New members can spend a lot of time lurking and reading the posts of experienced members and their reviews without posting. My opinion is they should ... there is a learning curve before you need to or can post good questions and spark good discussions.
+1
This is what I've done. I'm on my third board in about 6 months. I might have another couple or so in the next. But nil of them will be sold here to GH members. Which is the communities loss.
IMO 100 or 60 posts seems on the face if it a stupid rule. On my car site it's nil posts. To post in classifieds you have to join, it costs £25 for the first year and £10 thereafter. Many people join specifically to sell their car. It helps the club and the members by there being a special place for a niche car, so people also join especially to look for and buy such a car. A few boards are open, like GH, requiring only registration and we get a few spams a week at times in those that I or another couple of people delete as they occur. Often someone reports the post so we're on it straight away, it takes minute or so to deal with inc banning the spammer. It is a chore but not a big one if shared. I ran a test last month by opening a classifieds board to non registered non members to see what happened. It was spammed nearly every day by what looked like mainly Chinese people. I made it require registration only, no fee, and there's been no spamming since.
GH is free so spamming might be more but it really so bad that that the classifieds has to be effectively shut down?
Is it instead a policy decision that a few people at GH don't want people using the classifieds unless they been around for years?
That does not create a community it creates a clique of old pals who know and chat about stuff. People are most active and doing their buying and selling at the beginning of their discovery of mechanical keyboards, not after years when they know it all, have it all and have nothing to say, buy or sell.
I hope I don't get banned from GH before my stuff from the group buy arrives!
