Going through the For Sale/Wanted section and there seems to be quite a few "fishy" sales offered.

New members with no posts, or selling "for a friend", or cant post pictures, etc.

Waste of my time to go through this thread. Ive seen other forums have a post requirement (50 or 100).

Why should members who have been here years have to worry about getting ripped off by a newbie?

 

Just because they do not post does not mean they havent been here for years as well.

I was here for a couple months before i posted (if i recal correctly)

If you don't trust the seller or have issues, don't buy.

 

Post count =/= seller rating. It's not ebay feedback.

Many new members have legitimate items to sell. Many higher-post count members still haven't figured out how to post a pic. Some regular members have scammed others as well. My point? Post-count has nothing to do with how genuine the seller is.

 

I agree the post count is really not an effective way to determine if someone is honest or just out to scam someone. A suggestion to try and stop the scammers could be to make pictures manditory with the current date and members screen name. I have seen it done on other forums. Just my 2 cents.

 

Any more or less open board for sales is prone to scamming. Some people who never modded/car clubbed will wreck their car and come here to sell. Some people are not big on the "intraweb" as they get all their **** locally. If you were looking to decently scam people out of hundreds of dollars, it wouldn't be that much of a hurdle to bury 50 meaningless posts. That hurdle would serve to bar the people who would only come here to unload some parts they can't seem to get rid of elsewhere. Also, some people are just jerks. They might have 4k posts but are difficult to deal with, slow to ship, and generally a pain in the ***. I wouldn't bar these people from selling stuff, but it would be nice to know "JQPublicRx8TypeRRRR" is a jerk before you buy his clear corners. On a couple other boards I frequent, they instituted feedback ratings like the ebay rating but not immediately tied to a purchase. You could, technically, leave feedback for someone you've never had dealings with. This works for vendors too. This would straight up replace the good-guy, bad-guy forum. Institution of this might be tricky however.

As an immediate fix, I'd put up a "buying car parts on the intraweb" sticky that recommends paypal with an explanation of the dispute process and points out obviously scam tip-offs and ways to work around it with some security. It'll never be 100% safe, but you'll give the noob buyers some info they might need to defend themselves. Most salty vets have been ripped off a time or two and are much more leary.

 

Agreed. There's no fool proof way to deter scammers. If there was, well there wouldn't be any scammers. Post count just won't make any difference.

 

I've had about 10 transactions from the For Sale section.
None of those would have been possible w/ restrictions.
Even if the restriction was only 10+ post, none of those would have happened.

I do think would should try to flag scams, but putting restrictions will hurt a lot of legimate deals.

 

Another issues about post count, is that post count doesn't count on certain pages. for every post here on this thread doesn't count toward your post count.

 

You people are missing the point. A scammer is not going to hang out on a forum trying to accumlate posts, he/she will move on to the next board.

Do people with high post counts rip people off? Sure? That cant be stopped. Count limits are designed to DETER, not elimate the hit and run scammer. If someone wants to try to get 100 posts that count and post a For Sale item, he will. Im guessing he'll move on to a board without restrictions.

But, whatever, I dont buy second hand items so it doesnt really affect me. Just trying to help out.

 

Point taken,
But it's always buyer beware. There are legitimate sellers that just show up to sell something because this is a captive market.
Should the specifics of what is posted for sale (pics, prices, terms, etc) be monitored - Yes. But I wouldn't want to boot someone cause they don't have x number of posts.

 

Posting a picture with the current date and users name can be forged in five minutes with a free program on any Windows machine.



(Is it July 17th already... )

 

stop giving away my secrets