You may have noticed the new announcement at the top of the forum.
Classified Forums - New design & functionality

Changes to the Classifieds have been requested for a long time and until recently we really didn’t have a way to provide improvements without compromising other aspects such as security and moderation work load.

That has changed!
We now have a way, and it has been under development for a while now.
We are now ready to rock & roll with the updates.

I thought I’d open a thread here to introduce it, since our Canadian section will see one of the biggest changes in the way we post classifieds.

Currently we are the only group here on ‘Driver that has a dedicated classified section for our local Canadian ads.
Several other groups would love to have our setup, but there is no way we could deal with the HUGE burden that would be placed on the system.

What we came up with is a system utilizing a thread ‘Prefix’.
You may have seen them on other forums and to a lesser degree some sections here on ‘Driver.
The new ‘prefix’ system takes it to a whole new level!
It lets us provide so much more functionality.

With this, we won’t need a separate ‘Want to Buy’ sub-forum and
we will also be able to implement ‘Want To Trade’ as well, all in the same forum category.

For Canada, our dedicated classified ‘prefixes’ will be:

FS[Canada]:
WTB[Canada]:
WTT [Canada]:

and, if you are willing to ship to the USA, you would use the general classified prefix:

FS:
WTB:
WTT:

………………………………………
It may sound a little complicated, but in practice is very easy to do.

When you create a new classified it will look something like this….
..except ours will be [Canada] instead of [SoCal]





…………………………………..
& Here is what a typical forum will look like after some data has been posted.
This is a global 'All' view.

Note: please ignore content, it's a mixed bag of old posts in our test forum.
The same structure for wheels, Interior, Exterior etc will still be in place as it is now.






…………………………………
From within the forum, you have the ability to sort & display only the threads you want to see.

At the bottom of the forum page is a box for 'Display Options'
In that box, you have the same drop down box as you do for new threads.
By selecting the 'Prefix' you want, you filter out all of the other threads except what you want.
So, for example….

If you are looking for 19” wheels and you start with the [Canadian] filter;
- you find none
- you click the filter for [NorEast] & bingo… all the 19” wheels in [NorEast] pop up
- …& so on

In this example, the forum was filtered for Local Texas FS threads.






…………………………….
In Addition…

We will have Predefined HOT links set up in our Canadian Region forum.
There will be FS:, WTB: & WTT links set up and they will look something like this....

FS[Canada]:
WTB[Canada]:
WTT[Canada]:


They will act similar to the current forum 'New Posts' function,
e.g. the 1st example will bring up all Canada FS: items in all classified sub-forums.


For this prefix system to work, classifieds have to be all wrapped up into one section, maintaining all the current sub-forum divisions.
It will change the current set up for regions such as ours and other ‘classifieds spread throughout G35Driver.
For us it will mean that our current classified section will be phased out.


In addition to these design changes....
The "Rules for Classified posting" are also being updated. (also in announcement at top)
These changes are to improved validation of sales and to help reduce scamming.


(whew...) sorry for being a little long winded

 

I read it all. Nice work!!

 

I want to sell canada. 5 dolla?

 

You no funny. You go home now.