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In the Classifieds please leave the price for future sellers or buyers for reference

I think the OP request is not an unreasonable suggestion. I am not sure why it is provoking such strong reactions here ?

I don't think he or anyone is asking for the seller to reveal how much the items actually sell for (thats between the seller and buyer) but theres no need to physically edit the original price and replace it with 'sold'. That seems a bit unneccesary to me.

Yes we can use HiFi Shark, but sometimes the link it sends you to is not always there and i think it really helps gauge the sellers what an item may be worth to see it on one of the best respected platforms like PFM, which gets a lot of traffic. This doesn't have to show actual selling prices, merely indicate them so you can know you are not over or under pricing items. Thats all.
 
On another (non-hifi) forum I frequent a key rule of the marketplace is that all negotiations take place on the thread. The forum owner's feeling is that it helps protect against scammers.
 
There is another forum where hifi is traded and all discussions about any classified ad listing must take place in the thread rarther than through PM. In addition, they explicitly prohibit professional traders, who they define as members who trade with the intent of making a profit. Not sure how they deal with price information after an item has sold, but an interesting thing about the classified listings is the discussions are open, transparent, and often show a certain degree of tact and courteousness in negotiating over the price.:)
 
I’m still curious why people do it, leaving aside the wrongs and rights of it. And again we’re talking about deleting the asking price from the initial ad here rather than disclosing the final sale price or whatever. I mean what’s in it for anyone?
 
Seanm said:
I’m still curious why people do it, leaving aside the wrongs and rights of it. And again we’re talking about deleting the asking price from the initial ad here rather than disclosing the final sale price or whatever. I mean what’s in it for anyone?
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Exactly.
 
To be honest I think that the private classified posts should only be open to the OP for comment, whether forsale, wanted or an interest check, all enquiries should be made by PM, yes, unfortunately this would stop well meaning fellow forum members from offering advice or just having a chat but really the classified ads are not a discussion forum, there is plenty of other places for discussion, and it hopefully would stop or discourage the usual 'thread crappers' . I can see no reason why a genuinely interested party would not PM, after all it takes the same time to write a PM as it does a post.
Whether the PFM should insist on (initial asking) price, pics or location I guess is up too the management. Though I don't see any reason why 'open to offers' would not be acceptable.
I do think once an item is sold it should be marked as such.
 
Seanm said:
I’m still curious why people do it, leaving aside the wrongs and rights of it. And again we’re talking about deleting the asking price from the initial ad here rather than disclosing the final sale price or whatever. I mean what’s in it for anyone?
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I don't understand why a seller would replace the initial asking price with a sold tag, I do understand why some buyers would like the seller to remove the asking price, so they could flip it and turn a few quid.
 
Darren L said:
I don't understand why a seller would replace the initial asking price with a sold tag, I do understand why some buyers would like the seller to remove the asking price, so they could flip it and turn a few quid.
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Ah, ok, that makes sense: a courtesy to the buyer.
 
FWIW the classified room should really be pruned back to 30 days from last post date, it’s just got way, way out of hand due to quite exceptional laziness on my behalf. I’ve let it go for so long now it will likely take quite a while to do as it is server intensive and I’ll need to do it bit by bit, which neatly brings me back to laziness...
 
Tony L said:
FWIW the classified room should really be pruned back to 30 days from last post date, it’s just got way, way out of hand due to quite exceptional laziness on my behalf. I’ve let it go for so long now it will likely take quite a while to do as it is server intensive and I’ll need to do it bit by bit, which neatly brings me back to laziness...
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When you prune it back to 30 days, is it then still possible to find listings beyond that period, e.g. through a google search, or are they then irretrievably gone? Assuming they're definitively gone, the question raised by the OP would then really be a non-issue...
 
Just gone, i.e. hoofed from the server to free up space & boost performance. My pruning schedule used to be music/classic/diy and photo = none, audio & off topic = three years, classifieds just a month. The logic being so much of the audio and off topic rooms are just noise, plus they date fast, so best just to ask the question again. The other areas seem far more serious/lasting and contain far more real information that is worth preserving. There is no value in old adverts, so I used to prune that right back.

As stated I’ve since become a lot more lazy all round and I’m still trying to figure out if there is a financial advantage to letting it balloon or not. Obviously the more pages a site has the more search results, the more ad insertions etc, and the larger the site gets the more revenue it seems to generate. So, does that mean I just let it run free rein? I don’t know, I’m a real old-school IT guy from the days where a 360kb floppy disk was a lot of storage so I don’t sit easily with bloat, but if bloat = bigger paycheque, then why not?

There is a lot of work I need to do to pfm that I’ve been putting off for a variety of reasons, e.g. I do need to get the software upgrade to Xenforo 2.x done, but I know knocking it into shape will be at least two weeks of mind-numbingly boring work (I’ll need to do the look and feel again from scratch, and whilst that should be a day’s work I’m so OCD about tiny details that no one gives a shit about it will take me two weeks!). So I put it off...
 
Ah ok, thanks, now I understand why old content disappears. Haven't followed developments closely and am a bit slow on the uptake.:rolleyes:
 
Tony L said:
FWIW the classified room should really be pruned back to 30 days from last post date, it’s just got way, way out of hand due to quite exceptional laziness on my behalf. I’ve let it go for so long now it will likely take quite a while to do as it is server intensive and I’ll need to do it bit by bit, which neatly brings me back to laziness...
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However on that note I have on more than one occasion had someone contact me about an item I had for sale months before and I sometimes see people asking if an item has been sold on some old listings.

So keeping old classifieds does have some merit, but I can understand @Tony L point about the size it would become.
 
Seanm said:
I’m still curious why people do it, leaving aside the wrongs and rights of it. And again we’re talking about deleting the asking price from the initial ad here rather than disclosing the final sale price or whatever. I mean what’s in it for anyone?
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The sale price is always public, unless someone has forgotten it and it soon gets added further down the thread. I can't think of many sales I have made here over the years (low value stuff I suppose) where what it went for was different at all or by much. As for SOLD prices agreed privately (if different), seriously, does anyone even put them in the thread? Rarely if ever? Quite. I'm fine with that remaining private and had never given it any thought.

Given the sale price is public from the start, as with Seanm and others (and the OP even? I admit I haven't been back to read it but at first blush I thought the point was sellers deleting the FOR SALE, not SOLD prices) I agree just leave it in the ad, we are hobbyists and we like to see what asking prices there are, now and even in a historical search. The thread title is modifiable to SOLD isn't it? Seems to be.

Superimposing SOLD over the original asking price seems a bit precious to me, I mean, it was viewable for a few days. Perhaps, with more to sell, it serves those who delete the asking price and overwrite it with the ALWAYS all caps SOLD, as they can then set asking prices without a recent or past reference (except or forums, eBay, also making the practice equally daft and defensive).

Anyway I'm sure that's already been said...
 
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Tryant said:
they explicitly prohibit professional traders, who they define as members who trade with the intent of making a profit.
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Have never heard of a trader who doesn't seek to make a profit; surely, that's implicit in the name, so it seems utterly daft to 'define' a trader !:rolleyes:
 
I thought it wasn’t possible to edit a post after 48 hours? In that case you should be able to see the price that was being asked two days before the item sold. And if the first post says ‘Sold’ it means someone else bought it within 48 hours, so you missed a bargain. And then you really don’t want to know how little it went for, or you will kick yourself.
 
@Mike Reed, this thread is dead as per Tony's post, but since you insist... The idea as I understand it is to discourage people from trying to use the classifieds as a way to make money. It seems it was intended to be a way of non-profit trading between members. What a daft idea.:)
 
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