For Sale / Wanted Suggestions

dahamsta

I have a rake of old fudgies here that I wouldn't mind shifting, but it's all pretty small stuff and I couldn't be bothered my fat arse posting them on FS. I also have a few bits and pieces I wouldn't mind buying second-hand, but dropping into For Sale every day on the off-chance that someone's posted exactly what I'm looking for is a pain in the aforementioned. Here's a couple of suggestions that could make For Sale and Wanted more productive and easier for fat-arses:

Automated Notices

Gigolo1, Cyberslut69 has something you want!

Add 'forsale' and 'wanted' to the user profile fields; functionality for adding fields is built into vB, so this is trivial. Users fill in these fields with simple keywords of the stuff they have or want (computer, palm, monitor, toothpick, donkey). Run a script every night via cron that selects: a) posts from For Sale and Wanted for the last 24 hours; and b) users with the forsale and/or wanted fields filled. A few loops and PCRE keyword matches later, and you can send mail or PM's out to anybody with matches.

I accept that there could be a considerable overhead if this is rolled out on a large scale, however it's relatively simple to implement, so you could fire it together in basic fashion and roll it out to just the mods and anyone that notices the new fields in their CP, instead of posting an announcement across the boards. That way it should build up pretty slowly, and you'll have a chance to guage the overhead before every TD&H starts playing with it. If it works and people like it, keep it and beef up; if it doesn't or they don't, throw it away, no harm done.

Buying and Selling Boards

Anyone buyin' or sellin' a board? Tree for a powend!

This would be different from the existing For Sale and Wanted boards in that it would be a long term repository of Have's and Want's. That is, each user would be able to post a list of the bits and pieces that they might be willing to sell or buy. Unfortunately, vBulletin doesn't support this as is, because you would need to do things like lock users to one thread, but it could be developed as a plugin without too much hassle, particularly if you keep it really basic at the start.

You could implement this in several ways, but the simplest that come to mind are: a) just give the user a TEXT field and let them post what they want; or b) store each item as a row with the userid as they key and the item as a VARCHAR. The latter would be my preferred option, as it discourages verbosity and has the maximum potential for expansion. And expansion is the key here, it doesn't take much of an imagination to come up with add-on's for this, such as buyer and seller feedback and ratings. The possibilities are genuinely endless.

As I said, the first one is relatively trivial, so that's a freebie. The second is a freebie too, but if Regi isn't ready to start work on something like this just yet, I'd be happy to put the second one together for Boards in exchange for supporter status: because I'm working on something like this for Foot.ie at the moment; because I'm big fan of barter; and because I'm skint at the moment. (Ok, that's a lie, I just want to spend my money on something else.) Either way, I'd like to see these features on Boards. Quick sharp, hop to it.

adam

woolymammoth

i for one support the trial of this product and/or service.