Getting rid of negative FS posts from non-involved users...

[bvstaples]

I think this is vastly overpriced. I will provide mildly interesting information for 1 dollar
Regards
Bill

Acutally, I've seen advise like yours going for approximately 53 cents, so both your price and Mr. Shaw's price are exhorbitant. I might be willing to go as high as 60 cents, though.

Brian

[Jim Galli]

I like the chatter, good or bad, it keeps my sale up at the top of the page. 97 times out of a hundred the serious buyer pays no attention and contacts you off line just about the time you figured you were going to have to keep it.

Don't sell your audience here short. Everyone knows who the guys are who are the couch experts. Now the guy that was whining and threatening a camera seller because things didn't go by his rules.......that was pretty over the top. I remember that guys handle and rue the day he tries to buy something from me. Really bad form and I'm glad the mods honored the seller's wish to sweep the whole mess away.

[cowanw]

Acutally, I've seen advise like yours going for approximately 53 cents, so both your price and Mr. Shaw's price are exhorbitant. I might be willing to go as high as 60 cents, though.

Brian

Of course, I was talking about 1$ Canadian so that would be at a discount for you.
Regards
Bill

[BrianShaw]

Yer all a bunch of cheapskates. Don't buy my advise if you don't want to. I already have a well-established clientele who don't need to bargain for a discount. In fact, for them price is no object. I don't need you yokels talking about me and trying to undercut my business. I was just trying to let you in on the gold-plated experience that others currently enjoy. Sheesh... some people have a nerve!

[Brian Ellis]

Speaking for myself, it is not an indignation about negative comments per se, it is more an irritation with comments of any kind posted in the FS section that have little to do with the sales process itself.

Under that same Economics 101, the realistic price for an item is the one that market will bear. IOW, a seller is free to set any price for an item he/she likes and the buyer is free to a) accept, b) refuse or c) negotiate.

And we are all entitled to have an opinion. The issue is not whether to say it but where and how to say it.

Start a new thread and have at it, by all means. I still think it is rude to disrupt someone's FS thread with an opinion about his/her pricing policy.

Here's an example in which a buyer does absolutely nothing wrong and still gets persistently pestered by several members simply for trying to sell his stuff!

I looked at the thread you cited. I don't see that the seller was "pestered." I don't see the seller objecting to any of the comments and I don't see that any of the posts interfered in any way with the seller's right to sell or the buyers' right to buy. I also see nothing rude about any of the comments except perhaps for the seller's own response to a perfectly understandable question about why he or she was selling all this equipment so soon after buying it. While I agree that some of the comments got pretty far removed from the sale, I don't see that they were rude or did any harm.

Perhaps I'm missing something but I don't understand what a separate thread would accomplish except to make the comments obscure and unlikely to be seen. Is it your thought that prospective buyers would read a FS listing and then do a search to see if any separate threads relating to the sale had been posted? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, nor do I see how it's less rude than just posting comments in the most logical place, i.e. with the FS listing itself. In fact if I was a seller I think I'd consider it more rude to see that someone took it upon themselves to start an entirely new thread about my sale than I would just reading some comments in the FS listing itself.

Throughout the history of this forum various people from time to time have wanted to stop the free flow of information and have asked that rules be changed to conform to their ideas of what is appropriate and what isn't. Thankfully the people responsible for maintaining the forum have usually resisted those efforts. Hopefully that will be the case with this latest one as well.

[Frank Petronio]

In regards to above, eh I get pissed off when people call or email me for advice and then they go and piss money on expensive crap they don't need, and then they fail to use the expensive crap that they swore they needed. I end up spending a lot of time helping them when they seem sincere but that guy and a few others just ended up wasting hours of my time and bugged out when it was all said and done anyway.

So I just won't be as considerate or helpful thanks to experiences like that. And I vent sometimes. Silly human.

[percepts]

I can just see all these guys who want to stick their oar in standing in a gallery watching someone buying a "Fine Art Photograph" and not being able to resist the temptation to walk over and say "Hey, you can get a much a better one for a lot less money from the gallery round the corner, this guy is overpriced". Some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing...

[Mike1234]

We all have our own hidden agendas.

[jnantz]

i see no problem with people looking out for other people ...
what makes the sale pages here any different from anything else ?

[r.e.]

what makes the sale pages here any different from anything else ?

Interesting question. If I can venture an answer, there are a lot of people here who grew up with newspaper/magazine classified ads, which by their nature result in one-on-one vendor/buyer communication. As the newspapers have found, to their financial detriment, the internet vastly expands the geographic market for vendors and buyers, and it also vastly expands the scope of communication within the market. In other words, I think that it's a cultural/age issue. Interestingly, it strikes me that a lot of the discussion on the For Sale forum on this site - which in almost all cases is informative, often about the nature of what is being sold - approximates what goes on during the pre-sale sessions at a live auction and on the sidelines on auction day.