep the standard and charge $15 they will be better off financially and keep the competition up and so on.

 

It is indeed something serious which I myself seeing alot. People have asked for free sample of my 1000 directory submission to give a testimonial. Now as much as I respect the feeling, it is ridiculous to ask to do 1000 manual directory submission for Free.

 

Well my latest post I made in a BST section someone else hijacked it and posted an affiliate link to a competitor. I reported the post but nothing was done to it. I'm now wondering if I'm allowed to just post in other ad's my ad since apparently people can do it in mine.

 

Have some patience, we get hundreds and hundreds of reports a day and we get to them as fast as we can. Did they hijack your thread like you did to this one

 

My first post a little more above this post was about what I was seeing in the BST section. Then this post I posted an actual example of what is happening for me in the BST section.

Each forum is full of people wanting a service for free which is clearly advertised as not.

Then the other problem being random posters posting affiliate links to other services or advertising their own services as if they made the topic.

I think a sticky topic in each BST section with some rules would help greatly with reducing this garbage.

 

Affiliate links, thread hijacking and posting when you're not interested in buying (ie comments in sales threads) are all against the rules. We can't stop people from breaking the rules before they do it, we just have to clean up the mess they make as quickly as possible.

Also, if people are asking for review copies or something for free when it hasn't been offered that will earn them an infraction as well.

 

Lately, I've decided to take a tougher stance on 'these people'

With one thread I offered something, the first post asked for a review, then I posted that there would be no review - bang - I got neg rep.

Second thread I requested text links for sale, strictly said no PMs, then I posted I would ignore anything that came into my PM box - bang - I got neg rep.

I'm not really concerned about losing rep, but as long as those few people start to read the posts, understand the rules, then we can get somewhere instead of the current situation.

 

I agree, people just dont read the rules of the sales thread it really gets on my nerves, especially when they lowball a set start bid. People need to slow down a little lol otherwise they're gunna feel the pain later on and wonder why.

Rep added for ya ant

 

Its all about Supply and Demand.

If you can stop people undercutting you looking for a quick buck, which leads to prices ending up at $10 then you can raise prices

 

I've been campaigning against this for some time, but we will never get to the root of the problem without some sort of quality control being put in place by the admins, which will never happen.

The fact is 99% of the people hanging out in BST can't speak english, and think that $1 is a good return on an hours work. They couldn't care less how they get their money and spamming every thread with "review copy please????" is their best way of getting some free stuff.

I have threads open for one of my products at the moment (one in sig) and I am still getting PM's like this one which said "rewue plz " ...that was it, nothing else but that, I mean for gods sake!

I also repeatedly get people adding me on MSN to the point where I am thinking of taking off my IM details, most just say "i want review" or some just say "give me work please"

I'm fed up of it, and digitalpoint is beginning to become a joke. Just look at the forums from an objective point of view. Why would anyone with experience in internet marketing join the forum now? 99.9% of the posts are written poorly and are general nonsense!

The only thing keeping these forums alive are the relatively small percentage of intelligent people, once they are gone, this forum will be a haze of random crap. At this rate, digitalpoint will fail as a forum and there will be nothing left of it in a few years time. This is my honest opinion, it can't keep spiralling downwards like it is now, the fact is that less and less valuable information is being exchanged here which drives people away....

there's so much I could say about this situation, but no one listens and there's nothing most of us can do about it anyway...

 

Much as I agree with what's been said does anyone have a proposal for a solution or are we just having a bitch-fest?

 

Mostly a bitch fest

but I think a higher regulation would be better. Maybe more posts before being able to start a thread. More categories would help people who don't want to filter through crap to find what they want, maybe a few "high quality" and "low quality" sections would be good for things like design.

The whole area just needs a bit more customization to make it more of a marketplace. At the moment I reckon 50% of posts go straight into the BST section and not one of the specific BST categories, adding more categories would help solve this problem. Thing like "high priced writers" and "low priced writers" sections would be good (IMO, as a writer) because it would allow people offering high quality services to distinguish themselves.

If you look at sitepoint marketplace, it's completely separate to the forums, I'm not saying DP should be like that, but it needs some work and it wouldn't take too long to make some pretty simple structure changes...(although i respect how busy the mods and admins are)