TheSamba.com :: View topic

Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:05 am

It is very annoying to use the search function and always have to wade through the mass parts poster / Advertiser like Mike Wilkerson in Wisconsin. Some how he boosts his hundreds of adds daily to the top of the listings even though they are very very old adds. I like to buy my parts localy after inspection and this situation has caused me to almost quit using thessmba as a source. Is there anyway to eliminate these peoples adds from the search criteria.

Also since he started doing this I have seldom got answers to my adds. I believe this is because he and others like him with hundreds of parts keep boosting them to the top of the Wisconsin list even though they are very old adds.

How can I make the owner of this site aware of my concerns.

Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:27 am

All people are doing is renewing their ads. The person you are complaining about happens to be renewing his ads all at once.

Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:36 am

Well the webmaster might want to know that people like to see whats new for sale in there area on this site and those that renew 500+ daily makes this almost imposible.

I would still like to know how I can make this concern known to the owner of this site, if he chooses to do nothing that is up to him.

Mon Dec 18, 2006 4:04 pm

alsehendo34 wrote: Well the webmaster might want to know that people like to see whats new for sale in there area on this site and those that renew 500+ daily makes this almost imposible.

I would still like to know how I can make this concern known to the owner of this site, if he chooses to do nothing that is up to him.

A person is only allowed to relist an ad 16 days after he or she posted it.. If they are doing this more often they are deleting the ads and puting new ones up which is a violation of the samba classifieds rules. Please report this with the abuse button.

Mon Dec 18, 2006 4:26 pm

14 days is the renewal period. I believe he is very proactive about renewing his ads every 14 days.

You have several options:
1. If you are using the search screen to search Wisconsin every day then after you select your state, go to the "Sort By" box on the Classifieds search screen and change "Date Updated" to "Date Placed". This will sort the new ads on top and shove all his ads to whenever they were originally placed.

2. You can can add Mike Wilkerson to your ignore list. Go into one if his ads, for example this one and click on his name. This will take you to the the profile screen for Mike Wilkerson. Click on "Add to your ignore list". Anyone who is your ignore list will have their ads excluded from any Classifieds search you do. Click on Control Panel in the upper left of the site to maintain your current ignore list.

Yes, if someone is deleting and reposting their ads every day (they will appear as "New" ads), please hit report in the ad and they will be warned about doing this.

Mon Dec 18, 2006 6:14 pm

Thanks this will take care of my problems in serching for new adds.

Admin Do you own thesamba, if not can the owner be contacted--you seem to be avoiding the answer to this question. If it is NO just say so and I will quit asking. What is leagle is not totaly revelent, I want to make the owner aware that this is a problem and causes pepole like me not to post adds, because local browsers never get past the first 500 adds when serching Wisconsin. They have told me this to my face. Very few will read this thread. All I want to do is make the owner aware of what I percieve as a major flaw in the site.

Mon Dec 18, 2006 6:29 pm

I am the owner of the site.

If he has an ad that is 2 months old and he renews it, it will be at the top of the listings, as long as he has not renewed it in the last 14 days. So basically every 14 days, you can pop an older ad back up to the top of the listings. The listings are sorted by last updated date by default.

By changing what I told you above on the search screen, you can sort the ads by the original posting date, which is why new ads will show up on top if you do that.

As an example, if you look at
this ad
you will see it says "Ad Placed: Today, 7:53 am" and there is no "Ad updated" line. This means he placed the ad today at 7:53 am. It has never been updated so it is a new ad.

If you look at
this ad
that he updated yesterday, you will see it says "Ad Placed: Sat Nov 18, 2006 6:08 pm" and "Ad Updated: Today, 7:45 am". This means he originally placed the ad on Nov. 18, 2006. He updated it yesterday, which means it had not been updated for 14 days before yesterday.

He updated a lot of his ads today and yesterday so his ads are dominating the recent listings for Wisconsin. He also appears to have post a large number of new ads over the past few days. Maybe because it was the weekend and he had time to take lot of photos and post new ads?

His method of updating a lot of ads at once can be annoying. I recommend people update only a couple ads per day when they are available to be updated. This is not a rule however, just something that I personally feel is more friendly to users of the site and for myself it seems to work better because people won't skip over all my ads when they see "Phoenix, AZ" 30 times in a row.

There is really no way for him to update all of his ads every day so that they pop to the top of the listings. He has to wait 14 days. Unfortunately since he updated 50+ ads yesterday, he can renew those 50+ ads again every 14 days.

I looked at this user's ads and he does not seem to be reposting the same parts over and over as "new" ads, only renewing older ads.

Unfortunately you live in an area where there are not very many advertisers except for one person who dominates the listings because he has a lot of parts for sale. And he is proactive about finding more stuff to sell and posting more ads frequently from new parts finds. I wouldn't really be concerned about that though as the site is worldwide. It doesn't really make sense to sell to people only in Wisconsin.

You are free to email this particular advertiser and request he not renew so many ads at once so that his ads don't screw up the Wisconsin listings. I believe I have already suggested this to him in the past.

I am open to suggestions to alternatives that would make the site easier for you to use but if you are only looking in WI, you are probably screwed because of that one seller.

