How to Use the Gear Swap

[Ryan Jordan]

Here’s a new support article with a video describing how to create a new gear swap listing, edit an existing listing, reducing the price, closing a listing, and browsing the gear swap:

• How to Use the Gear Swap (video)

We’ll be creating a number of “how to use the site” kind of video support articles in the coming weeks for other sections of the site. In the meantime, feel free to try stuff out on your own!

[Lisa B]

I am unable to connect to the video.  I like the new format.  However, where do I sign up for notifications of posts to the gear swap?  I was signed up under the pre-May 2021 format.  Thanks!

[Ryan Jordan]

Lisa – we’ve now added the link to the video in the sidebar of the form where you create a new gear swap.

We’re disabling notifications of new gear swap listings right now until we get all the kinks worked out. It’s fairly complex to deploy them, and we’re still working out a few bugs and doing a lot of tests, so we’re hesitant to add notifications until that’s all done.

[Lisa B]

Ok the link works now.  Thanks for the info about notifications.  Great work on the new format!

[J R]

I wish the plan was not to delete the old Gear Swap, it’s a good resource for understanding a proper price for an item by seeing what it or something similar bought/sold for in the past. Also discussions of gear choices have occasionally bloomed in Gear Swap. A lot of historical data there that could be beneficial to members if it was archived and still available rather than deleted.

[Philip Tschersich]

I agree. Knowing prior selling prices reduces the guess work of testing the market and saves a LOT of time.

[Lisa B]

But what is agreed to in PM as a selling price may be different than the listing price.  So I don’t think there was a way to always see the actual selling price before anyway.

[J R]

Sometimes an item may have sold for a different price, sometimes for the listed or updated price. Either way, seeing the past postings gives a lot more information about the price and selling history than no historical data and just guessing wildly.

[Ryan Jordan]

It’s not worth the database performance penalty to have tens of thousands of closed posts in the forums for archival purposes, because the majority of our community do not use the Gear Swap, Chaff, etc. This was the motivation behind closing chaff and moving Gear Swap out of the forums.

However, we are looking into a solution where we replicate the old Gear Swap in its own forum instance on another part of the site separate from the main forums. Then, it can be served 100% static via CDN with no database hits.

[J R]

Thanks Ryan for the reply. Not knowing much about websites and the other technical stuff you reference, I can only express what would be nice to have without knowing the costs or consequences. Appreciate the explanation.

[Winston W]

I think it would be helpful if you could put a notification saying “image size exceeds 1mb” if people try to upload a larger size pic.

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