I spend a fair amount of time on the sale forums of [H], OCN, and TPU. Mostly [H] because there's tons more traffic.
I voted for don't care. Why? I don't find it particularly helpful to have everything sectioned off. If I'm in the forum, I'm either A) Just browing for potential deals or B) Looking for something specific. If I'm just looking for a deal, I hit "See all Sale threads" so I can see everything and just click on whatever looks interesting. If I'm looking for a specific item, I just search for it. So having the forum divided, doesn't help me. That said, it doesn't
hurt me either. So if dividing the forum will help others, I'm all for it. Makes no difference to me either way. So unless somone has a reason why we
shouldn't do this, I'm all for this.
Since we're all here and all, I do
strongly think that posts in the B/S/T Forum should count towards your post total. I could have a huge post count if I bumped my thread everyday. Especially when you consider all the random discussions that happen in these threads in addition to the bumping. It's post whoring. Posts in the B/S/T forum are just the same as posts in the old General Nonsense forum here on TPU and if posts don't count in GN, they shouldn't count in B/S/T. And I know everybody says a high post count doens't mean anything, but you all know you judge based on post count. If it really didn't matter, why keep track of posts at all?
This is slightly off topic, but still related. It's also my opinion that forums are
not the ideal place for buying and selling goods. I've been toying around with and idea and it's still in its infancy.... What about a single site waht would consolidate all the FS forums on TPU, [H], OCN, Anandtech, etc into one site. All those sites would close thier FS forums and everyone would use this new site instead. The biggest benefit is the increased traffic.
All the traffic from
all the other forums would be on this on site. I'm not sure what this new site would look like or what kind of format it would be in. I'm not a software guy and quite frankly, I don't know what's even possible. But I do know that this proposed site would be built ground up for buying and selling computer hardware and such. If anyone is interested in working on such a project, or at least fleshing out the idea, let me know.