While I previously posted that I thought a separate forum would be a good thing, I've changed my mind.
If someone new starts looking at the sale forums, originally for non-product X, and sees many threads about product X, it may well pique that persons interest enough to look into product X, and they may thereafter become a new customer for/of that product.
Had product X been segregated to its own unique forum, that person may never have thought to look into that product, and therefore a potentially new customer/fan/collector would be lost.
If a person collects a specific brand/style/whatever characteristic, and all things are listed together, given the search limitations, they will have to do some legwork to find that item/brand, but they would not be exposed to a product were it in the segregated product line.
The need to scroll pages, to me, appears to be just the nature of the limitations of the search function.
Perhaps changing it so that a search limitation of up to 30 or 60 or 90 days would alleviate the inability of it to return findings due to a huge number of hits.
If it is searching the entire database, the number of hits on commonly used brand or model names would be, and evidently are, overwhelming, and too numerous to post.
A historical timeframe limit on the search might address/solve this.
It could also be tiered so that the higher your membership level, the further back you could search.
I do feel that sale posts should be consolidated, not listed out in several posts, each relating solely to one item, when those several items could be listed in one post.
To me, multiple listings on the same day are just space hogs.
I have seen many people (mea culpa here, but I'm getting better...) continuing to post "wow, good deal", "hey, he's a good guy", or "man, that's STILL here", which provides a bump contrary to the forum guidelines.
I know that AR15 has a 72-hour bump restriction, and threads are locked if it is violated.
Perhaps something like that would enable all sellers to have their posts viewable (on the first page or two) under a natural occurence/posting sequence state, without unnecessarily bumped posts moving non-bumped posts to subsequent pages.
Personally, I think the enforcement of the chit-chat related bumps, along with consolidated postings, would help the forums move to their natural state, and should be tested before a split off...
The search function changes might well help out too....
Carry on.
