I briefly touched upon this subject with Huey, who rightfully suggested that it would be a good idea to bring it up here to see how others feel about this:
One thing I find hinders my browsing experience with other community sites’ classifieds sections is that everything tends to be thrown in together in a jumbled mess, making it somewhat difficult to get clear read on what is a sale, a buy or a trade — which can result in missing out a great deal. I was wondering what others thought about implementing something akin to a tag system that would allow users to filter out the classifieds by their status. A good example of this in my opinion is deskthority’s Marketplace.
Sounds like a fine idea to me. The site actually already has a tagging system built into it for posts, but something like sub-categories might make more sense since it’s hard to enforce r/mk-style self-tagging (and tags aren’t required for posts). I for one am certainly open to whatever folks think would be helpful.
I’d agree, a properly drawn up series of categorisation would be a boon for any type of classifieds section, making it easier for both buyers and sellers.
I like this ideal! I agree the classifieds will get very messy & become a pain to navigate without some type of organization. I think the sub-category ideal @norbauer threw out sounds like a good way to go about it. Probably wouldn’t even need that many to make it useful either, it could be broken down like this possibly - Complete KBs, kits, & parts. Although TBH I’d like to see the categories be a little more specific & numerous.
All classified ads should be moderated for correct style markup for categorization. A reputation system like /r/mm would be good. Although I imagine a lot of duplicate posting with mechmarket will be present I reckon.
Also maybe dedicated a set of mods for the classifieds.
Surely a little plugin can be developed for the title regex for markup compliance. Also a mod manually checks the timestamp on /r/mm… so begins the feature creep …
Reputation system would be okay, but I think something like heatware would be nice too. Perhaps even both. link to heatware for that user and a /r/mm style of # of transactions for KT specifically. That way if someone has built up a profile on heatware it shows there too. Could lend creedence in the beginning when there’s not much institutional history for trading on this site.
Basically, this comes back to putting links in your profile to other things. Could do hearware and your reddit username and GH or wherever else keeps track of your trades/sales.
That’s probably the best way of doing it, IMO. A /r/mm style tracking for users on this site and placing more info to their number of transactions on /r/mm and GH and heatware on their profile.
We’re currently sifting through the moderator applications and should have at least two to announce very soon. I think we’ve been sort of holding off on decisions like this to leave them in the purview of the moderators.
FWIW, my personal opinion is that, given the existence of MechMarket and Heatware (which has the advantage of not being tied to a particular community), there probably isn’t much reason for us to create—and then have to police—yet another reputation system. But again, I’m happy to leave that decision to our incoming moderators.
Quick, someone start training a neural net to recognize timestamps in the handwriting of keyboard enthusiasts! Can maybe use handwriting samples from the “slow” classes in elementary school to train the handwriting recognition
That makes sense. I was thinking mostly of scalability. As in, if the site gets as big as we’d like it to be, then we’d have our own tracking, but I can see where that just makes more work for the mods both now and in the future.
I think heatware is a valid alternative and platform independent, which is nice.
This is something that I hope to be looking at. I like the idea of tagging to allow filtering more than subcategories but we’ll need to discuss the best way forward.
Each option has its pros and cons both in terms of moderation and viewability.
