The New Classified Section

I prefer the old one i must admit, but the new one does certainly have some great features! The postcode thing for me doesn't seem to read right and when i click the sellers profile, it doesn't actually take me to the profile which is mildly irritating but that may just be my browser!

*Thanks for explaining that Jordie, i didn't know that*

Edited by Globule, 13 April 2009 - 10:59 PM.

Classifieds profiles is different to forum profiles! Please be aware of that.

If you check my classifieds profile, it should say my username, d.o.b, part of my location and my interests. You also have options to include your yahoo or ICQ contact information etc

Jordie

Why do we have a different profile for the classifieds? seems to over complicate things pointlessly. If it aint broke don't fix it

Like the sections
Love the instant buy thingy.
Like the choice to be able to decide if you can comment in the add

Dislike the faffing around needed to make an add
Dislike the way you cant have 1 add for like everything (although if its kinda related I put a few things in one add)
Dislike the 15 day limit
Dislike not being able to bump it up (although it does keep it cleaner)
Dislike the limit to 15 adds at one time
I think the condition of the item thing is a pain in the arse and pointless

Why do we have a different profile for the classifieds? seems to over complicate things pointlessly. If it aint broke don't fix it

because its a seperate module of the forum. maybe one day we can find a way to intergrate the profiles, but this would take alot of php/mysql coding and trial and error, which all takes time before it can be released onto a forum of this size without any bugs.

Why do we have a different profile for the classifieds? seems to over complicate things pointlessly. If it aint broke don't fix it

I agree, it's just something that came 'as standard' with the software. If I'd had time to integrate it properly with the forum profiles I would have. Plus I don't want to go messing about integrating it too much with the forums for reasons I'll give below.

Dislike the faffing around needed to make an add

I've heard this a couple of times now, but not sure I understand why. All the information you need to fill in with the new system is information you should have been putting in old adverts as a competent seller anyway.

Dislike the way you cant have 1 add for like everything (although if its kinda related I put a few things in one add)

That's why we put in the 'Misc' and 'Minis Breaking' sections.

Dislike the 15 day limit

Its just good housekeeping. Past 15 days no one will be bothering to view your ad anyway, and most people will just assume its sold or not for sale anymore. We can't just have hundreds of threads going on for eternity.

Dislike not being able to bump it up (although it does keep it cleaner)

Its the fairest way of selling unfortunately. You don't get to bump your ads on AutoTrader, eBay, PistonHeads, etc. It puts everyone on a level playing field and stops people taking the proverbial by bumping 1-2 times a day, every day, for several weeks!

Dislike the limit to 15 adds at one time

The limit is currently set to 10 ads for regular members, 20 ads for TMF+ members. I can look at changing those limits if enough people want them changed. However, what I will say is that I recently listed about 12 things for sale, and I'm struggling to keep up with all the PMs and emails I've had about stuff. Being able to list 20, 30 different things is just going to lead to people have problems with selling so much at once.

I think the condition of the item thing is a pain in the arse and pointless

I'm sure many people find it useful.

I appreciate the fact that it isn't integrated much with the forums currently, and that in some respects the old system was easier to use. However, the old system had just become unsustainable. We were constantly getting complaints about people not putting location or basic contact information in adverts, constantly having to request a seller put a price on an item, constantly having to moderate the sections too, remove unwanted comments, deal with disputes, mark things as sold, etc. So a new system was desperately needed, and believe me it took a long time to find something this good, despite its drawbacks!

As has been pointed out, the new system has some very good new features, the postcodes for one, and I think its much easier to ad pics, and viewing thumbnails is a lot nicer too. This is all stuff that just wouldn't be possible with the old system. You can modify the forum code to an extent, but to implement things like that would have just taken it too far unfortunately. The new system also allows for a much more regimented form of selling. Sellers HAVE to enter certain information like price and location and it makes all the adverts a lot more uniform. Personally I think if you can't be bothered to fill in a simple 'Condition of item' field then how bothered are you about selling the item!?

As for making the section more integrated with the forum, it is coming, but not yet. Invision (the people who supply our forum software) are planning a big new release in the next couple of months, so it makes little sense for me to continue to modify the software we currently have when it will be obsolete in a couple of months. We're also working on integrating all parts of the website together and more closely, and hopefully by the summer TMF will be more than just a forum, more like a fully functional website, where by the forum is just one (albeit big) part of it. In the meantime I'll try and integrate the classifieds into the forum a bit more, without it creating too much work. If anyone has some suggestions on what they'd like to see first then I'm all ears.

