Yes, they will still fall fast. Both the custom and production threads have a relatively high volume of new knives being posted daily.
Yes, they will not fall as fast as now and there is a lot of superfluous posts occurring.
However, as one who has followed the rules strictly, I feel that we are being penalized by the sins of those who cannot seem to follow the rules.
You are basically saying that a person will have to wait 2 weeks to get another shot at getting the knives for sale into the first part of the threads?
As I noted, I do not like this move and I disagree. You asked for feedback and that is my feedback on this issue.
As another who has followed the rules to a T, I feel where you are coming from. That's life, though. The actions of a few determine what is allowed by the whole. It's not fair, but it's what keeps things running (relatively) smoothly.
On paper, scenarios could be written for this test to go either way. Now that Spark has taken the leap, though, we have our first opportunity to see what this new system will look like. Undoubtedly it's the inability to bump which will worry sellers the most. For better or worse, we have never known a time on these forums where bumping wasn't just a part of life. Rather than speculate, lets take just a few minutes to look at some statistics while we can.
As of this writing (~8 AM CST on a Monday) if you were the very first person to post a new thread in the 'For Sale by Individual: Production' forum on Sunday morning, your post would still be on the first page.
There were 21 new threads created yesterday in that forum, figuring in the default 25 threads per page, that leaves a spot for 4 newer or older threads to show. Saturday looked fairly similar; 19 threads posted that day. 22 new threads on Friday, 23 on Thursday. As you can see, your thread stands a really good chance at staying on page one for a good 24 hours. As an aside, of all of those threads I counted, only 23 of the 85 of them would not have been bumped prior to this test...
and about half of those were after the infractions crackdown began a couple of days ago.
Now, regarding the two-week re-post rule, I'm sure everyone has their own way of monitoring for price drops on knives that they are interested in. Personally, I'd rather not have to wade through the jumbled mess that is a dozen bumped threads that I've already seen, now in random order, just looking for the one thread with a knife in it that I was interested in.
Under the new rules (the Halloween rules, not these new test rules) having the original poster (OP) post price drops was also greatly restricted. You could edit it into your first post... or wait 72 hours and include it in a bump. Granted, 72 hours isn't 2 weeks, the effect might as well be the same. Under these test rules, the 'give' is that you can no longer bump every 72 hours... the 'take' is that everyone is given equal opportunity for page-one visibility, the hectic nature of the forum is greatly reduced and we are given much more freedom to use our threads in whatever way we please.
There are other options, though. This one was just the easiest to implement for the staff. If disallowing thread bumping is proven to be a major problem, another option would be to have a mod/hack created that would allow only the OP to bump their threads and only after a designated amount of time. Actually getting that mod written is a different issue entirely, let alone if Spark is willing to have his vB install modded.
yeah, I agree with this. I don't think changing the way the posts are ordered in that forum will be good at all. you could post your knife at an off-time and no one will ever see it, and there's not a whole lot you can do about it.
Well, you would actually have a choice to make.
If you post your knife in off-hours, it stands to reason that your thread will remain visible for a much longer period of time.
If, instead, you posted it during peak hours, you might not stay on page-one as long, you might be seen by more people.
Oddly, though, it seems liked there aren't really any off-hours around here. That is to say, in the (admittedly) small sample size that I posted above, each day saw around 20 posts each. That means that whether you posted at 2 AM or 2 PM, your post is very likely to be on page one until the following day. If someone logs in that evening, they will see each thread just as easily.
I posted it on Friday (prime time for people seeing it) and waited patiently with what was the newest rules of not bumping with any sort of price drop, I edited in a Q & A section, and finally did my "bump" for the 3 day wait. 
