[plug] [OT] Second-Hand Hardware Sale

[James Devenish]

In message <0408131948140E.01419 at oberon.amber.com.au>
on Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 07:48:14PM +0800, skribe wrote:
> I don't think this is re-inventing the wheel.  I think this is adding value 
> to the mailing list/PLUG. I'm more inclined to trust a plugger - as foolish 
> as that may actually be =).

Hi, do you have any further details about how this list would work?
Presumably, it would be of no use to buyers unless sellers are
interested. How will new sellers know (and remember) to send for-sale
notices to the trading list rather than the main or off-topic lists?
Will the trading list be advertised on the web page to aid this? If so,
will it be a free-posting list, or restricted to list-members (e.g. to
limit spam)? If "list members", will sellers therefore have to subscribe
to the list in order to post to it? And if someone posts a for-sale
notice to the list, how will you know they're a plugger? (There are many
lurkers on this list, though presumably the actual PLUG financial
members are fewer and more well-known.) And if you think that you can
tell a plugger from a non-plugger, then why don't you just use regular
lists, groups and fora? The pluggers might not be very visible in the
crowd, but I would have thought this would be fair and normal. It would
also short-circuit the current consternation and would be effortless for
us to administer. On the other hand, it is easy to set up Mailman list
just to "try out" the idea (I imagine that the readership would be
mostly a subnet of the current off-topic subscribers). Who wants to put
up their hands to be the admin(s) of that list? What does the committee
think?

Something that occurred to me initially was to make use of the 'topic
filter' in Mailman. However, I don't think that would work out very well
for us. Basically, what you do is define a regular expression to match
the body or subject of messages. If they match the 'for sale' criteria,
they will be classified under the trading topic. However, making this
work would require a very careful selection of regex, and perhaps user
education. The worse downside is how it works for end-users. My
understanding is that the default status for all existing users will be
to receive "all topics". Therefore, most subscribers will have
commercial posts included by default. This kind of defeats the purpose!
It would be more like "opting out" of commercial postings rather than
"opting in". However, I'm not sure that people can "opt out" unless we
create a "catch-all" topic. People would have to subscribe to the
"catch-all" topic /only/, in order to eliminate the commercial posts.

I suppose one other alternative, if you really want to proceed with this
idea, is to go with a web-forum. But of course this wasn't brilliantly
successful before, and may be a bit too "public", and require web
registration, and not be a "push" services like e-mail, etc, etc.