Why So Many For Sale Threads??

[baltochef920]

I'm not sure if this is the correct place for this question, but here goes..

There are 29 pages of For Sale threads dating back to late 2006 in the Photographer's Market Place forum..

There are 28 pages of 50 threads each, plus one page of 32 threads totaling 1,432 For Sale threads as I write this post..

It seems to me that this is far too many..It's confusing, not to mention it's got to be taking up valuable hard drive space on the forum's computers..

I'm just curious as to why there isn't a finite time limit on how long a For Sale posting stays active before it's automatically deleted..

It seems to me that if that were the case then there would only be at the most a couple of hundred posts active at any one time; making the amount of info for a potential buyer to sift through much less..

Just my thoughts..

Bruce

[pingflood]

I agree that they should expire after a given time, though I would not be too concerned about disk space; these days hosting is cheap cheap cheap and those 1,400+ threads are probably not using up a lot.

[Kami]

If a site continues to archive its for sale ads then you have a historical record of prices of equipment. You can then search the archives and get an idea of prices being in the right ballpark.

If you think that 1432 ads is bad then you need to head over to FredMiranda.com - there are over 30,000 posts covering the last 2 years

[Venturi]

Disk space is practically a non-issue. I would be surprised if the entire PF database, minus photo attachments, takes up more than about 10GB; mySQL compression algorithms are pretty good and words crunch up really well.

As for confusion of searching, you can specify a date cut-off on the advanced search page so that only threads/posts active within a certain time range show up.

Having a historical record however does serve purpose. It provides a tool by which buyers and sellers can get an idea of what price a given item typically sells and depreciation trends. The feedback system also depends on sales threads to exist so people looking at feedback can see what occurred to a degree between buyers and sellers. Additionally, the search engines eat up forum threads and posts and by keeping as many of them alive as possible that means this site gets better ranking in the search engines bringing more members with it.

[Eaglerapids]

I agree with the valuable record of prices paid, and it seems far to often after an item is sold the seller replaces the price with "sold" . I wish this wasn't done. The selling price should stay a part of the record.