Greetings, all.
The "Advertisements" section of the Forum proper has been a minor problem with the site since it came into being. We rightfully discourage partisan posting in favor or against this or the other vendor/manufacturer/shop, and the Advertisements board was originally created to keep all the marketing material in one place. This approach has met with varying degrees of success.
On the one hand, as mentioned above, we wish to keep all Madison Avenue-style content off the Forum; it's too easy for it to be construed as advocacy or worse, endorsement. However, the fact is that as long as such material appears within the discussion areas of the site, this remains a problem.
On the other hand, I
certainly agree that it a good idea to encourage word-of-mouth advertisement, as it is really the only accurate kind! Furthermore, the community we have built is an invaluable resource with regard to discovering good repair shops, used horns, and other buyer-seller relationships.
The solution has been apparent to me for years, but I've only eked out the time in the last 5 days to build it: A separate site, related, but not linked to the Forum, *just* for classified advertisements, vendor advertisement, and the rating of same. Accounts will NOT be linked, as this is, for a number of reasons both common-sensical and legal, a standalone entity.
Anyone can browse the ads that will be present; however, to place an advertisement, you must give your real name and at minimum, a contact email address. You do have the option when placing an advertisement, however, to hide that email address and let the website handle the sending of an email via a form.
This new approach to classified and vendor advertisements will go live on the morning of
Wednesday, 3 January 2007; I will post the URL for the new site at that time. As a consequence, the Advertisements section of the forum will be locked for new posts later today with only replies to existing topics being allowed, and Notices will be moved to the Town Hall category.
This will continue to be a free service of The Trombone Forum.A few benefits of the new software/TTF-sister-site are listed below.
* Yahoo-style categories, with selectable number of subcategoriess and order of appearance.
* Ability to make ads bold in listings, in addition to appearing on the index page. (i.e., "premium listings.")
* All listings may be sorted by clicking category headers.
* Print-friendly functionality removes navigation junk.
* Ads from sellers include vendor-logo and vendor-homepage (if a vendor).
* Login will only be required in each of these pages: Contact user, Rate Ad, Rate Member, Picture gallery and detailed view.
* Easy renew function for advertisements
* Advanced search, different search-page for different categories (template fields)
* Review seller ability
* Translated to 4 languages (English, French, German, Danish)
* Payment gateway integration with WorldPay, PayPal, Autorize.net and ClickBank. (not needed now; for possible future expansion)
* Favorites list (bookmark function for members)
* Advanced search
* Large images are viewed in auto-sizing popup window
* List images in category view (option)
* Multiple images allowed for each ad (configurable; currently set to 5)
* Picture next to ad in list-view
* Banned-list for @domain and
user@domain.com * Notify user before ad expiration
* User email validation
* Chooseable expire date on ads (option)
* IE/Opera/Netscape/Firefox compatible
* User Control Panel (manage all ads and user info)
* Unlimited categories
* Unlimited sub-categories
* Unlimited ads
* Unlimited users
* WAP-enabled functionality (for mobile phones)
* Auto email sent to user when registering
* Auto-deletion of old ads
* Browse image gallery feature
* Email ad-link to friend
Town Hall
