Can we please get just one singular thread for the influx of what should I do posts? It seems like 3/4 of the new posts are threads with the same questions?
“What should I do?” I dunno whatever you want.
“Can I really sell my lease and make money?”
No. Nobody ever has. /s
It’s leasehackr, can we please clean up the influx?
What, you don’t want to hear for the 3rd time this week what someone thinks the best 3 row SUV under $450/mo is?
I think there already is a thread for that kind of drivel:
“3 row SUV for 450 mo” at least they have a general idea!
I prefer the “I don’t care what I drive and I want to pay $400-$600 mo” vagueness.
Hell, most of the time it’s “here’s a list of all the reasons why my next car needs to be a minivan, so with that all in mind, what’s the best exotic 2 seat sports car I can use to transport my family of 5 for under $300/mo with $0 DAS. I’m willing to put up to $5k down though, but I won’t spend a penny more than $300/mo with $0 DAS because I’m trying to close on a mortgage in 2 weeks and my DTI is already too high to qualify for that”
We used to get 3 row SUV questions once every 6-ish weeks. Two days before “$450 a month / 3-row” someone else asked and we answered, the day before I closed one because we had JUST answered one, then that post.
FTR “What should I do?” posts are exhausting because 99/100 times you have you have to ask several more question just to answer.
Tomorrow I’m expecting another “what should my friend do?”, which is even worse.
It’s obviously get a $900/ month pilot.
Not my forum obviously, but here is the issue: there is a delicate balance that the forum must maintain between staying on topic and driving people away. People may disagree with me on this, but technically if the “letter of the law” is followed, the whole forum can be replaced with Markeplace, private transfers and that’s it. The entire Ask the hackers section is very rarely anything new that can’t be answered by an auto-responder, a search engine, or comparing the “how’s my deal” with the marketplace or LH calculator. Even if the ask the hackers section is to be considered viable, after each post, if the thread is locked between @mllcb42 triggering the standard FAQ dump and the OP providing required information, there would be maybe a few threads a week that’s alive. On top of that, if all the duplicate (as in not adding anything new to the conversation) responses are removed, there would be barely a functioning forum. Issues like this are common to specialized forums in general, and hyper-specialized forums like LH bring it out that much more.
So what’s the solution? There are a few, but none of them are good in a sense of pleasing everyone. First and foremost, noone is holding a gun to anyone’s head to respond. If you don’t want to discuss the $900 pilot for the 15th time today, don’t respond. Second, moderators can always take a hard stance on the issue and start closing threads immediately with “asked and answered”, or “duplicate”, but that’s going to piss people off and will reduce traffic in the long run. They can let the threads run until the ultimately devolve into $900 pilot and then close them, but then people who may have provided reasonable responses will feel like they’ve just wasted time, so what’s the point, which again will lead to reduced traffic. Then of course there is removing parts of the thread, however that runs into the problem of unpaid volunteers with their own biases and limited time to deal with BS. Threads get snipped up into chunks with no logic which leaves part of the allegedly problematic conversation up while removing others. Makes things difficult to read in a lot of cases.
So what is the purpose of this site? At the base it’s to make money for its owners. The money is made (I’m assuming here) from broker fees and I believe I’ve seen some ads somewhere. Both revenue streams require eyeballs, not people coming to the site, no reason for brokers to hang out around here and pay whatever it is they pay.
My guess is that outside of brokers and a bunch of regulars, there is no reason for a person to hang out here except for a few weeks every 3 years or so per vehicle leased. Let’s look at the question of “what should I do” from a regular person. They are coming to a site that’s supposed to be specialized in leases and specifically lease hacking. They know they want a 3 row SUV and they know they have $450. Asking what’s the best one is not a crime at that point, as again, for them it’s a simple question asked of “experts”. In layman’s mind it should be a very simple question to answer. The response from the site is usually go to Edmunds and a bunch of other sites, do a ton of research, and come back here with numbers. That’s great, but then let’s all stop and think what’s the purpose of this site? If as a customer I’m going to go to all the sites and do all the research, I can just call the dealerships myself (not talking about 2021, but in general). And that thinking reduces visits, reduces incentive for brokers, etc…
What this wall of text is about is while to you it’s annoying to read the same drivel over and over again (which again noone is forcing you to or forcing you to respond to it), it’s perfectly normal for the person asking for help.
While a lot of your points are valid, I think they also miss the crux of the drivel. The majority of the “what should I do” questions that come through, and certainly the majority of the ones that spark harsh responses, aren’t about leasing or really anything anyone here can contribute to. They tend to fall more into categories of “someone tell me what I like, but I won’t actually listen to anything suggested.”
It’d be like someone making a thread that says “should I lease the blue car or the green car? I only like things that are yellow.” Sure, they used the word lease in the topic, but the question at hand is “someone tell me what my personal preference is between these things”. It turns into 5 pages of people suggesting that only the best lease deals are had on pink cars with stripes, but the OP posts one more time saying they actually only like brown, and then gets mad because someone said “pick the color you prefer”.
It does nothing to contribute to the community, it does nothing to help people learn, and it never even resolves the dilemma for the person asking.
Which is why I was saying that there is no real good way out of it. The threads usually devolve into meme content within a few posts if that, because everyone needs to show their displeasure with the pointless posts. So unless these threads are locked immediately it will always be the same mess over and over again.
Im here for the pointless posts
The genesis of the forum was sparked by our pure desire to educate shoppers and to share great lease deals. Overtime, the forum has evolved organically and developed unwritten rules and practices such as the widely understood Leasehackr Method which @mllcb42 has since diligently outlined in his template response to newbies.
So no, it’s not against the “letter of the law” to ask “what should I do questions” nor is it our priority to maximize our traffic for financial gain (we don’t). I agree that these kinds of questions aren’t productive for the purpose of hacking a lease. At the same time, some people love getting others’ opinions in their purchase decision process and there are some who are willing to give their 2 cents. These questions are innocuous in my opinion as long as it is not offensive or goes off-rail.
My suggestion is to ignore these types of topics if they do not interest you. If they do not interest the majority of the community, the topics would die down on their own anyways without us applying our individual biases. We have many stakeholders here and some of the behaviors are understandable as @njc points out. Our goal is to make the forum resourceful without killing the community aspect of it which to me means inclusivity, staying respectful even when we disagree, and yes chatters. I truly appreciate the diversity of talented folks I have met here and am eager to meet them in person once the pandemic is behind us (haha @michael and I were joking yesterday that maybe we should organize our SoCal meetup at a…… dealership – so we stay on topic 
).
