Petition for new sales rule:quote stays in thread after sale

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

This is something that seriously annoys me and I know that other people on this forum agree: many people remove the price quote after an item has been sold. IMHO this not only makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, it also makes it impossible to estimate what the going rate is for certain items.

Here's a suggestion for a new sales rule: it's mandatory to leave the price an item went for in the description of said item/ in the sales thread.

If this is something that you would like to see implemented, please subscribe in this thread. Thanks.

[Skykid]

Yes yes yes. Been chasing folks for years regarding this. It's a niche thing, the stuff we trade, and good price guides that aren't auction sites are rare. A searchable record is really important.

I only have one caveat: if a price is privately negotiated and sold cheaper, it doesn't have to be declared. That's a private matter between you and the buyer, but if you want to publicly declare it that's also fine.

Otherwise I agree this should be a rule.

[CStarFlare]

Agreed.

[Xyga]

Plussing this.

[EmperorIng]

Once I heard Skykid and others post about it, it made so much sense that I just started doing it on my own. While I don't know how much it will affect "market value" it's good to do as a record of what things were worth at any given point in time.

[MintyTheCat]

Makes sense to me; I actually wanted to know what the last couple of RECCA sales went for and found them to be have had amounts removed post sale.

[Strikers1945guy]

Makes sense. I've probably been guilty in the past but when something I have for sale sells I usually would just wipe the topic clean and leave a *sold* message. I've left all the pictures and descriptions up before with a sold sign at the top but months later still would get messages asking to buy the stuff as i guess people would just search the trading section for something and not bother to read the entire topic, so I found it easier to just erase the entire thing and put a SOLD message and that's it.

I will still do that but leave the price up in the future if I haven't in the past.

[Tarma]

+1 for this

[drunkninja24]

I would support this fully.

It's been an annoyance basically since I started posting and buying/selling on this forum.

I would like at the very least to be able to more effectively track pricing, especially when I have something of my own to sell.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

if a price is privately negotiated and sold cheaper, it doesn't have to be declared. That's a private matter between you and the buyer, but if you want to publicly declare it that's also fine.

Well, the agreed-on price would still be an indicator of market value, but I agree that it's a private matter; since we couldn't really force anyone to disclose the real price without violating a their right to privacy, this restriction makes sense.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Finally found the time to send Ghegs a link to this thread and ask him to consider intriducing this new rule. We'll see how it goes...

[Icarus]

My thoughts.

It's a nice idea, but impossible to enforce
1. behaviourally - people will delete that information as and when they want.
2. technologically - the current system for trading here is based on a forum software solution, which allows for edits after the fact, so for this idea to work, we'd have to migrate the trading system to a suitable e-commerce solution that locks the price information in place when the item or request goes up into the listings - and then work out how to integrate it into the forum vis-a-vis shared user logins etc - which is more work than is worth, with no guarantees it'd be well-received and/or work the way we'd want it.
3. culturally - people have been deleting price information from their threads for years here, and you want a change now? Change is always slow to implement, so you're not likely to see results for months, even years, if at all.

Not to mention the problems in attempting to enforce such rules:
1. Is deleting price information from your own sale thread considered a punishable offence anywhere? I don't think so. So how do you punish such behaviour, if you even punish it at all?
2. How are we (the admin/mod team) supposed to track every single thread for this behaviour? Are you guys going to report every single post that has price information removed after the sale via the reporting tool? That's not what I'd call a good use of time and forum resources.
3. Even if we're to enforce this rule, we are unable to revert the information that was removed unless we make a backup of the forum every single second it is up, to effectively cache any and all changes. You can probably work out that's not feasible in terms of time and resources.

That said, there was the idea of having a thread similar to "what's it worth?" but for tracking current sale price information via the FS/FT/WTB threads - and if you really want permanence, screengrab that info from people's threads and upload it to imgur, imageshack etc. However, that would be up to you, the wider community, to set up and run, not the admins/mods.

[Ghegs]

Like Icarus already covered. The Team talked it over and the suggested rule is just not something we can make work in any meaningful fashion (unless we completely disable users' ability to edit their own posts in Trading Station, and that'd just result in chaos really fast). It'd be completely in the hands of the users to follow as we'd have no way to track and revert offending edits. I don't see much point in making a rule that we can't administer.

That doesn't mean the idea is completely without merit - it's certainly good practice to leave the sale price as information for others, so we should encourage it. And if somebody wants to start the Price Guide thread, go for it.

[Skykid]

I think that's a good suggestion, let's give it a try:

http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.ph ... 5#p1162555

[trap15]

Bump, but... I don't get it? We force users to put up pictures and enforce that. How is "don't replace $250 with SOLD" not just as enforceable?

[Strikers1945guy]

Bump, but... I don't get it? We force users to put up pictures and enforce that. How is "don't replace $250 with SOLD" not just as enforceable?

Agreed. Every sales thread HAS to have a price. If you stumble upon a sold one where the price is removed then strike?

[Ghegs]

Bump, but... I don't get it? We force users to put up pictures and enforce that. How is "don't replace $250 with SOLD" not just as enforceable?

Because we can clearly see when a picture is missing. But we can't see if a user has decided to remove all mention of their sold item (not just marking it as sold, but deleting it completely). The forum software doesn't store every iteration of every post so we could see the post's version history and confirm the deletion. So it'd devolve into user A saying "This guy removed his sold item from the listing!" and user B countering with "No I didn't!" and we'd have no way of telling who is correct.

[LEGENOARYNINLIA]

I don't see much point in making a rule that we can't administer.

Because we can clearly see when a picture is missing.

I think the "The Team" should spend more time in the For Sale section to make sure it enforces the few rules it has put in place.