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Just a random idea, would it be something Admin could consider please, splitting it into a For Sale forum and a Wanted forum?

It would make it a lot quicker to sort through and there is no real reason to keep them all in one section imo.

The admins are highly unlikely to split a forum in 2 sub-forums. Reason being that it would lower over all traffic for both sub-forums, which is bad thing.

Dakka trys not to split content where possible. Splitting often results in two subforums with little traffic and a messy hard to use forum. As far as I am aware and have experienced, the swap shop system and search function make for an efficient way to find what you need. In addition, despite having dedicated moderators, the swap shop already puts quite a lot of strain on the system and this would certainly add to that.

Forgive my foolishness here, but if you just split it in two wouldn't they add up to the same traffic and mod duties overall?

Edit. I guess it's probably just me used to scrolling down the page to look at stuff and not using the searches.

They may very well add up to the same level of traffic, but it's less of a "will the traffic to these two forums earn the same traffic as 1 forum" it's more of a, "will 1 of these forums gain a large majority of the traffic while the other kind of withers out on the vine."

And to an extent, "will both suffer from limited amounts of traffic?" Where possible, most forums will combine sub forums where possible to concentrate traffic and to keep the forum tidy. Conversely, that means the splitting of a subforum is a big decision and requires a very good reason.

I could be wrong but I think the Mods would see increased workload due to many people posting in the wrong sub forum for what they or doing. People would also ask for their threads to be moved across so they could change it from want to have. There would also be the difficulty of discerning whether many of the threads are have or want as many people will post what they want to trade for and what they have to trade. Where would those threads go? Each one would need to be moderated to make the call.

And you aren't being foolish don't worry. It's good to offer suggestions it's just that the bigger things aren't easy to change and are already pretty carefully engineered.

As I see it, the issue with splitting the swap shop into 'sales' and 'wanted' is not so much a traffic issue as simply that it's a swap forum... which sort of inherently implies that a certain number of listings are going to include both sales and wants.

Yeh that's pretty much the main issue here.

Doesn't seem to make much sense to separate the people wanting to buy stuff from the people wanting to sell stuff...

My only kind of separation I would like is USA sellers and non USA sellers. However this is an incredibly minor thing.

However, what really irks me is how lazy/careless some people are with there trade threads. As in a seller sales his stuff, two months later I see it and toss him a message only to get "oh lol sold that awhile ago". So now when your looking for something specific that guy once sold, it's going to clutter up the search page because he can't be bothered to clear it.

Jumping off this is people that sell things but instead of clearing them they just leave them up and put the word SOLD beside it. At this point that information only serves to hinder buyers in locating specific goods. Really gives me a good rustling. I wish there could be a bit more structure to the swap shop in that regard.

I just assume if the thread hasn't been used in a while it's all been sold. If I really want to I'll pm them anyway just to check but I expect it to be gone. If they aren't posting then they aren't wanting to advertise, if they don't bother about advertising then they probably don't have anything to sell. It's logical...

Hey Grim,

Just wanted to say thanks for the feedback . Dakka does generally try to avoid splitting forums unless it is very necessary, so it's not likely to happen... certainly something we've considered, though.

A more likely candidate would be a separate subforum for auctions, though, since those truly are their own animal (i.e. they are only for sale through ebay or the like, not for trade). But as insaniak said, many "want" ads are also "have" ads, so splitting it becomes a bit harder.