How to post create an account to HP advertisement?

[Dave Hicks]

There were a number of issues with ebay ads in the old classifieds. Among them:

About half of the total accounts at any time were people who just made an account to sell something on ebay and then never posted anything again. (And that's with account pruning - if I count accounts created, the ebay percentage is even higher.) This is a resource drain and doesn't enhance any sense of community, since so many posts in the classifieds don't relate to anything/anyone in any other part of the forum. This thread is a good example of that. I turned off new registrations in the old forum on Friday morning or maybe Thursday night, and we've already got someone wanting to create an account to post an ebay auction.

Other issues were that I just get complaints about ebay auctions in the classifieds one way or another. Sometimes just their existence and/or perceived spammyness and sometimes complaints about something to do with ebay that has nothing to do with me. And sometimes DEMANDS from ebay sellers that I'm not advertising "enough" for them. Some ebayers would delete and re-post their ads daily to keep them on top and then get mad at me when I told them to stop - which I did in response to other people bugging me about that. The whole required marking thing "(AUCTION)" in the old forum was intended to satisfy part of that issue but it didn't entirely.

When I looked at the new software, I didn't see a way to do that (required AUCTION marking) without hacking the code directly and I want to minimize hacking the code directly because it makes it harder to install core code updates - which may be necessary for security. So I decided that if I wanted to keep ebay at all, the easy way was two separate Classifieds forums. But I decided to start off with just the one and consider the other (ebay) if it was requested, because, my personal preference was not to have it.

After about 10 days of adjusting, and getting moderators on-board, I opened up the forum, naively thinking: now I could take a break and get back to other things that had been pushed aside... instead the first day turned out to be extremely busy with user requests and various issues to track down and adjust. About 12 hours into this, the first ebay "request" came in the Test forum, which referred to the classifieds policy as "a bit draconian." And I thought: really? after all this work to try to fix complaints about the old forum and then adjusting the new forum, I'm "a bit draconian." ? But I realized I was tired and went to bed.

The next day, I was feeling better, so I decided to embrace it, own it. etc. and I put my buddy, mentor, and confidant: Δράκων AKA Draco in my avatar.

Now I just have to figure out how to implement a death penalty for referring to ebay in the classifieds so I can be fully Draconian.

I may still create that 2nd classifieds forum. One thought is to make it only available after you are an established member of the museum. (Time/post count kinds of metrics.)