Mon Dec 18, 2006 7:51 pm

I did not know you were the owner, thank you for your response telling me you were.

Maybe a search paramiter that lets you eliminate users with more than X current adds. That would work for me and more important for those that might miss my adds that did not read this thread. I am sure you use mysql--shouldn't be two hard to do.

Thanks, I have no other solutions for you, nor am I saying you should make any changes. Nor was it a complaint--more what I personally perceive as a flaw. At least I have made you aware of my perception if nothing else. All I can tell you is has caused me to not post adds, maybe this is just me.

People in Wisconsin have just said to me "I missed your add because of the 500 very old adds above it" and 2 times this was for expensive cars that got sold by other means. I would have donated the 10% to thesamba if these two $2000+ cars would have sold through your site so I would say he is giving you more of screwing than me :-) I think you underestimate the # of users that browse for high ticket items localy by state.

You have solved my browsing problems like I mentioned in my last post and I appreciate that.

No reply expected!

Mon Dec 18, 2006 8:44 pm

I find it odd that people miss whole cars for sale, because of a bunch of parts ads. If I'm searching for a vehicle, I set the filter to search for vehicles only, usually a specific subset of the site.

Jeremy

Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:22 pm

alsehendo34 wrote: Maybe a search paramiter that lets you eliminate users with more than X current adds. That would work for me and more important for those that might miss my adds that did not read this thread. I am sure you use mysql--shouldn't be two hard to do.
They would still miss your ads because that would not be the default.

I agree with what was said above that if they are searching WI for vehicles, it might be best to narrow the search by selecting the type(s) of VWs they are searching for using the vehicle-only categories.

alsehendo34 wrote: All I can tell you is has caused me to not post adds, maybe this is just me.
In my opinion, this is illogical.

I search AZ every day in all the vehicle categories. I have it bookmarked so I don't have to even enter the search screen. This method of saving searches is also useful.

It has been suggested in the past that I limit the number of ads you can renew to a certain number per day. I prefer not to do this either but it is a future possibility.

I appreciate the feedback.

Tue Dec 19, 2006 9:30 pm

I really need to drop this but it is not just cars, this was an example of high end stuff that would probably not be economical to ship. Things that people might be interested in from browsing and not having to pay big bucks shipping. Someone might see a fender or beam or something of the sort and think that would be nice to replace on there project if they could get it locally. I do believe this is keeping people from browsing the local adds-- thus they will never see them. I believe a lot of people browse and not search.

Quote: It has been suggested in the past that I limit the number of ads you can renew to a certain number per day. I prefer not to do this either but it is a future possibility.
I'm glad to here I am not the first to bring this up. This makes me think that you judge your site by #s posted and not #s sold since you want a bunch pretty much dead adds hanging around.

Some off these commercial parts vendors just plug up the space with their over priced adds hopping someone will bite on one of the hundreds of over priced adds they post. They just get in the way of the hobbies trying to sell parts they don't need to fellow enthusiasts. If you want to make it easy for them to do this it is up to you. There are plenty of other less vendor dominated sites to sell parts on.

Over and Out--I promise I will not post again on this subject.

:) :) :)

Tue Dec 19, 2006 10:40 pm

I only have 3 further comments:
1. At least in this situation, this particular seller is not a commercial seller. They are selling used parts.
2. Old ads are not dead ads. Some things take longer to sell than others. I can't control the prices people ask. I have to assume they drop the price if it doesn't sell after a certain period of time. I will say that one person's expensive can be someone else's fair or even cheap price.
3. If your search is resulting in too many ads to browse through, you need to limit your search further using the options on the Search screen. Even just picking the parts category to find a 58-67 Bug fender will narrow it down to 3 pages or less. Or type in "beam" or "fender".

Fri May 04, 2007 12:49 pm

Being recently very annoyed with a flood of trivial parts renewed by a couple of users, I would like to make a few suggestions:

- people using free samba ads should be limited to a certain number of ads (new and renewal) per day. This may encourage people to list multiple items in one ad; say a single 'Misc Vanagon Parts' with 20 items instead of 20 separate ads, each for a single 1 dollar item.

- due to the overwhelming number of ad renewals of a particular user today, I added them to my 'ignore' list such that I can scan through the recent ads more efficiently. When doing so, I wonder if it would help people to know just how many people have them on their ignore list.... and if this was implemented, maybe allow the person doing the ignoring could comment just why they are placing someone on their ignore list. Some people just may need some feedback.

Tue May 08, 2007 6:46 am

I try to spread my ad renewals out over some time. If I have more than one page to renew, I wait till the next day. That way, I have ads towards the top of the renewal lists, but not overwhelmed with mulitple pages.

Wed May 09, 2007 2:27 am

EverettB wrote: ... 2. You can can add Mike Wilkerson to your ignore list. Go into one if his ads, for example this one and click on his name. This will take you to the the profile screen for Mike Wilkerson. Click on "Add to your ignore list". Anyone who is your ignore list will have their ads excluded from any Classifieds search you do. Click on Control Panel in the upper left of the site to maintain your current ignore list.

I came to this section of the Forums to suggest such a functionality... good to know it already exists.

I will go in and add the multiple advertisers I deem fit to my IL.

Cheers!