Assume not the most ethical seller. They post an item for $100. Someone feels it's an exceptional deal and offers that in a reply - not via PM where there's the option to save it.
A few minutes later several people post comments and show that it's worth 5X that (hypothetically) A 2nd member posts an offer of $300. So now the less than honest seller deletes the $100 offer and accepts the $300 offer. He looks honest to the board, the 2nd buyer never even knows and the seller pockets the difference.
You or I would take the loss and sell to the first person. But there are members that have deliberately used the classifieds to defraud other members. Most are ex-members. Do a search for keithdiver if you're interested.
I will look up keithdiver, thanks, I'm a buyer too, so, good idea to be aware of the latest scams.
It sucks to have to deal with certain rules because a few dishonest makes them necessary to have.
It doesn't matter that in your opinion there are no useful discussions posted in the classifieds. Other members will still take exception to your being allowed to delete their posts in your thread. Even if you're right. Only SB staff/volunteers are allowed to do that and unless it's very routine it's also documented.
I think the difference here is maybe that I'm thinking about posts that become meaningless right after it is responded to, and you are thinking of the ones that have relevant info. Common sense should be applied when deleting posts and cleaning a thread, the problem of course is, common sense isn't very common, and here we are again, "suffering" because of the ones who don't have it.
Some people actually use older posts to determine the value of their items to be sold also. Deleting your posts makes that a slightly less valuable resource.
This is a valid point, but like I said, the idea is not to delete post with relevant info.
I wouldn't delete a post that lists the items sold, quite the contrary, I want them to be seen, if I'm browsing a thread with multiple items and I see a list of items sold, it gives me some assurance the seller is legit, specially if has been long enough that the buyer has had time to receive the goods and possibly test it.
I can tell you one for thing for certain, the more posts it gets, the harder it makes for subsequent members to browse it.
I thought about opening a new thread with just the items left and linking to the old thread, but I think that's against the policy and I've been trying to play by rules, I could, and will, post and updated list to thread, but people would have to reference back to the first post anyways for the pictures.
Here's a different idea then, how about just hiding the posts?
On ebay, if you click on the bidding history of an item, it only shows the actual bids made manually and hides the automatic bids, but with just a click of a button, they pop up, in place of order in between the actual bids.
So here, it would be possible for anyone browsing the thread to choose weather they want to see every single post, in the order in which they were posted, or filter it all out and see just the posts relevant to the items left for sale.
On the editing, for the classifieds only, have it so that nothing can be deleted, only added, and have it being distinct from the original text, like having the later edited/added text show as red color text. This is pretty useful, if I could edit the original post this way, things would look a lot better in my opinion and would save everyone a lot of time.
---------- Post added March 27th, 2014 at 11:19 PM ----------
Btw, I saw your original 3 line response earlier, I was ready to reply to it and would have done had I not been distracted with other things, as it turned out, you edited it, my response would not have been compatible to your later edited version then, think about it, the potential problems you pointed out are still here, it's only a matter of timing.
