Name Tag in Sales Posts.

[Qlimax]

What do people think regarding having paper name tags on sales posts as a rule. 

 

Personally I think they’re worth having rather than not having. 

[proffrink]

To clarify: It's not currently a rule to have your name next to the gun or gear that you're selling. This is a popular rule on some other forums though.

 

On 4/3/2013 at 10:34 PM, Devastator said:

- All sales and swaps topics must have a picture, all pictures must be taken by the seller (adding a piece of paper with your forum name and date helps)

 

 

[Prisce]

Depends on the person, I have never done it, never had a problem, guess it depends on the type or people/persons your dealing with. 

 

I know the idea is to create another “safety” barrier to prevent scamming, and if people ask for a photo with it next to the gun then sure, but I don’t believe it should be a rule/requirement. 

 

We can’t spoonfeed everyone, natural selection won’t have anything to do!

[Robert James]

I sit on the fence with this.

 

If it was a new member of This forum I'd ask them. If it was someone like the 3 people responded to this thread I wouldn't. 

 

I've just bought something from @L3wisD, his name wasn't on it, and I paid friends and family as trust is built and earned.

 

However it would be good to add potentially for newer members as a "recommended* 

[proffrink]

This didn't make it to the new rules despite there being an overwhelming amount of support for it (myself included, frankly). Despite the low number of respondents, I have no doubt that the poll results would stay the same given the perspective of most of those who will be answering (i.e. active forum contributes). My reasoning for not implementing this might not make a huge amount of sense, but I have a strong belief that there's a balance to be struck between usability and the relaxation of rules vs. making the forums safe and easy to browse. This rule addition would add to the latter, but at a cost to the former.

 

I'm hoping the new classifieds have made posting easier. The area is well defined, adding a new listing is clear to even those who might not have used a forum before (read 'coming from Facebook'). The rules are still a bit of a wall of text, and frankly I might be advocating for slashing a few of them over this year. I've already done this for the main forum by opening up our language rules. Whether it's resulted in better content or not is certainly debatable.

 

Back to this specific rule on adding names to paper: This is flaunted on ZeroIn (and not enforced) and will be flaunted here (and likely enforced). The enforcement isn't the problem: The adding of another hurdle to people who already have 3-4 Facebook risky Facebook groups to post in is an issue, however. I'm just not sure the pay-off of getting them to add their name to a piece of paper is worth it when this is put in the context of a forum that already requires you to post 'your own pictures', add a defined price, FPS, make etc. (all things that many of our competing places of listing just don't require of people).

 

So you even if you agree with me on that, I'm sure you might also wonder why I'm worried about competing when it comes to our classifieds. It's fairly simple: They're our main draw. They're not the reason people stay (I hope), but they do get people to sign up. The classifieds page is the single most popular page after the first page of the forums right now and also sends to most amount of traffic to the sign up form. Given how forums are laid out (every thread on a different URL) I'd be dubious of these numbers too, but it's no coincidence that the youngest accounts on here almost always make a classifieds listing first.

 

And once they're over the hurdle of signing up, sometimes we can squeeze a post or two out of them. If they like it enough, they contribute meaningful content. In short, the classifieds are an excellent meatgrinder and do yield some quality members from time to time. Our forum classifieds are maybe the 2nd or 3rd most popular (after ZeroIn, but perhaps ahead of Arnies) in terms of volume, but there's a hell of a lot to do in order to actually attract the FB users. Keeping active membership (the vast majority of which just lurk) who might buy an item is key as this fuels the posting of more classifieds and gives people more of a reason to sign up and perhaps stick around.

 

unfortunately for now I just cannot see the pay-off for something like adding name to paper when it can be asked for in a PM. I understand there's a slight benefit to people viewing those threads where they don't have to, but I'm hoping people will use the 'question' feature to publicly ask for these images when they're not there.

 

Ramble over I suppose.

[Robert James]

6 minutes ago, proffrink said:

 

Honestly, prefired now insist on it and it actually puts me off. Sometimes I don't have time to take the photo and then forget about it or I'm at work and don't have a photo with me that has the paper so can't even post it. Like I said, if it would say recommended then newer members may do it without hesitation. I always ask if I can't see one with a name, if someone won't send it then deal off (if I don't trust/know them)