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Classifieds - Yea or Nay?


Gloves

The Classifieds Section  

26 members have voted

  1. 1. Should we keep the Classifieds feature?

    • Yes
      6
    • No
      6
    • Don't care
      14
  2. 2. Have you used it before?

    • Yes
      8
    • No
      18
  3. 3. Did you even know it existed?

    • Yes
      20
    • No
      6


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Administrator · Posted

So we have this feature: https://www.videogamesage.com/classifieds/

And it gets used a little, but not a lot.

Is it because it's not very visible? Did you know it existed?

Or is it just not very helpful, or too different from the usual "Post a thread, work with that" kinda situation?

I ask because it's a plugin which has a subscription fee; not a ton, but doing a bit of trimming right now and taking a look at things that cost money in general but are maybe due to be chopped.

Note that this isn't tied to Feedback, which we definitely wanna keep. It's just a different way of showing items for sale, or that you're looking for.

Thoughts? Keep it? Toss it and move on with life?

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I think it's a good feature that needs better exposure. I'm not sure how others navigate the site, but I almost exclusively use a bookmarked "Latest Activity" custom feed. If I do any navigating beyond that, I use the "Browse" button and choose forums. From there I would go to buying or selling as it seems easier to use and easier to remember than the classified section.

My suggestions:

  1. Make a big "Buy Sell Trade" button that is much more obvious than the current menu option along the top bar.
  2. Combine the classifieds with the buy/sell forum. Maybe have the classified section at the top of the page as a scrolling horizontal bar (as it currently is). Then have the traditional buy/sell forum directly below it. Leave the right sided bar as is (or make it more obvious that it links to classified items and not forum posts).

I'm not a web designer so maybe that isn't how it should be done, but that makes more sense to me than the current layout.

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  • Agree 2
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It's a good idea, but it was already replicate by the old school sales forum, which overshadows it quite a bit.  The only time that I ever remember seeing something in it (maybe a time or two, and I think someone linked to the listing as I never sought it out), it basically appeared as a kludgy, less elegant version of what we already had.

It's an additional place to have to look, and from what I saw, people who posted in the Classifieds section were also posting in the regular threads, so no real benefit of the dedicated section being there since the original was always copy/pasted to anyway.

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Just now, Gloves said:

When you post something in Classifieds, right now it also will post to the forum automatically for you.

I guess that's what I was seeing, then.  I vote to get rid of it, as it doesn't seem like it's being used, similar to how many clubs don't see a ton of traffic simply because they're part of the main "flow."  I know I miss/skip checking on the book club more often than not simply because of it being a different section (then being totally annoying in that it doesn't just present a list of topics like the forum does, but a "quick summary" of the last however many posts across all topics).  Seems extraneous at this point.  Maybe a good thing for the few who check it religiously, if someone posted something there that flew under the radar because it didn't appear in the main sales topic, but past that, just a duplication of what's going on already.  If it's costing you money/bandwidth/whatever versus the base software, I'd say axe it since the functionality was already on the site (albeit in a slightly different form).

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  • 2 weeks later...

I tried it once, but I didn't feel as though my listing had much visibility.  It doesn't really matter much to me.  I'm fine with the traditional buy/sell/trade forum. 

In fact, it would be my preference to have one or the other (I don't really care which), but not both.  Having both seems like you might limit your views because some people might only use one or the other.  

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  • 2 months later...

I never saw the point, felt redundant.  If the board just auto created as a function some kind of classified for the existing sales posts as they're done that would be fine, but also let's be realistic, impossible.  When I was going at it regularly I just kept the thread.  Whatever I do with it in the future will be far more minimalist and for trades, little cash, due to the little cap.

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