Trading post

I think that commenting on what somebody is selling should only be done if you’re asking questions about it, warning others about a scam or pointing out some interesting aspect or history of the item. Otherwise you’re potentially sabotaging the sale.

And obviously if it’s something as unusual as the Red Menace that was sold here recently all of that goes out the window. There’s no way someone’s going to be able to advertise something like that without a thousand questions and comments.

bingo you hit it on the head. The goal should be that this is a platform for connecting buyers and sellers. What must be realized is that a misstated comment may ruin a sale and that is not fair to the seller and may deny the buyer of a good opportunity.
In The case of the red menace, private conversations are possible and further comments after the sale should be moved to another category in the forum outside of trading post. These conversations should not be permitted to go on and on after the sale has ended.

When I sell an item on eBay it is listed and interested parties may ask as many questions as they like. These interactions are private and not open for general discussions or criticisms. . When the sale is over the information concerning the sale is visible for others to research and compare as a completed sale. After the sale my item in no way can be confused as an item still for sale.

I’m not suggesting that this forum as it is can redirect and reconstruct a section of the forum it may not be possible within this frame work.

I think that this unicyclist.com site is first and foremost a forum site that happens to have a trading post area. Is it not a paid for or commission for sale site. I think that free and open discussions on the trading post section fits well with the purpose of the site. If someone is not interesting in posting for sale items here that may spur a discussion, they should post it on a dedicated for sale site where secrecy is the standard practice. A discussion about a for sale item may help to sell it or may even bring up other options for prospective buyers that could kill a sale. In the end a free and open discussion could even help from someone being taken advantage of.

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Jim with all due respect and there is probably no one i respect more than you on this forum. Let’s go back a few years to craigs list, you post an item to sell the buyer asks some questions, you answer them and they either buy or walk. No body interjects from outside and interferes with the natural flow of the buyer seller negotiation process. This is a process as old as human interactions have taken place . There is a flow to 2 honest people negotiating a sale of goods or services. At some point they are going to come to an understanding through a building of trust or they walk. That is a personal interaction , when some one pops up with their 2 cents worth it can completely erode the relationship developed to this point. .it’s not " hey I’m. Selling Joe my bike for $20 does anyone object to this or forever hold their peace"
When someone posts something for sale the just want to move it on and recoup some money they are not looking to to present a case defending the items value to someone that has no intentions of buying it… This is my point,if you have no intention of buying an item stay out it is not your concern.

Bottom line for me is this.; If 2 unicyists would like to enter into a business deal with this forum as a catalyst to the process it should be between the parties involved. The fact that the trading post process exposes a personal transaction and then leaves it up for public discussion is flawed . If I Choice to buy something off of this forum from another member that is My choice… I do not need somebody telling me I have made it are about to make a bad choice. I’m 53 I’ve raised a family, run a business s for 23 years and I m quite certain i can purchase some i
Unicycle parts with out it having to be known world wide and wether I paid to much. For trading post there has to a more private process.

Ok, you derailed this one.

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The main problem I see with this proposal is the fact that the suggestion requires a major modification of how the forum works, which means someone has to put hours or even several days into this, modifying configurations and adding custom code to discourse.

This also means that with later versions of discourse someone has to maintain that code.

@Canapin does a great job running this place and put a huge effort into migrating the data from the old forum. Personally I hugely respect this work and would not ask him to donate even more of his spare time to add and maintain custom code.

I completely realize And respect canapins efforts and dedication and my comments are in no way a criticism of this forum. I am also not singling out any particular instance or contributer. I made some suggestions based on my observations.

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Yes you are correct.I am not without fault on this topic and I am clearly guilty myself, this is precisely my point. I did not intend to derail this sale but my interaction may have done just that. My intentions to help one member may have hurt another member. I don’t think anyone is maliciously trying to sabotage sales by eliminating a the ability to make public comments on an item up For sale would solve this.

Interesting discussion!

Let me reply in a random order.

Indeed, having major changes is out of the scope of what the forum software allows, though we have added some useful features, like the location of the ads in Trading Post (but often this field are not filled, which can not enforce but only remind the person manually to do it).