I think I said in one topic earlier, would it help if there was an 'All' section for cars and also for parts, so you could browse the adverts from all the sections together?

i like the new system i think it is much easier to find what i am looking for do i want some new wheels there they are engines well there they are as well

i dont quite understand how people have difficulty's with finding what they are looking for but that probably me

i have been looking for a new cylinder head and i looked in the old system and i searched for it and it brought up loads of threads some new and some old but most of them meant that i had to look through many pages starting by looking at the first page so see if it was the head i was looking for then through all the following pages (many of which said "bump" or chat between seller and other people) to see if it had been sold or not only to get to the last page to find out that it said nothing about the head i was looking for and i have to send a pm anyway to the seller and many times find out that it had gone on ebay ages ago

i love the new system its a great idea well done jammy and everyone else that has worked on it

michael

I do like it, however 3 gripes:
Can an ad not be REMOVED once it's sold, rather than being marked as sold? I don't want to keep looking through pages of stuff to find something useful only to see it has already sold. If it's sold there doesn't need to be an ad there.
That's part of my 2nd gripe; the only advantage the old system had was it was easier to just stumble upon something useful you may not have neccasarily been looking for. I find that very tedious to do with the new system.
Finally, again about the not so integrated with the forums. I appreciate you're working on it, I really do, but I just wanted to get my thoughts out Main thing on this point is why separate classifieds and forum profiles, why can't they be linked.
Again, I'm sure you're working on it, just re-iterating points so you know what the users are feeling

Hope I don't come across rude or anything, I really do appreciate the work all the team does for the forum, believe me I'd be stuffed without you guys

Cheers,

Mark.

I think I said in one topic earlier, would it help if there was an 'All' section for cars and also for parts, so you could browse the adverts from all the sections together?

Yeah it would sorry just spotted this bit.

Ok, username links now go to member's forum profiles instead of the rubbish Classifieds one. At some point I may be able to put either feedback or ads on each members profile page, but not yet.

As for keeping adverts live after they've sold, there are a few reasons this is done, but the main ones are that many people like to refer to an advert after is sold/they've bought the item. Also if there are difficulties with the transaction then the buyer may wish to access to the advert to get a copy of it.

This is an excellent addition and will, without a doubt, attract a lot of new traffic to the forum.

If you're a browser & bargain hunter use the recent ads tabs - much easier than searching through several different sub sections as before.

Leaving ads up after the stuff has sold is useful for establishing what the market price is and also encourages sellers to advertise as they can see stuff does sell.

There's less reason to bump adverts since it's much easier for buyers to search for what they want and this would reduce the functionality of the most recent listings - more punters will be attracted by an easy to use system and less ads will be missed if buyers can be sure they've seen every ad by clicking one tab once a day.



A minor tweak might be to identify wanted ads better in the most recent views. I guess they are the only ones with "n/a" in the price field - would "wanted" be clearer?

Would a sold section be useful so people can check what going prices are, see who the regular (business) traders are etc?

It won't make much difference unless the number of adverts increases substantially, but the ability to sort the ads by location, price, etc would be great.

I can't see an issue if people wanted to add a link to their classified ads on their posts on the forum proper. As long as they don't spam for the sake of pushing the advert.

A minor tweak might be to identify wanted ads better in the most recent views. I guess they are the only ones with "n/a" in the price field - would "wanted" be clearer?

Yea, I agree. I'll look into this.

Would a sold section be useful so people can check what going prices are, see who the regular (business) traders are etc?

Again, I agree, though this might take a bit of work.

It won't make much difference unless the number of adverts increases substantially, but the ability to sort the ads by location, price, etc would be great.

Bottom, right of the section.

Yeah sort by distance would be great. A-Z of postcodes, helps, but within 100miles of me theres quite alot of different Postcodes (NE, SR, EH, YO, WF, LS etc etc) so ability to search within 10/50/100/200/national miles of my post code would be the best! I understand this might not be easy to do though, ive worked with php/mysql and forums before :|

It won't make much difference unless the number of adverts increases substantially, but the ability to sort the ads by location, price, etc would be great.

Bottom, right of the section.

I almost suggested people should give themselves some time to get used to the new system before criticising it. Good job I didn't or I'd have to eat my own words. I guess I was expecting an Ebay style pop-up menu from the column header - stupid of me since it's exactly the same as the controls on the rest of TMF. Sorting on price does offer a part way alternative to a sold section if it's possible to sort all the sold ads to the bottom of the sort results.

Another useful side effect of having a 2nd high traffic section in TMFville is that moving from one section to the other offers the opportunity to take users through TMF's main menu and encourage them to make more use of all TMF web content.

One comment I have is that that postcode location for me is way out. I typed in LL13 (where I live) and it tells me it's 4 miles from Llandudno (which is about 60 miles away). Don't know if you can mod that to include the full postcode or not?