After some concerns were voiced about non members going into the web finds and poaching the ebay links posted, we have decided to set this board to members only. Guests will not be able to view this board, this includes members not signed in.

This change will help members be able to view listings and not be out-bid or have the listings sell out prematurely by guests.


We also would like to encourage members to post links to ebay for other parts of the world and when you do, consider putting the country it's from in the title. Helps members know what's where.

Poaching the eBay links? Bidding? Ah, you mean the auctions?

As an eBay seller myself, the idea that someone here posts my buy-it-now with-offer listings for the exclusive perusal of LG members is sad. Sad because most members here are financially strapped, students or don't like the high prices. If LG owns eBay listings, then sure restrict. Since LG can't discriminate between auctions and buy-it-now listings, which are two different processes, then LG shouldn't restrict anything.

This is my opinion. I have bigger issues than this on LG, such as taking gallery pictures with cell phones. They're not pictures, they're crappy scans.

No harm in your feed back!

We can certainly look into reopening the board again. The web finds section is no longer being pruned by any of the admin team due to the shear volume and time consumption involved to weed out the expired links.

I will post a poll and see what everyone thinks on this. If majority agrees, we shall make the board public. 

A poll would be interesting. This isn't a big issue though. I think that someone should start deleting some of the older dead stuff (single posts, no added info in replies) so that it then becomes manageable again.

I'm interested in seeing what the members think myself.

I hope in the future we can implement some kind of self deleting of posts in that section, similar to how the classifieds themselves will typically last a month before they expire depending on the platform.

My personal view is that the web finds section should be limited to just that, web finds. Then they can be deleted after a month or so, assuming the original poster doesn't do so first. Once a post in this board becomes a discussion thread, then it's difficult to decide whether it should be deleted or not.

I suggest that one way of doing this would be to make the original poster responsible for monitoring the thread. If you post a web find, then don't just forget about it, keep an eye on it and check back every so often to see if the item is still available, and mark it as ended if it's sold. Assuming there hasn't been a big discussion on the thread (try and avoid this if at all possible) then either the OP can delete the thread or one of us can after a month or so.

If there has been a discussion on the thread in question, once the item has sold or is no longer available, then it can easily be moved to General Discussion or any other appropriate place.

Thoughts..?

I agree with Ria on all counts!

I'm in full agreement myself. Also it is looking like the members prefer to keep this board out of the public eye.

I'm also in complete agreement with Ria.

My personal view is that the web finds section should be limited to just that, web finds. Then they can be deleted after a month or so, assuming the original poster doesn't do so first. Once a post in this board becomes a discussion thread, then it's difficult to decide whether it should be deleted or not.

I suggest that one way of doing this would be to make the original poster responsible for monitoring the thread. If you post a web find, then don't just forget about it, keep an eye on it and check back every so often to see if the item is still available, and mark it as ended if it's sold. Assuming there hasn't been a big discussion on the thread (try and avoid this if at all possible) then either the OP can delete the thread or one of us can after a month or so.

If there has been a discussion on the thread in question, once the item has sold or is no longer available, then it can easily be moved to General Discussion or any other appropriate place.

Thoughts..?

That sounds pretty reasonable, one could auto archive or delete a thread after a set period of time on the board like 45 days or so. The OP should also delete their own threads but the 45 day period means the board won't really get too cluttered by people that forget.

Can the web finds threads not be set to auto prune themselves after say 90 days of no activity on that thread as for ebay, i think links expire after either 60/90 days i am sure. So once they are expired and theres been no activity on that thread then it will delete its self after 60/90 days saves someone going through them, we have this set on the UK forum.

Also if people don't want massive discussions on eBay link threads to save a discussion being deleted at a later date i would recommend that you post the web find link up and lock the topic if you wish, then it is only the link bring deleted and not what could potentially be a very important discussion. Also this could be done on something thats posted up that might raise a few eyebrows.

Id suggest if there is a lengthy discussion created on an ebay link thread that once the item has sold (if auction and only 1 of) that the link is then replaced with what the ebay item was and a date when it was for sale so that people remember. And move the topic into another board.

It can certainly be set to auto-delete, but some people have complained when we've suggested that. Also a lot of listings, especially buy it now ones, keep going until the seller cancels them. I've seen 10yr old stuff up there sometimes

I agree in principle about locking the topic so it's just the link, but sometimes someone might have a genuine question. I'm slowly going through and moving threads with discussions into the relevant boards, and I believe Owen is weeding out the dead links, but it's a time consuming process so may take a while.

Anyway, with the way eBay are now screwing up the payment process for small sellers, I don't suppose there will be much of interest on eBay for much longer 

Would it be possible to automatically make posts public after XXdays rather than auto deleting them (or perhaps make both of those options when starting a new thread)?

I also think you guys might be getting a bit carried away deleting stuff, half of the stuff in the old "web finds" threads was still for sale.

Would it be possible to automatically make posts public after XXdays rather than auto deleting them (or perhaps make both of those options when starting a new thread)?

I also think you guys might be getting a bit carried away deleting stuff, half of the stuff in the old "web finds" threads was still for sale.

I think my preference for the Web Finds was to have it function like the "Hot Deals" forum on RedFlagDeals (RFD). On RFD, people would post deals they find on the "Hot Deals" board and once the deals in those threads expired, instead of being deleted, it would get moved to another board which serves as an archive spanning back years. This allows the discussion to continue in threads that still have activity and allows the old archived threads to be used as a reference. Adding a subforum for Web Finds Archives should be fairly easy. Let's see what the admins think about this.

Yeah, that could certainly be done. Adding a sub-board is easy enough, but moving things from one to another is still a manual process as far as I know, maybe Patrick will be able to advise here