Should the Group Buy and For Sale Thread be locked?

[Windmiller]

Should the Group Buy and For Sale Thread be locked to members only. When I say locked I mean non-members cannot post, purchase or even view it.

I would also be interested in how others feel about this. This decision is going to effect all of us for along time to come so lets hear your thoughts .

This is one of the best communities I have ever been a part of and I want to preserve it. I don't want anyone to think I am taking a stance of not letting others in but I think the community aspect is what makes it so special and I think this promotes it.

[johnorun]

Reasons to restrict threads:
1- keeps out spammers
2- reduces the clutter of one-time visitors who ask about chip values in the sales forums.
3- encourages 'lurkers' to join the group in order to make buy or sell posts.
4- Keeps high price Ebay dealers from spying on our auction sale comments about them.

I favor requiring members wait until they have 10 posts, like on some other sites.

[Windmiller]

[g0b]

I think limiting access to sale and (especially) group buy threads makes sense, even if I'm always, by principle, reluctant to limiting access to information.

But I don't think we'll avoid IC sellers to realize that there are collectors who are ready to pay higher than scrappers... It'll just slow down the process... or even maybe not...

Our interest is anyway that the community of CPU collectors is the largest, and it'll necessary raise prices... So it's a bad for a good...

g0b

[CPUShack]

The Group Buy forum already is restricted to members only

[Windmiller]

[Cpuswe]

This has been up a couple of times before. (Cant find the threads) To lock group buy and sale forums for members based on posts or membership age. Nothing has happened and not sure what happened but i think gshv has the final say on this. My opinion is that we should have a closed part of the forum that are accessed only by members, based on posts or in special cases to sellers that we know and trust.

This should be sale and groupbuys that we dont want to show of for the public for some reason. From my point of view the forum could also contain my list of ended ebay sales instead of publicly at chipdb.org, since this as it is now could damage the collecting community more, than it contributes, by giving out where to put starting bids to sellers.

Access can be manually administered by moderators or other with special access.

"What about all new collectors, they will be closed out?"
Newly registered members will be informed about the closed forums and how to gain access. Make some posts, present yourself, and your collection, and be a part of the other parts of the forum.

"If its based on posts, there will be posthunters, just posting stuff to get to the limit..."
Since there will be manuall access given, the administrator will of course check what posting has been done before.

"Man this will be huge to administer!! We cant do this manually!!" We are not that many i think... 70-80. Not sure how the interface looks but split the work on a couple of members.

[Windmiller]

[iguana]

imho ... we have to start from experiment.

1. Make locked temporal forum part.
2. open it for 50...100 top posters
3. move there some group buy threads, list of ended ebay sales, the thread you are reading now... ect
4. see what it's like, how does it work, do we need it?

P.S. We are looking for additional work to Gennadiy. Sorry for that

[Chiefish]

I have always liked the idea of restricting who gets to see the for sale and group buy threads. I do think that gaging it by posts will only create post whores who will say any gibberish to reach the quota set. I also agree that if youre not a contributing member of the group that it should be harder to access these forums. Show you have a collection and you are into the whole scene of collcting and you will have access to everything, Join just to see what collectors are willing to pay for chips and then list them on ebay with crazy prices, and you should not have access. I am sure i have been witness to group buy threads that directly influenced the final sale price of chips that we wanted on ebay. Only to have the prices skyrocket.

[Windmiller]

An additional idea would be to add a Private Discussions section so prices and questions between long time members can be had with relative safety.

[D.8080]

How to keep informations concealed or very hard to access to others?

My suggestion:

start a newsletter style messaging system, sending infos to who effectively participated in the past; order of relevance by number of particpations to auctions (the ones that already participated are in by default). And than hand pick new users, who need to apply in order to get in the exclusive inner circle, being the suggested requirements fulfilled (posts etc.).

There should be 3 or more "judges", because we hate when one only man says no... democracy.

At last post recaps in a "group buy" thread, unlocked by a password - hackers will love that, oh my!

There are certain users that barely reach 50 posts but registered years ago, but many of us had business successfully with. Active participation to the community is a requirement? For how long? Quality of posts?


I believe that just two men for the job is much optimism.

I understand that this gets top rpiority as our strategies get known by our enemies (evil sellers) and affecting my lone ebay auctions (high prices).

Shill bidding on group buys auctions is a reality, as others posted in the past.

This is going to slow down IC from knowing fast what we are palnning, and by the time they know, we already moved on bidding.

My one cent (recession ate the other one )

[debs3759]

I also always thought it a good idea to have some way of restricting who gets access to sale and group buy threads (although group buy threads, IMO, should be more restricted than sale threads...).

My feeling is that group buys reveal a much bigger pattern as to who would pay what for certain chips, so should have the greatest restrictions imposed on them.
For Sale threads only show what sells fastest at the given price, and in some cases can also show that a certain price is too high as chips never sell. There should be (IMO, of course) some level of restriction or requirements to prevent abuse, but not excessive as it would potentially prevent new collectors from getting reasonable prices.

[admin]

We can restrict "for sale" forum in the same way as we do with the group buy forum. We can also "privatize" the "group buy", i.e. make it private and open it only to collectors. If we do this then we'll need a moderator - somebody, who would be willing to spend hopefully not much time managing access to the to the "group buy" forum. What do you think?

Gennadiy

[CPUShack]

I can mod it, I run hald the buys anyways lol