Gear Deals intent

Hi Brett

> I imagine we'd all do well to know what's considered acceptable here.
Fair question.
This Gear Deals channel is a bit more tolerant than the Gear Swap channel. We want to keep the Swap channel just for the one-off once-only items.

The sort of things which are acceptable here include:
Letting people know of a good temporary deal at a store.
Selling a limited amount of stuff at a *real* discount. [Bunny's postings are fine as the items are at a real discount. Trying to sell the contents of REI at a 5% discount would not be on. Dig?]
Start-up cottage industry making gear to spec and selling it. [We encourage cottage industry start-ups in the UL space, and this is a bit of an extension to the posted rules.]

The sort of things we discourage or remove:
Duplicates of eBay postings
Shoe Spam
Postings irrelevant to BPL and UL gear

Cheers
Roger Caffin
Online Community Monitor

I'm all for having a specific place for start-up cottage industry type postings, for custom orders or whatever they are making. I guess the main problem, with regards to the thread that's currently taking heat, is that some people (potential customers for those people) wouldn't think to look in here for something like that. I usually pass up this subforum entirely thinking that it's just postings about coupon codes, sales, and special offers on individual products. Actually there's only 3 subforums I really read the most and those are G Spot, Gear Swap, and Lightweight BPing Discussion. Sometimes I'll stray into Fishing, hoping there's some new posts, or MYOG to see the latest uses for cuben fiber, but that's it for me. I only have so much time in the day… Ideally, something like "New Posts Since Last Visit" would be the best way to view the site, but since post titles are not set in stone, it's hard to know what thread a post relates to, if it was a thread I wanted to follow, etc.

I agree that the Gear Swap is not an ideal place for "storefront" type threads, but what I'm saying is, the Gear Deals might not be either, as these type of threads might not get the attention they deserve in here (particularly if there's only one or two of them). Maybe there could be an all new subforum for start-up cottage industry threads? Now something like that could be interesting. It could even inspire some of our resident MYOGers to post their prototypes for sale and encourage some of them to take custom orders (something I know there's interest in here, as I have been contacted once about a modification I did to a Golite pack, by somebody wanting me to make the same mod to their backpack). In a subforum like that, there could be FS/custom order threads and even WTB/custom order threads so if it started out with only one cottage industry "storefront" thread in the subforum, it wouldn't necessarily be all alone in there.

Hi Robert

Thanks for the very interesting comments. Food for thought.

How about we designate Gear Deals as being the right channel for this for the present? We can see how it goes for a while and then decide whether any more changes are needed?

Cheers
Roger

Makes sense to me.