Sales & Services / Other Mod Stuff / Thank You / Discussion Thingy Yolk

RopeDrink

Hey folks.

Feel it's time to review how things have gone and get involved with the community and ask for some views and opinions.

For a little history and explanation.

When I was reeled in to mod DA&D I was asked to take a headstrong view against sales/services related threads being posted mostly because letting stuff like this fly in the past caused a hell of a lot of unwanted grey areas and also goes against the simple fact we have Adverts.ie for this sort of thing.

On asking the higher uppers it was suggested I take a peek at the Photography Forum who have their own dedicated sticky thread assigned to give a bit of leeway and freedom for people to make requests and the likes, so long as the results gotten from using this was kept 100% to PM so that there was no on-board advertising and all things being discussed were between the individuals so that Boards could not be held responsible in the event of bum deals and whatnot - And also to not detract too much from Adverts.ie where this sort of thing really should PRIMARILY take place anyways.


Now, here's my gripe to which people can step in and lend some views.

I'm looking at the Sales & Services Sticky primarily for now - One issue I have with it is that it clearly says people should contact me (or simply delete their post) whenever a service/sale issue has been resolved or is being closed.

This never happens, leaving it entirely up to my judgement to clear out the thread and overall the whole thing is a cluttered mess.

In it's current state it's impossible for me to guess, so I stuck by a rule where Service posts were being deleted after X period of time, regardless, which isn't really a good way to handle things and also tasks me with keeping tabs on time-passed and a lot of pruning, which = merging/deleting god-knows how many posts a month.


So folks, I'm looking to see how we can go about giving some freedom on this Board (without taking away from Adverts.ie and also keeping the workload down) so it will work better for both you guys and myself. In it's current way it's not optimal, basically, for anyone.


One idea I had for this was to ditch the sales side of it and maybe recreate a new sticky thread from scratch where users of the DA&D Forum could post their qualifications or interests and simply list people in a fresh sticky thread so that if others are looking for X, Y or Z service or person they could reference the list and maybe mass PM the people eligible to fulfil a wanted service from there.

This allows me to just keep DA&D free from grey area posts (Sales & Services) and encourage people to move on to Adverts.ie or simply have a look through the list of people who are capable of filling desired roles.

This may also help another issue I have where people could quite easily mask a sale or service by not mentioning money. With the new way it wouldn't matter if people were looking for Charity reasons or pay related work as they could just chance their arm by getting in touch with whoever is free (Charity work I'm sure is decent for people looking to fill portfolio's and whatnot, aside from being, well, charitable) :P

This is not a well thought idea, mostly just a spur of the moment thought - If it's decided the current way is stale and should be revamped, I'd have to get some input from the higher uppers anyways.

In addition, if there's not a lot of feedback about this issue, I'll just have to assume it's best to leave things 'as is'.

Either way, if anyone has any views or feedback to express about this situation, feel free to post

Outside of that I want to thank the community in general - There's a lot of helpful people around here and DA&D (Aside from being a hotbed for spam attack) is quite a nice bustling little place!