Here, when we list all the ads, only a minority of people has properly filled the location field, which is a problem:

There is currently no way to force the location field to be filled in before posting the ad.
What incentive could we set up to remind people to fill it?
Would a pre-written message on the ad textbox would be a good way ? How should it be written (English not being my first language…)?


As for the ads by location filter…
Unfortunately, there is currently no way to filter by location, though there is a map: https://unicyclist.com/map but I think is it of low interest.
As the ads are only shown by an icon, we don’t know what it is before clicking them (is it a sell or a buy ? What product does it contain?). Only open topics are shown here since Trading Post posts are automatically closed after 6 months to prevent bumping years old topics (some people just don’t pay attention to the date).

Plus, this map could potentially contain mixed content as I’m still thinking how to add an Events category that would also contain locations.
Both ads and events would be shown in this map, and I’m not sure how’d they differentiate and how’d we be able to filter them.

The forum being primarily focused on what a forum is about (discussions), all additional features usually come from official or unofficial plugins that don’t always mix up nicely. They are also often missing features that the community would really need.

In short, the only and current way to see ads from our area requires:

  1. That posters properly fill the location field, and
  2. That we need to look through the trading post list and mentally filter ads :wink: :woman_shrugging:

As for the unwanted messages inside ads topics…
In practice, we could restrict the category to prevent any reply after the first post, and add a message that every discussion between the seller and a potential buyer should be done in private message.
Here are the current Trading Post settings:

I would just have to uncheck the “reply” option.

Is that what is needed here tough? As unicyclist.com is centered on discussions. Trading Post is an addition, but not specific feature by essence, it it makes sense (reminder of my imperfect English that doesn’t allow me to clearly explain my thoughts… :sweat_smile: )

What do other people feel about this? Public comments on sales or searches can be useful in my opinion.
I never trade here (but sometimes only on our very similar French forum), and I’m open to everyone’s arguments.
I’d like to hear way more people on this particular matter. I do like @JimT’s opinion though.

Currently, here’s how it works:

  1. Ads are automatically closed 6 months after the last reply (Ads from the older forum engine aren’t closed, but since they’re rarely bumped up, I don’t really care, I’ll close them if they are bumped up and if they’re clearly expired)
  2. People sometimes send me a direct message to ask me to close the topic, or they edit their title (and then I close it manually). I’m not sure there is any feature to allow a topic creator to close his own topic.

Maybe we could archive expired ads in a specific private or public category (I like the idea of the category being public, as market information, whether it’s old or very old, can still be interesting or useful information) instead of keeping them in the Trading Post category. I can do a bit of a search on this and see what is possible. But again, not everything’s possible.

Then the ads topic could be split and comments could go in another topic in Unicycles and Equipment of people want to discuss it? But, of course, that requires a moderator intervention.

I’m also not skilled enough to do major changes… I mainly use existing plugins and solutions.

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Thank you for your informative reply.

I’ll comment as someone who had a recent sales post taken over. I had 11 replies total, none from people interested in the item. Eventually it sold through the FB trading post group, but part of posting on here is that people will be allowed to comment. Also I think it’s fair, @Gockie said the item was overpriced and though I didn’t appreciate it at first, she was right as the item ended up selling for much lower than the posted price. ($100 cad originally down to $85, sold for $60).

In a niche community it’s good for people to ask questions and challenge bad deals. If you want a private process list it on eBay and post the link on the forum and groups. Also though people comment it doesn’t mean you have to respond. If you choose to post here there are conditions that you have to accept.

A sales platform is not what this forum is first, and it may be a lot of work the mods don’t want to get into for this free service they provide all of us. There are dedicated sales platform outlined to the suggestions above for those that would like to use them and advertise here.

I have a preference for going through the forum as it saves me eBay’s cut of the sales. Buyer pays shipping and I only lose a few dollars to PayPal. I’ll take Australians commenting on my post to save money.

