Oh, i see what you’re saying…it’s too easy if all the BMW models are grouped in one post and makes you feel, as a buyer, that you haven’t worked enough to get your deal. Tell you what, if your idea gets implemented, i will take the day off reading the forum when volume brokers post their deals. Imagine having to go through all deals individually at the beginning of the month…lol…you would put in a 8 hour shift.
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Just a difference of opinion is all. They’re just like buttholes…everyone’s got one.
With the month long posts, it can be challenging for a potential buyer to keep up with all of the new listings being added on a 30 day old string. I support whatever the buyers think is better for them.
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Previous format will address that
And paid adds
I agree with you
I firmly believe that charging for adds will filter some brokers who are doing more harm than good and are damaging the market
It seems that everything is more complicated this way and I fear this will drive consumers away.
Fundamental problem is this medium (forums) doesn’t really work and was never designed for this use. No one wants to read through a long list of models on a post, but then no wants to scroll through hundreds of separate threads for each individual deal. Search helps a little with this but it’s still messy. If @michael is interested in developing a separate UI or website for those adverts (with some sort of interface to here) I’d be interested in building that.
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Every ad thread should contain all dealer/broker contact info and be locked. It will still be available for edits by the thread owners. Simple.
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The problem with that is if there is a common question about the car that many would find the answer useful, it will have to be done in private. The broker/dealer would be answering the same question over and over again. Guess they could add it to the thread (the answer), but that would be slow.
Having the access to ask direct questions that others might find helpful is best for the consumer, just not for the site operators because of the volume of the threads.
That will help in some ways, but won’t ultimately solve anything. The problem is that the market has been damaged so much over the past little while by people who learned a couple of tricks and discovered that you can make a couple of bucks by sitting at your computer screen and sending people into a dealership to whore out their inventory. To them, even an incremental amount (say $299-$399 a car) is better than nothing, and this was nothing but fun and games. You can bump the monthly fee to $500/month, and people would still pay it because people do move serious volume here, especially when they just give cars away.
That is not a problem - this is an offer for a particular deal on a particular car. All questions should be addressed directly with the poster.
If a thread is locked, then this is no longer is a forum, but an advertising board.
Just my 2 cents.
That is exactly what Marketplace is - advertisement section of the forum, so all will be in its place.
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I think that the multiple models on one thread is kinda confusing.
Each car should have its own thread.
Also I think the more competition the merrier. The brokers with shitty pricing get ignored and eventually leave the platform. We only have a handful of brokers on this forum with strong pricing.
I think all brokers should adapt a spreadsheet model for multiple models — easy to look at and understand
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All of the brokers I’ve interacted with on here have been top notch, but I agree that a spreadsheet like @BMW_Dave is a really great way to narrow the herd.
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Even if you don’t lock it, just make sure the original post is editable so will always reflect the current deal. Then the buyer can open the thread and read the first post and done.
I forgot to add at the end of my post…“Just my 1 cent.” Since you are actually doing biz on here you got 2.
I saw this today, read it twice, and still can’t make sense of why there is a random dollar figure, then words followed by the emoji representing the words, along with every BMW that exists.
All could be due volume of new users/brokers.
Even when QX60 was on sale end of last year it was a bad as it was now with BMW.
You could not find any other topic to discus other than scrolling through page and a half of BMW because it applied to all models while before it used to be only one make and one model like S90 or Cruze come to mind.
when I read this on my phone i like to select “latest” to see all latest topics but it has become 80% ads. (And I actually like when they are all together. This way I can what one brand has and from one person. Not 5 topic on same car from different people multiply that by number of models.)
But sometimes general discussion or question get lost in a sea of ads.
I actually like more when all model combined into one post. Fast and easy to understand. Link works to but hard to find value in such topic when every post is “link please”
New format works better for me as a consumer:) but I’ve been here for awhile and still remember early days. May be new users like he onslaught of BMW ads:)
I, for the life of me, can’t figure out why people need to ask for a link in a thread vs just PMing the person, especially when the person supplying the link says to PM THEM. Then again, that also applies to many of the questions found on the marketplace as well as contacting individual brokers. “Please PM me for the details,” or “Please PM me your contact info,” or similar. JUST PM THAT PERSON…is it really that hard? Is common sense lost today?
/rant over
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How about each broker having their own “Deals” page that is locked only to them?
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Lock them up! (I mean threads)
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I agree. The problem arises with someone like @bmw_dave who is limited in the amount of PMs he can send. Everyone is so impatient that if they don’t get an answer within 2 minutes of sending the PM and he can’t reply back, they think he’s ignoring them, they blast him and he loses a potential customer.
At least he has the opportunity to alert people he’s out of PMs for the day with the post. That said, if discourse allows individuals to update only their posts while being locked, like a mod can, that could solve that. If discourse gives you an all or nothing action with regard to post updates, that poses an issue.