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Although theoretically possible, are there any threads where the discussion has clearly affected the sale in a negative manner?
I’m not sure what I think to comments that something is overpriced though. I don’t think we should stop people from commenting, but I’d generally advise people against making those comments. The value of unicycles is so variable and cannot easily be compared across different countries.

My thoughts on this are that if one’s not open to a discussion about something, then this might not be the right place to post, and I’d also perhaps question their motives around selling. There are many alternative places people can put up unicycles for sale.

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Cheers. Great you ended up with a sale. I think your final sale price is fair. Also, FB has a much bigger audience. Also on FB, it’s pretty common you’ll have a reader that will comment that your asking price is too high if it is. (And side note, if someone is particularly rude, they’ll put a laugh emoticon on it. That is not cool, but you can’t control human behaviour.)

Also, on my local buy-sell site (Gumtree), I’ve also mentioned to some sellers that their asking price is too low, when its a quality brand name unicycle listed way too cheap and as a result, they modified their asking prices upwards to something more reflecting market value. Normally in this situation its the parents of a unicyclist trying to sell their kids stuff. One of the sellers actually said to me thanks because they really needed the money.

Anyway, glad you have a result :slight_smile:

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I really just need to add that this entire site is a luxury. It could be that for unicyclists we’d be stuck with FaceBook, which while not terrible would never feel like a “home”.

I totally get in fact all the points of view and “styles of interaction” - and I personally see things all-ways.

But overall I feel I personally have a broad enough perspective to accept whatever kind of comment happens on any kind of thread - be it trading post or others.

There’s tons of examples where things feel like they’ve gone off topic and a few reactions here and there which feel like some opinion is being held or articulated a little too dominantly. But that is just the simple fact of: people being people.

If I post a unicycle for sale and I’ve overpriced it, I can take the outcome of lots of comments about the price or total silence or: “hey that’s a nice uni I wish I could buy that, but I’m skint” - in fact, I don’t think I’d ever lose much sleep if a post marked SOLD was replied to again in 2030 asking me if that wasn’t the case.

I do agree all of these styles or interaction can be annoying or even disheartening - but if I were to find that to be the case in the daily, I’d go and read another site about something else.

I know this community likes to share and chat and express their views, curiosity and interest. That’s good. That’s OK.

So going off topic, or derailing a thread can and does happen and such is life.

I only ever flagged one post here on the forum as I felt a reply was overly aggressive and offensive - not to me but someone else, but again the poster may have just been having a bad day.

To demo how to derail this thread - and shed my views more broadly.

Sadly we recently had a serious and alarming experience with 999 and A&E - and at each stage the people we spoke to across the system here in the UK varied from helpful, to lovely, to cold, to indifferent, to brave and jokey, to kind and thoughtful, to experts and kind taxi drivers and to people smiling and asking if my wife needed another tea 🫖

At times I was upset when some people were blunt or didn’t listen (as I perceived it) and at others, I was so grateful when they were switched on and cared.

The point here is that however interactions go on these forums it’s never going to be perfectly organised or the replies able to meet everyone’s hopes or desires for how it is run - but I’m mainly just glad it exists and I’ll happily take the rough with the smooth or the replies I like or don’t.

:heart:

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But i often see users that read the forum frequently befor but just register to buy a uni or part.

Ah, yes. Indeed, new users aren’t allowed to send private messages to prevent abuses (spam, scam, etc) until they have minimal requirements.

Examples would be a good thing! This kind of hypothetical issue isn’t an issue until it shows up for real.

I tend to agree. And like you said, this forum community is very well-behaved (and has always been, from what I suspect – wasn’t here from the beginning :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: ).


And also, if some of you can take a little bit of time to reply about this particular issue reported by @Gockie:

Open to other ideas, of course!

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What you have there looks like a fine solution to me :slight_smile:

Let’s give it a try then. Here’s how it looks now, when you create a topic in #trading-post

I wish the reminder was a notice rather than an actual message that need to be manually deleted, but I can’t do better right now.

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Maybe you can modify it to “… field above [and delete this message] before posting your add. …”

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